*For wide distribution–please disseminate. For a PDF version of the below open letter, click here.

**This is re-posted from theliberalquaker.wordpress.com. 

23 October 2013

Open Letter To

The Next General Secretary

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

1515 Cherry Street

Philadelphia, PA 19143

Dear Person:

You are the next General Secretary of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and I’d like to write before your appointment is approved at an Annual Sessions coming soon to a theatre near you. We’ll offer you the position, and you’ll accept pending the approval of the “Yearly Meeting.” They’ll tell you this approval is almost guaranteed. This is where you’ll confront your first paradox. In the weeks leading up to this approval you’ll notice, if you don’t already realize, that you are being asked to lead a community with dispersed authority and no central totem, no earthly locale from which vision and purpose emanates. How does one lead a group like this? I’d like to give you my own answer in the hope it might aid you in your special work. I’d like to suggest that you remind us and community-organize us.

I’m relatively new to the Society of Friends. Although I was raised in a Quaker family, I wasn’t convinced until High School. So I am going on nine years of actual self-identification. I am guessing you’ll have been a Quaker for a little longer than this? If so, you’ll see even more acutely the symptoms that plague us, and which reflect the symptoms plaguing Western society. We are caught in a story that more than privileges—rather it assumes—a collective isolation. We are not individuals, we are hyper-individuals hording the most important parts about our spiritual lives to ourselves. Perhaps we do it because we fear damage from vulnerability. Perhaps we are so entrenched in the story of isolation that we do not even realize the alternatives. Our own lives and to-do lists catch us; we forget that meaning and purpose are drastically improved when we enter into fellowship that empowers. Our worship and our spiritual journeys are bolstered in turn.

So the most important thing you can do for the Society of Friends of Truth in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is to remind us. Remind us how to be vulnerable, and remind us how to be tender. Remind us to cultivate robust discourses about gifts, leadings and ministry in our meeting communities. Remind us to celebrate when we each come into our own power. Remind us, when it is time for retrospection, that the most important thing we could have done is to have known love, to have risked our lives for what is right, and to have built communities premised upon resistance, resilience and movement.

The more that I think on the story of isolation, I remember the reason why I was convicted in my Faith as a Quaker. The community available to me at the time called me to bring forth neither rote verse nor blind ritual; neither used dogma nor blithe deference. Quaker community called me to bring forth the spiritual truths in my experience, to test it with others, and to work as a team in the search for what is right. We were little Aristotelians cultivating a collective phronesis.

So, secondly, you need to community-organize us. If you are wondering how to lead a community with dispersed authority and no central totem, the answer is unlikely to knock on the door of your corner office in that building on 1515 Cherry Street. If you try to remind us of the above reminders by sending emails or posting letters on the next iteration of pym.org, you aren’t likely to reach us. Instead, you should spend at least fifty percent of your time in “the field”, as it were, and you should invite the staff you lead to do the same. All the answers lie with the people you serve, and the path toward vitality and growth begins and ends in relationship. You can bring people together and they’ll see that we are better together. The programs you shepherd should be required to involve Monthly Meetings and Quarterly Meetings. Programs should be disallowed from functioning on a separate plane—as if the Yearly Meeting is a separate entity from the Monthly and Quarterly Meetings that constitute it. You must bring the work of our friendly staff to the Yearly Meeting if you want people to stop conflating “the Yearly Meeting” with our friendly staff. You’ll have to build a true network of volunteer community organizers, and you’ll have to face the stubborn opposition of folks who’d rather go down with the ship than allow it to change. Yet there are many of us who will stand behind you as you do your work—who will celebrate with you as you come into your own power. Many of us sense the approaching sea change in the winds that blow metaphorically out from the horizon, and I invite you to ride the waves alongside us. 

Sincerely,

Zachary T. Dutton

Member of Wilmington Friends Meeting