I see an underlying theology of community in every part of Quaker practice: how we worship, how we make decisions, how we do work together, and how we act in the world. Foundational Quaker writings even teach us that corporate worship is in itself the sacrament of communion, because this is the experience of being nourished by Christ’s body.
This understanding of the essential nature of community is a powerful counternarrative to the seductive ideology of moral purity, which I define as the insistence among both the far Right and the far Left that it is fundamentally dangerous to work with or even speak to anyone who is not in perfect alignment with our own beliefs.
The Church as a whole, and Quakerism in particular, could be pushing back against separatism and the refusal to engage, but instead, we are often influenced by the society around us. We argue, we fail to listen, and we convince ourselves that God prefers we be purified, expelling the other. So we divide.
My intention is to start by reading all the currently-in-use, English-language Quaker books of discipline. Each book represents the corporately discerned theology of a regional Quaker group. Then, I’ll use historical Quaker texts and the Bible along with modern understandings to discover what our collective theology of community actually is. Finally, by engaging in Church groups outside Quakerism and a few secular groups as well, I hope to learn about and then write about an even broader testimony of community.