Getting Kicked Off The Titanic: More NC Quaker Shakeups?

Getting Kicked Off The Titanic: More NC Quaker Shakeups?

If you look in one direction among North Carolina Quakers, good news is busting out all over:

— Last month Durham Meeting agreed to spend $300,000 on renovations to expand its meetinghouse, which is overflowing. Further, they intend to raise the funds from among the membership, without any bank loans. By the way– their current meetinghouse is less than ten years old, and attendance there has increased by nearly 50 per cent since it opened.

— In the county next door, Chapel Hill Meeting has a major renovation already underway, to cope with a burgeoning attendance. And

— An hour west, Greensboro’s Friendship Meeting is likewise spilling out of its current meetinghouse, and is looking at the need to expand as well.

But if you look in the pastoral direction, the prospects are very different: North Carolina Yearly Meeting-FUM has lost more than a dozen meetings since last summer. The departures took more than a thousand members off its rolls; and this was on top of a steady shrinkage in membership that goes back more than twenty years.

There’s more bad news: NCYM-FUM‘s budget for 2016 was less than half that of 2014:  $484,000, down from $1 million-plus. The YM staff was reduced from three to two; the Superintendent’s pay was cut. A youth gathering at year’s end was canceled when almost no one signed up.

Given this situation, one could imagine that the NCYM leadership might be interested in studying what the Friends in the three overcrowded meetings are doing, to see what secret sauce they’re mixing into the potluck casseroles.

But that’s not happening. Instead, NCYM is getting ready to do more of what they’ve done best for most of the past two years: drive more Friends away.

Yep. This Saturday, NCYM’s Representative Body will gather. On the agenda are proposals to target its largest monthly meeting (yet again), and other policies which can open the way to expelling meetings that hold views unpopular with some. 

The issue targets are familiar: friendliness to LGBT persons; non-fundamentalist approaches to the Bible; views of Jesus which don’t involve sending most people to burn in hell forever; openness to other kinds of Friends (i.e., liberals).

The door to this negative-growth plan was opened at the November Representative Body session, when a secretly-drafted revision of the YM’s Faith & Practice was sprung on the body, then rammed through on a voice vote, flouting any recognizable Quaker process. The change would give the yearly meeting authority over local meetings, which it does not now have.

The sudden change was billed as a “correction” — the authors alleged that the YM supremacy section was formerly in the F&P, but was “accidentally” — or surreptitiously — removed. 

The only hitch is that the passage was deleted from the F&P 48 years ago, and the handbook was further revised, approved and reissued half a dozen times since then. 

(Yes, it’s okay if you laugh at this. It’s absurd on its face. The ploy should have come with a proposal to rename the body “Rip Van Winkle Yearly Meeting,” as it only makes sense if they’ve all been asleep for almost three generations. But it’s not so funny to the NCYM meetings it puts in the crosshairs.)

In addition, there will be a proposal to ban “dual affiliation.” This is aimed squarely at New Garden Friends Meeting in Greensboro, NCYM’s largest. Last year they joined the new Piedmont Yearly Meeting (which is affiliated with the liberal Friends General Conference, which is anathema to some in NCYM) , while staying in NCYM. There was (and is) no rule in NCYM’s Faith & Practice against doing so. The proposal this Saturday intends to change that. (Full text of the proposals is here.)

Yet the responses from the targeted meetings to the upcoming March 5 session seem to range from fatigue and indifference, to cautious patience, to a strangely passive defiance.

 More than one source from these meetings has shrugged off the potential for future moves to expel them with a weary: “Let them try.” 

From one perspective, these reactions could make sense: in its shrunken, depleted state, NCYM-FUM is not exactly a fearsome juggernaut. The most progressive meetings include around 800 members and more than $70,000 in dues (called Askings) for the YM budget. If they are pushed out, they get to keep their own money and meetinghouses. And otherwise, what does NCYM now have to offer them? Or what disciplinary stick does it now wield?

Moreover, there is a possible sop to these targeted meetings included in the Saturday proposals: a provision that seems intended to end the repeated purge attempts that have disrupted recent annual sessions. 

It would do this by directing meetings which think they have a grievance with another meeting, to formalize and take up the the issue(s) directly with the other meeting first, before bringing their case to Yearly Meeting committees. 

This change could, in a best-case scenario, bring some of the recent purge efforts to a screeching halt.

Why? Because, to be frank, there are very few if any of the purge promoters who have the guts to face their targets over a table in the target’s meetinghouse, and to lay out and explain a prepared, meeting-approved bill of particulars.  

