How do Quakers live in community?
Students must submit a learning response for COMMUNITY with a minimum of 400 words. The goal of this assignment is to engage with fellow students and create a learning environment.
Based on the description community provided on Quaker.org and the video on “How do Quakers live in community?”. How can the concept of the community be applied in your life and how will that application change your experiences? In a separate paragraph at the end of your post Include an open-ended question for your peers to respond to.
How do Quakers live in community?
Community is implicit in our very name—the Religious Society of Friends. Though each of us has our own personal understanding of, and relationship with, God or Spirit or the divine, it’s important for us to come together in worship, to share messages and insights with each other. Being a community is more than just everyone showing up in the same space at the same time, though; it’s about learning to set aside personal differences and act as a unified force for good.
We do this with deliberate intention because, underneath our individual differences, we all have “that of God within us,” or, if you prefer, we are each of us made in the image of God. Honoring and respecting each other, then, is a way of honoring and respecting God.
That holds true for people who aren’t Quakers, as well! We recognize that we exist in relationship to all of humanity, and we strive therefore to live in “right relationship,” knowing that our happiness and well-being is ultimately bound with the happiness and well-being of everyone else. This holds true not just spiritually, but economically and politically—Quakers understand that when one of us is in chains, as the song says, none of us are free.
“We can all be ministers to one another, but… none of us can do it alone. We are all blessed with gifts from God—with spiritual gifts, with talents, with knowing God at all—and so we have to work together. We have to worship together, and in that work and in that breaking the bread beautiful things are possible.”
We haven’t always lived up to that ideal, of course. In the United States, for example, many Quakers are taking a second look at the Society’s historical relationship with Black and Native people, acknowledging the ways in which our predecessors failed to honor that of God within them, which we discuss in more detail in the next section. We cannot change our past, of course, but by acknowledging it, we can begin to take steps towards repairing the harm we have done and establishing more equal and equitable communities in our meetinghouses, in our neighborhoods, and on a global level.
APA Reference:
Quaker (2023). How do Quakers live in community? Quaker.org https://quaker.org/living-in-community/
Click on WEEK 5: Discussion Forum Video link Community: How do Quakers live in community? to open the resource.