IMYM Faith & Practice, 2009, pp 163-164
5.01 Being orderly come together, not to spend time with needless, unnecessary and fruitless discourses; but to proceed in the wisdom of God not in the way of the world, as a worldly assembly of men, by hot contests, by seeking to outspeak and overreach one another in discourse as if it were controversy between party and party of men, or two sides violently striving for dominion, not fellowship of God, in gravity, patience, meekness, in unity and concord, submitting one to another in lowliness of heart, and in the holy Spirit of truth and righteousness.
Edward Burrough, 1662
5.02 If you want to listen, then you hear; if you don’t want to listen, God is working anyway.
Gusten Lutter, 2002
5.03 It is a weighty thing to speak in large meetings for business. First, except our minds are rightly prepared, and we clearly understand the case we speak to, instead of forwarding, we hinder the business and make more labour for those on whom the burden of work is laid.
If selfish views or a partial spirit have any room in our minds, we are unfit for the Lord’s work. If we have a clear prospect of the business and proper weight on our minds to speak, it behooves us to avoid useless apologies and repetitions. Where people are gathered from far, and adjourning a meeting of business attended with great difficulty, it behooves all to be cautious how they detain a meeting, especially when they have sat six or seven hours and a good way to ride home.
In three hundred minutes are five hours, and he that improperly detains three hundred people one minute, besides other evils that attend it, does an injury like that of imprisoning one man five hours without cause.
John Woolman, 1758
5.04 The spirit of worship is essential to that type of business meeting in which the group endeavors to act as a unit. . . . To discover what we really want as compared with what at first we think we want, we must go below the surface of self-centered desires. . . . To will what God wills is . . . to will what we ourselves really want.
Howard Brinton, 1952
5.05 To be present is … to penetrate the deeper dimensions … to be open to influence and change; to be vulnerable, to be able to be hurt; to be willing to be spent and also to be awake, alive, and engaged actively in the immediate assignment that has been laid upon us.
Douglas V. Steere, “On Being Present Where You Are,” 1967
5.06 Friends, both in individual worship and in meetings for worship and for business, continue to experience the presence of the living God not only as awe and healing but also as guidance for conduct. Like the prophets of Israel, they proclaim the unity of religious faith and social justice.
From the foreword in Faith & Practice of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 2002
5.07 It seems to me to be a major issue for the Society of Friends . . . whether on the whole the emphasis is to be for a type of open, expectant religion, or whether it is to seek for comfortable formulations that seem to ensure safety, and that will be hostages against new and dangerous enterprises in the realm of truth. Are we charged with hope and faith and vision, or are we busy endeavoring to coin repetitive phrases and to become secure resting places for the mind?
Rufus M. Jones, Rethinking Quaker Principles, 1940
