The Message and Mission of Quakerism

by William C. Braithwaite; Henry T. Hodgkin

In vital Quakerism then, the form has continually to be subordinated to the life. The life must be allowed free expression from time to time and place to place according to the varying needs and circumstances. In a word, the form must be kept plastic. This should be as much a fundamental of religious biology as it is of physiology.

The physiologist tells us that living matter is always soft and jelly-like. It is matter in a jelly-like state, permitting of the free play of molecular interchanges, so that [39] ]it is called a “dynamical state of matter.” That is the general statement about living matter which the physiologist has to make to us to-day. It is essential that it should be plastic, able to grow, able to change its shape from time to time. It is always changing its form, as may be seen in the colorless cells of the blood. It has been said, and said truly, that no one of us is the same person we were seven years ago, every little bit of us has been changed in the interval. Living matter does not grow like the crystal, by the addition of new matter on its surfaces. It grows by absorbing matter into its substance and transforming that into matter like itself.

It should surely be the same in the life of institutions. The form should be flexible so that the life may be continually growing and changing its form according to the great directing control which the life exerts upon the body, and you want ease and flexibility in organizations just as you do in clothes. If you do not have this, you will have a good deal of chafing and cramping. Sometimes, perhaps, a growing boy [40] ]will burst his waistcoat. It is a great mistake to try to fit the man to the clothes when we ought to be fitting the clothes to the man, but it is a mistake that the Quaker Church has frequently made.

In Church life, our own included, the letter that killeth has again and again encroached upon the quickening spirit. Outward government and external rules have limited spiritual guidance. The desire to preserve the deposit of faith has crystalized vital experience into formularies and creeds. Emphasis has been laid upon life according to some stereotyped standard with a particular cut of collar and a particular mode of language and the life of the spirit has been quenched. But where the Spirit of God has been allowed freely to work upon the groups of disciples there has been a wonderful expansion of Christianity of a vital kind. This has been largely the case in the great foreign missionary work of the Churches, and in our Adult School movement in England, and in the pioneer work of Quakerism in the Western states.

[41] If spiritual life is allowed to be the controlling, directing, molding force in Quakerism I have no fear for our future. We shall put in the forefront of our Church work the things that belong to life, the gathering of disciples, the raising of leaders and prophets, the maintenance of warm fellowship, the encouragement of service, the fostering of growth. This means that our Church arrangements will be so made and modified as to promote and secure the expression through them of the living forces which we have at our command. Those living forces are the spiritual force of the individual, which we call individual responsibility, the living force of the group, which we call fellowship, and above all, the Divine vitality, the incoming of the life of Jesus Christ, which we call spiritual power and spiritual guidance. Church arrangements, important in themselves, must be regarded as simply machinery through which forces can work, and the more efficiently the machinery allows the forces to work, the richer will be the service of the Church.

[42] Let us consider the way in which these great forces get to work. I will take the meetings of the Church as my illustration. I am not one who says that the only kind of Friends’ meeting is a meeting for worship. I believe that there are three or four types of Friends’ meetings, in all of which we may have personal responsibility and group fellowship and the spiritual power and guidance of Jesus Christ.

Take first—it comes first—the evangelistic service, the meeting which seeks to do the primary work of the Church, by bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to man, the living gospel of a living Savior. For such a meeting you want a man who feels his personal responsibility, who feels that he is speaking as the ambassador of Jesus Christ, called, chosen, faithful, with a freshly given message of truth on his lips, but you want also behind him to back him the fellowship and sympathy of a group of earnest souls, who are helping the meeting by their prayer and sympathy, and who perhaps themselves will have some share in the delivery of the message or in [43] ]the other outward service of the meeting. Moreover, the ingathering of disciples is a matter not only for evangelistic services, but for individual personal influence. Andrew findeth his own brother Simon: Philip findeth Nathanael. The men and women reached will need from the first to be surrounded with a new set of companions and to be brought into a new fellowship. They will need, not simply one service on a Sunday stimulating them to follow Jesus Christ, but the helpful comradeship of a group bringing them into a knowledge of what it means to live according to the will of God. In the redemptive work which our Adult Schools in England have done in hundreds of cases amongst men and women who had lost their own respect and were down in the gutter, the most fruitful work has been done by bringing men and women a new set of companions, in whose fellowship they may learn what the love of Jesus Christ means.

Take next the Friends’ meeting with worship as its primary object. There you see clearly the three-fold play of these [44] ]same forces of personal responsibility, group-fellowship and spiritual guidance. Worship in fellowship is an intensely active thing. Its basis is not an inert stillness, but a waiting upon God in the unity of the spirit. The meetings of the first Friends were radiant with the joy of Christ’s indwelling life. There were times of living fellowship and communion, warm with the central fires of Divine love, so delightful that sometimes they could hardly break them up and would stay far into the night.

The meeting for worship, more than any other agency, has given the world the Quaker type of character—the man or woman who meets life’s problems simply and wisely, because he resolves them, not by passion or prejudice, nor mainly by the motions of human wisdom or policy, but by habitually consulting the Light of God which shines in the waiting soul.

The revival in its power of the Quaker meeting is an urgent need in the crowded hurry of this twentieth century, when men live so much upon the surface and so little in the deep places of their lives.