Instead, the modus operandi over the past two years has been classic bullying: innuendo, false charges, harassing gossip, catcalls and bullying in large sessions, or haranguing audiences captive on their own home turf. 

They are even less prepared for a setting where they would be obliged to present evidence, and then listen as well as preach. 

They are much more accustomed to drive-by potshots. For instance, in a Quarterly Meeting session, I listened to jackleg preachers toss out accusations that the meeting I attend was allied with the Anti-Christ, and going down the same road to mass murder followed by the Branch Davidians. 

These absurd charges were based on — well, misapprehensions would be a kind description; prejudiced delusions somewhat more pointed. But the preachers were not held accountable for those calumnies there. 

Further, in one of the recent Representative sessions, a preacher accused my meeting and several others of spreading “blasphemy” with almost every statement we made. Really? Blasphemy about what? There was no accountability for that assertion either.

Insisting that such charges be formalized, backed by a meeting, and then engaged directly to the group accused could be a step toward marginalizing these tactics.

But the proposal, called “The New Way Forward,” still would permit appeals to the YM if differences were not resolved locally. This makes sense in the abstract. 

Unfortunately, in the current debased state of the YM’s polity, it is in fact deeply suspect. After the chicanery of the November session, how much trust in the integrity of the NCYM leadership is left? How much moral authority do they now wield? How much do they deserve? It was, after all, the YM’s Executive Committee that brought in the surprise F&P “correction” scheme to the November Representative session, and with it came this ominous introduction:

Past years and particularly the events of the last fourteen months have made it increasingly clear that positions and actions adopted by a very few meetings are serving to create much of the discord and unrest that we experience in North Carolina Yearly Meeting. These continued statements, positions and actions are threatening the very existence of North Carolina Yearly Meeting as we know it today. With that in mind, the Executive Committee would recommend we consider recreating the process existent in the 1967 edition of the Faith and Practice:

“The Yearly Meeting has power to decide all questions of administration, to counsel, admonish, or discipline its subordinate Meetings, to institute measures and provide means for the promotion of the truth and righteousness, and to inaugurate and carry on departments of religious and philanthropic work.”  (Faith and Practice, 1967 Ed., p.83, Jurisdiction.)
(Emphasis added.)

One could easily have nodded yes to this “very few meetings” phrase: “Truly, those few meetings which came into annual sessions demanding an immediate purge of everyone they disagreed with, did indeed ‘create much of the discord and unrest that we experience . . . .’” 

Ah, but that’s not what the Executive Committee meant; after all, most of those hyper-purge meetings had already left NCYM by November. 

No, the “very few meetings” targeted here are clearly those the departed purgers were after. (A YM official acknowledged to me that there were still some meetings declaring privately that if the “very few” progressive meetings were not “dealt with,” they might yet join the recent exodus.)

So the purge impulse was catered to, repeated and reinserted, not only into then NCYM session, but then abruptly shoved into its F&P in a blatantly irregular way. Moral authority? Give me a break.

To think these November changes are empty rhetoric and that nothing will be done with it is, I think, to succumb to wishful thinking.

But then there’s the fallback of the shrug: what can NCYM really do to these “very few meetings,” whose offense has been no more than to bear witness to their honest leadings? The notion of “subordinate” meetings also sounds pretty obsolete, or even offensive, to many.

By besmirching their reputation, and in view of their self-inflicted wounds, NCYM can’t do that much. In fact, getting expelled from NCYM looks more and more like being kicked off the Titanic before it sailed.

Besides, if these targeted meetings lift their eyes and look beyond that narrowing circle, they can see what we noted at the beginning: other meetings nearby that are growing, burgeoning. (And apparently having fun at it.)

What a concept.

NCYM’s sinking spiral of squabbling is not the only game in town.

And here are a couple of other interesting bits of data about these three burgeoning meetings: 

— None of them has an “evangelism” or “church planting” program, beyond the ancient advice of George Fox to, “Let your lives preach.” (But they keep growing!)

— None of them has set up a committee to determine if the members’  beliefs are doctrinally correct.

— None of them is quarreling over a creed, never mind an obsolete artifact of earlier squabbles of almost 150 years ago.

Hmmmmm.

So come Saturday, not a few Friends will make their way to the NCYM-FUM Representative sessions with a kind of grim resignation. Que será será. 

But I bet that in the back of their minds, there will also be this query: 
Which way to the lifeboats?