Quakers, especially unprogrammed meetings, like to talk about how we strive to keep things simple, so we can get on with building a spiritual community and listening to what God has to say to us.
But we’re also very good at creating structure, process, and things to do.
It’s right and valuable that Quaker processes are built around wide participation. But I can’t help feeling that sometimes we have so much process going on that we end up reducing the space from which inspiration can grow.
So where does all the process come from?
I think the ‘DIY’ nature of our faith leads us to want to foster involvement and participation- we want people to find roles for themselves.
We also want to take great care to ensure ideas are tested thoroughly, so tend to appoint committees here, send minutes there, etc etc.
Unprogrammed and liberal Friends can end up using process as a kind of community ‘glue’- they replace orthodoxy with orthopraxis (an idea suggested by Ben Pink Dandelion)
Do we need all the process all the time?
things that might have been otherwise 