A precious patchwork: Britain Yearly Meeting's Book of Christian Discipline

Elizabeth Cave, Britain Yearly Meeting

Our Book of Discipline Revision Committee (BDRC) comprised a group of 28 Friends appointed by Meeting for Sufferings, together with the Recording Clerk and the Librarian. We met three or four times a year as a full committee, 25 times in all, as well as in small working groups on more than 125 occasions, over a period of nearly a decade. At our first meeting in the autumn of 1986 we were joined by a member of the previous revision committees whose work had resulted in Christian faith & practice (1961) Advices & queries (1964) and Church government (1967). In April 1995 we met for a weekend at Glenthorne in the Lake District to celebrate the end of our task and to receive copies, each signed by all of us, of “the red book,” the new single volume Quaker Faith & Practice approved by the newly named Britain Yearly Meeting at two groups of sessions in May and August 1994.

I loved the two volumes of London Yearly Meeting's book of discipline from the time I joined Friends in 1969. Yet there were aspects of it I found increasingly unsatisfactory as the 70s became the 80s: much of the language was unnecessarily gendered; assumptions about lifestyles were decidedly dated; a key chapter was entitled “God and man.” (When I phoned a friend to rejoice that we had both been appointed to the committee she remarked, “'God and man’ - there are two words we'll have to do something about.” In the event, 'God' stayed pretty well unchallenged and we avoided writing 'man'. Our policy on this we described in the introduction as “accepting that quotations from earlier times must remain in the language of their age, but exercising discretion where there has been a choice of extracts.”) I remember a woman Friend in my Meeting ministering on the query 'Do you behave with brotherly loveà?', saying 'I don't know what brotherly love might feel like.' Listed informal groups within the Yearly Meeting - Quaker Concern for Animal Welfare, Quaker Women's Group - began to produce their own advices and queries. Then Meeting for Sufferings received minutes from two Monthly Meetings and one central department, and the process of considering then undertaking revision was set in train by appointing a Memorandum Group to report to Yearly Meeting in 1986.

Consulting the Society was recognised in the Memorandum as an important part of the committee's brief. When we began to invite comments from meetings and individuals, we found many who knew Christian faith & practice intimately. We were also moved and challenged by the letters and minutes we received saying, in effect, 'Now you've consulted us we've really looked at the book for the first time and we find we love it - please don't take it away'.

Early in our work we took a close look at Advices and queries. We chose to begin there for two main reasons. Here was a manageable amount of text to invite us to begin engaging with description of our communal faith and practice as contemporary British Quakers, and really talking to each other in committee about our personal faith, theology and relationship with the Society of Friends. Another reason was that Friends were writing to us in copious detail about the wording of the 1967 text: 'Don't change those precious opening words: "Take heed".' 'Please get rid of that archaic "Take heed", and so on.

Two committee members took personal initiatives. One worked on a thorough 'minimal revision', changing 'God and man' language, moderating assumptions that all Friends lived in stable marriages with 2.4 children and were comfortable with traditional Christian expression of their relationship to the divine. Another sat at her wordprocessor and drafted new paragraphs, combining advices and queries, in up-to-date English including some striking images: 'When we experience great happiness or great pain the doors of our spirit are open.' Each version went through several drafts as well as being considered line by line in full committee sessions. We needed to convey that the BDRC was thinking radically as well as conservatively. By December 1987 we were ready to offer Questions & counsel, never intended as more than a provisional document and for that reason given a different title, and Meeting for Sufferings agreed to its being produced and circulated.

Predictably, some Friends and meetings were puzzled, some were appalled, and some were delighted. Consulting the Society entered a more interactive phase, as Friends had some new text to consider and BDRC members could speak from experience about the challenges and satisfactions of working to express continuing truths in language that aimed to be contemporary yet not ephemeral.

The BDRC invited Friends to submit extracts that might be suitable for the new book. We received over 3200 suggestions. All were read by several committee members, catalogued and passed to the groups of committee members, sometimes augmented by Friends with particular knowledge and experience, working on sections of Christian faith & practice. Then in 1990, with drafts of chapters prepared, the committee regrouped to work on 'coverage and balance', on church government, on Advices and queries (to be edited after the experience of living with Questions and counsel), and on introductions, which of course needed to be written last.

With excitement and trepidation BDRC handed our work to the printer, and offered a two volume draft to Yearly Meeting 1994. The text came out in January for YM sessions in May and August. Some Friends thought they had been given too little time to familiarise themselves with the draft text and asked for a year's delay, some were very distressed by particular extracts or overall tone, some thought the YM should accept the draft forthwith and not waste the Society's time in sessions where there would be too many Friends to work on textual detail. A monitoring group was set up to consider all comments on the draft and brief the Yearly Meeting on their contents. An editorial group was also appointed to work on redrafting text during and between YM sessions.

In the Yearly Meeting sessions our clerks steered us through an enormously complex task at a steady pace that allowed our sense of worship to be present throughout. There was unhappiness expressed, particularly about changes that reduced traditional Christian language - especially in Advices & queries - and about the recognition of sexual partnerships other than marriage. A small number of Friends said they would resign their membership of the Society. Others spoke about the need to have a book as attractive to today's newcomers as Christian faith & practice had been to the generation who are now older Friends.

Yearly Meeting did unite to accept the book, with additions and changes, including changing the title by adding 'Quaker' to 'Faith and practice', and putting the whole into one volume, symbolising the interdependence of our inspiration and our church government. Now in 1998 the YM agenda includes consideration of new 'constitutional' text. We need to reprint the hardback book and will amend the text. The index will need updating too. Even as Friends are coming to love the new book, further changes are upon us. The patchwork assimilates new material. Dare we say that the Spirit, not waiting for the next revision after a generation or so, is calling us even in the description of our new Yearly Meeting structures to be faithful to our professed understanding of continuing revelation?