Questions That Arise on Considering Outward Witness of Our Beliefs Through Service

1. What is a “Concern”?

2. What is a “Leading”?

3. What is a “Clearness Committee”?

4. How do we go about discerning whether a leading is coming from the spirit (God-led) or from the ego?

5. What are we asking of the Meeting by bringing a concern or leading before it?

6. How does the Meeting spiritually address a concern or leading brought before it?

7. What guidelines do Clearness Committees use in discernment and helping to clarify one’s leading?

8. What issues must the Meeting consider when determining whether our response to a leading can involve formal support by the Meeting, including financial support, public endorsement, use of meeting space, etc?

9. How much time is needed between the expression of one's leading, the Clearness Committee(s) (if needed), the planning, the actual undertaking, and the result of the leading?

10. How do we balance Quaker process with time constraints?

A concern is God-initiated, often surprising, always holy, for the life of God is breaking through into the world. Its execution is in peace and power and astounding faith and joy, for in unhurried serenity the Eternal is at work in the midst of time, triumphantly bringing all things unto Himself.

Thomas Kelly, 1941

“Concern” is a word which has tended to become debased by excessively common usage among Friends, so that too often it is used to cover merely a strong desire. The true “concern” [emerges as] a gift from God, a leading of his spirit which may not be denied. Its sanction is not that on investigation it proves to be the intelligent thing to do—though it usually is; it is that the individual... knows, as a matter of inward experience, that there is something that the Lord would have done, however obscure the way, however uncertain the means to human observation. Often proposals for action are made which have every appearance of good sense, but as the meeting waits before God it becomes clear that the proposition falls short of “concern.”

Roger Wilson, 1949

The concern arises as a revelation to an individual that there is a painful discrepancy between existing social conditions and what God wills for society and that this discrepancy is not being adequately dealt with. The next step is the determination of the individual to do something about it—not because he is particularly well fitted to tackle the problem, but simply because no one else seems to be doing it.

Dorothy H. Hutchinson, 1961

Do we remember that it is the spirit of our service, the aura that surrounds it, the gentleness and the patience that marks it, the love made visible that compels it, that is the truly distinctive quality that lifts Quaker service above lobbying, above pressure, above coercion, that inspires the doubtful, and reaches the heart of the adversary?

Stephen Cary, 1979

Friends are conservative radicals. … Their authority is the light within, the present and personal experience by which past undoubted authority must be tested. “Thou sayest Christ said this and the apostles saith that, but what canst thou say,” says George Fox…This “What canst thou say” is the key to a religion in which we have “No time but this present” and in which there is a constant hunger to apply the eternal principles of love, justice, and redemptive suffering to this present world.

Kenneth Boulding, 1988

I think I have wasted a great deal of my life waiting to be called to some great mission which would change the world. I have looked for important social movements. I have wanted to make a big and important contribution to the causes I believe in. I think I have been too ready to reject the genuine leadings I have been given as being matters of little consequence. It has taken me a long time to learn that obedience means doing what we are called to do even if it seems pointless or unimportant or even silly.

Deborah Haines, 1978