Quaker worship (especially unprogrammed worship) is famously minimal. But could we de-clutter even further?
What is the minimum we need to do as a community in order to:
- befriend each other and those around us
- worship together
- share our truths
- find our visions
- and act on them?
Imagine you’re washed up on a desert island. What would you do first to build spiritual community?
I have some experience in this, as I’ve been part of a young Quaker Bible study group for a couple of years now. We asked no questions and made no plans at the beginning, but gradually evolved graceful and helpful practices which enable us to get on with the main thing- deepening our shared spiritual life.
This came to mind recently as I spoke to a friend who is thinking about starting a similar group. I had to keep racking my brains about what made our group ‘special’. What kept coming back is that we made hardly any assumptions about how we needed to do stuff, and preserved a very minimal level of organisation. We just got on with it.
That’s where the title of this post comes from; perhaps there’s a new way of practising faith together, ‘Getting to God’.
things that might have been otherwise 
I think the point of thinking about the minimum needed to build & sustain a spiritual community is a good one – from the perspective that it is good to try to think simply from the outset, not be too organisational, constricting, & solve all the problems in advance which might occur; I’m reminded of some of the conversations some of us had a few years ago whilst we were planning for the World Gathering of Young Friends, & thinking about the Manchester Conferences in Britain – the first one was a bunch of mates who gathered together to have a chat, & ended up changing the shape of British Quakerism for the following century, whilst subsequent attempts to have ‘Manchester Conferences’ (including in Manchester!) were planned as gatherings to change the shape of British Quakerism for the next century and ended up being a bunch of mates having a chat!
I also think it is good to review where we are every now & again – to check what we have built is still in keeping with our original visions, or alternatively have a look at how our original visions might have changed or even gone beyond what we might have originally hoped for in the first place!
But I do think we should be wary about feeling pressured to discard long-kept traditions & ways of doing things merely in the name of simplification – we should always be sure to look at the reason for any given way of doing things first before we discard it, to think about how that reason might be better carried forward.
(I also think what is important about spiritual community is external accountability – one of the reasons we ask Quakers organise ourselves into local meetings, area meetings, & yearly meetings is so that we are accountable outside our own groups, to try to ensure that we are not simply a bunch of mates getting together on a Sunday morning developing our own ideas in isolation)