Chester Quarterly Meeting (Quakers)

Quaker Business

Quaker business meetings are open to all members and often to attenders. While the purpose of the meeting is to conduct business, there is also an element of worship. In fact, the monthly Quaker business meeting is more formally referred to as Meeting for Worship With a Concern for Business because we try to sense God's leading in our decision-making processes.

Each Meeting for Business incorporates a period of silence at the beginning and end.They are quite different from normal business meetings because Quakers don't vote on issues. Decisions are made by consensus, not by majority rule. There is no chairperson, but the clerk guides the meeting. Minutes are made during the meeting, rather than at the end. The clerk will write the minute after an issue has been discussed, and will then read it aloud to ensure everyone finds it acceptable.

The Religious Basis of Our Decision-Making

Despite the difference in format, meetings for business are meetings for worship in which our business is held and are conducted in the same openness to the leading of the Spirit. For our religious community to thrive, it is essential that we nurture our love for one another, maintain our spiritual unity, and live in harmony with the Spirit. These beliefs underlie every attitude and practice in our meetings for business.

As we wrestle with outward issues, the Inward Light gives us new perspectives and creative responses. On all matters, even the mundane, its presence promises a fresh revelation of truth and a clearer understanding of God's will.

It is also our experience that new openings to truth may come at any time and from any source. Each Friend should therefore listen to all efforts to express that truth, testing them against accumulated experience, the life and teachings of Jesus, and moral and spiritual guides in Scripture and elsewhere. Yet we are careful to rely not on the letter of the text, but to read as George Fox enjoined us to read the Scriptures: "in the Spirit in which they were given forth."

The Goal of Friends' Decision-making

The goal of Friends' decision-making is a Spirit-led sense of the meeting—a crystallization of the search for clarity on the topic under consideration. Even in the face of strong difference of opinion, that goal is achievable when there is spiritual unity.

Our search is for unity, not unanimity. We consider ourselves to be in unity when our search for Truth is shared; when our listening for God is faithful; when our wills are caught up in the presence of Christ; and when our love for one another is constant. A united meeting is not necessarily all of one mind, but it is all of one heart.

We believe that this unity, transcending apparent differences, springs from God's empowering love, and that a Meeting, trusting in the leadership of that love and gathered in its spirit, will enjoy unity in its search for truth.

A Meeting is a living spiritual entity which may encompass strong differences of opinion. It is like an individual who may have many conflicting inclinations but who still has a final sense of how to act. The sense of the meeting is not designed and fitted together, but is conceived, born, and nurtured; the Meeting's care for the quality of its decision-making process is essential to the rightness of its decisions in the same way that an expectant mother's care for her own health is essential to the strength of her child.

Sense of the meeting is not synonymous with consensus. Consensus is a widely used and valuable secular process characterized by a search for general agreement largely through rational discussion and compromise. Sense of the meeting is a religious process characterized by listening for and trusting in God. Both result in a course of action agreed to by all of the participants, but the sense of the meeting relies consciously on the Spirit. Although reasoned argument and lively debate may often play a role in Friends' decision-making, they are useful only to the extent that they are the expressions of spiritual leadings.

When the sense of the meeting has been rightly discerned, those present will know that they have faithfully followed their Guide, and will feel a continued affection for each other.

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