Jesus discouraged swearing by anything sacred, saying the custom of swearing was “of the devil.” It tended to dishonor God, in that anyone might swear mistakenly, while some people certainly do swear deceptively.

Among contemporary Friends this has morphed into an element of the Testimony of Integrity, that we should hold to "a single standard of truth."

Some understandings of our 'unprogrammed' form of worship suggest a dual standard of religious truth: things said in a “message” vs things said outside Meeting for Worship.

- - - - - - - - -

We have generally instituted rules as to what kind of subjects and statements are considered appropriate in Meeting, when to speak, and for how long-- growing out of the wish for undisturbed communion, for some members-- and for others, the wish for undisturbed personal tranquility.

Such rules incidentally hamper the exchange of religious 'notions', good or otherwise, in Meeting.

Do we need more exchange of religious notions? We need to be muy watchful of the spirit of such exchanges-- but yes, I say that we desperately need them. We don't need force-feeding, but when we can pass each other morsels like Ethiopians at a feast, this can nourish the soul immensely!

Friends had silent worship from the beginning, though it was not always done the way we do it. Many Friends in the US eventually found the practice, as an exclusive mode of worship, stifling to the Spirit, and so amended it in various ways; I understand their descendants much outnumber my branch of the SoF.

We who have kept this as our core religious practice have incorporated some tacit notions about it: “If a message starts with 'I've been thinking' it's probably not 'a real message'.” (As if God weren't at work in 'our' thinking, among other things.) My Faith and Practice says nothing of the sort, but among a reticent People, tacit assumptions can have great force.

I have heard vehement pronouncements that seem to imply that any person giving a  message is, or should be, directly channeling God. There's even a well-circulated flow  chart for “Deciding to Speak in Open Worship” (from 'Quaker Life', July/August 1997)  which features a checklist of questions like: “Will others likely mistake the message  for...” and “Is the message also truly 'not from you' but from God's Holy Spirit?”-- finally
ending at last with “Must you speak?” The reluctance to speak in Meeting, the religious  fear of speaking improperly there, goes back a long way; in the journals of early Quaker  ministers one often finds them initially resisting the call at the cost of great personal anguish, sometimes for weeks.

What chafes on me, and my contentious mind, is my Faith and Practice's insistence that “Neither debate, nor discussion with previous speakers, is ever appropriate, and  speaking twice during a single Meeting for Worship is very seldom so.” Does this mean that God can't be on 'both' sides of a disagreement? Does it mean that errors should not be challenged? Early Friends would have stood on their benches!-- although reading a few accounts of their debates, one can see why we'd prefer not to have to hear them in worship. If we have limited time, we don't want it all taken up by Battling Egos.

Through following such guidelines, many Meetings have arrived at a condition in which  agnosticism is the norm. “Talking about” religion is no substitute for encountering God, but people really don't typically recognize God at work without at least some mental expectation, some mental framework to accommodate the possibility.

It's as if we have taken on a reversed variant of the 'fundamentalist' fallacy: that  'Inspiration' == 'Infallibility'-- so that we can't be mistaken without being an embarrassment to God. Spoken disagreement thus suggests that someone must be speaking wrongly; an ongoing dialog suggests that this is 'only' between mere humans, not Direct Communication. We've missed the awareness that God may be stirring up the disagreement to bring us to some deeper understanding.

We can certainly make mistakes: A homeless member of another Meeting had gone  missing for several months, and people had been concerned. One member rose to say  that the man's spirit had just come to her, saying they should not blame themselves for his death; he was now in a place of utter peace. It wasn't too long after that the man  contacted another member by more prosaic means, unaware of his unfortunate fate. A reason for the speaker to be more discriminating, between impressions and imaginations-- But mistaken prophecies are far from a new phenomenon. The work of a prophet is to discern and proclaim God's intentions for his times, not to deliver information that could perfectly well be waited for.

- - - - - - -

I've long felt things that I believe were from God, intended for my Meeting-- but I've seldom had a prompting to deliver them in Worship. Nor do I have time to address them fully in brief messages, nor do these messages add up to what I need to say, even over time.

I've been making a mistake: acting as though the only appropriate occasion for delivering Truth must be in Meeting.

It's a natural mistake; Meetings generally go from worship, to the sacred announcements, to small talk and munchies. Whatever Divine influence people may have experienced, they seem to rise from worship with little to say about it. Typically they don't want to talk about religious matters at any other time or occasion.

The prohibition of swearing was not to keep people from lying under oath, but so they would tell the truth at all times. The separation of “under oath” and “normal life” had to go.

There are functional reasons to set aside 'Worship' as a sacred time and space. But has this become our only time to tell the Truth? Can we please set aside more time for worship-sharing, and study, waste more time exploring those “impractical” and  “useless” issues behind everything we do?