The Quakers have an interesting way of arriving at corporate decisions.
I have sat, as a visiting teacher, through some discussions in a Quaker college faculty. At the point where a chairman would normally declare the discussion ended and call for the vote, the Quakers often lay a matter on the table. We are not ready, they say, to make a decision. The Spirit needs more time to work. Better left open than ill decided.
What the Quakers seek is consensus. If not unanimity, then as close to it as possible. They know, of course, that matters cannot hang fire indefinitely; and Quaker success in business enterprise suggests that at least some of their faith know how to seize a conclusion and run with it. But for a visitor, the process is endlessly fascinating. Every facet gets looked at, and sometimes one can almost feel the forming of a common mind, the shift in sentiment, the opening of new perspective. If democracy is long in making up its mind, then Quaker democracy is often tortoise slow. Small matter, they will say, if the truth is found at last.
What matters about this Quaker experience is the light it sheds on a little game that gets played in some non-Quaker churches. I am thinking of the growing practice of electing women as “adjunct” deacons or elders, and including these as members in council meetings.
I call it a game because the pretense is that the “adjunct” does not vote, and therefore does not really exercise authority in the congregation. I have long supposed that those who argue this way cannot be really serious, but new examples of the argument crop up just the same.
This argument assumes precisely what the Quaker knows to be false, namely the assumption that influence comes to expression only in the final vote. Not at all. The whole Quaker process illumines exactly the opposite and in this is undoubtedly correct. What a vote simply does is to summarize where the group has come through the discussion that preceded the balloting. What matters is that discussion. And whoever is entitled to participate in that discussion does exert an influence upon the outcome. This is no doubt why church council meetings are not free-for-alls with anyone who drops by taking part.
Were this not so, then all that is said about the virtues of democracy (and there are many) would rest upon a misconception. Then delegates to a national convention might as well stay at home and mail in their votes. Then election campaigns are not only tedious, but in fact are totally unnecessary. Let each voter go cold and uninformed to the polling booth and vote his view of the moment.
Fact is that participation in discussion leading to decision is the way to democracy’s superiority over totalitarianism. This is the ground for a free press and politically uncontrolled news media.
And, accordingly, participation in council or consistory discussions is involvement in church administration. Of course!
It is hard to believe that advocates of “adjunct” office bearers can themselves take seriously the argument that abstention from voting at the end of a discussion process exempts anyone from influence upon the process, and upon that final vote.
When the worldly play games, they are, after all, true to character.
When the churchly do the same, what is to be said of them?
Lester DeKoster
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please,
not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep
but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine.
I don’t want enough of him to make me love a black man
or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation;
I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth.
I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack.
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
