In this blog, Emily Provance, 2025 Swarthmore Lecturer, shares insights from the research behind her upcoming Lecture, drawing on Quaker texts from across traditions to explore how we live and thrive in community.
“How does God call humanity to live in community?”
This was the only item on my agenda for a giant imaginary business meeting. I gathered the thirty-eight English language Quaker books of discipline currently in use—discovering along the way that there’s some disagreement about the definition of a “book of discipline”—and also twenty or so historical Quaker greatest hits, plus the entire Bible. Then I tried to pretend, as I read all these texts, that each word in each sentence was a response from some Friend in answer to my stated question.
My sources, of course, did not have the agenda ahead of time. Isaac Penington repeated himself so often that I wanted to redirect him. Margaret Fell was entirely focused on speaking to a single sub-point. The author of Proverbs had a lot to say, almost all on topic, but frequently seemed to disagree with his own previous statements. It was a lot like some real-life business meetings, except that we never came to a tea break.
The question at hand—“How does God call humanity to live in community?”—is not a frivolous one to me. I had faith there must be an answer better than the ones I knew, because the communities I know and travel among are full of dehumanizing rhetoric and dismissal and fear and violence and hopelessness. And I believe in sense of the meeting. I believe God is always there to lead us collectively, even in communities that are not Quaker, even in communities that are gigantic, as big as all humanity. We can listen or not listen, but whether we listen does not stop God from speaking. Through all of us. To all our communities.
The texts of our ancestors, including Quaker historical writings and the Bible itself, are the contribution of the dead to our modern discernment. Friends do not stop being part of our community because they’ve died, and what they knew must not be lost to us. So their answers were relevant: “How does God call humanity to live in community?”
So, too, were the answers of the evangelical Friends and the pastoral Friends and the conservative Friends and the liberal Friends. The African Friends and the West Pacific Friends and the North American Friends and the European Friends. I’d have wanted to hear from all parts of the world, but linguistic abilities put limits on what I could do. Still, the total population of English-speaking Quakers is nearly (not quite) as culturally and theologically diverse a group as can be found in the world, and for that reason, I believed we collectively would have something solid to say. Altogether, we might have a real understanding of how God calls humanity to live in community.
It was pretty extraordinary, searching all these documents for responses to the central question. Friends in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, for example, had the only passage devoted to fear that I found in all thirty-eight books of discipline. It was an extraordinary contribution, because fear has such an enormous impact on our ability to live in community. From Friends in East Africa, I learned that oppression is the result of communal sin. No other group of Friends said this, but interestingly, the rest of us all speak as though this is true without articulating it. Our responses to oppression are all responses to communal sin. We just don’t phrase it that way.
Switzerland Yearly Meeting and Belgium and Luxembourg Yearly Meeting highlighted the essential nature of storytelling in how we communicate within communities. Aotearoa New Zealand Yearly Meeting spoke to non-human community and human relationships with non-human community. Central Yearly Meeting expressed a theology I barely recognized as Quaker but also a steadfast defense of the belovedness of every child of God that made me weep.
By the time I finished reading, taking notes, and synthesizing, I had ninety-two minutes that I thought reflected a pretty good sense of our answers to my question: “How does God call humanity to live in community?” But as I explained the work I’d done, some Friends pointed out that one thing would be missing from my lecture and from the minutes themselves…that is, the experience of being present in the imaginary business meeting. They wanted to know what it was like to hear all the different voices, in both harmony and disharmony, but almost no one would be able to do the kind of reading that I’ve done within the restrictions of their daily lives.
So there’s a play, as well, which will be shared in Woodbrooke workshops in June and July. Seven characters in a room together, responding in conversation to the question—”How does God call humanity to live in community?”—and every word they speak is a direct quote from a book of discipline somewhere in the world. The invitation for those of us performing or watching the play will be to listen for a sense of the meeting, for underlying spiritual resonances, even in moments when the conflict seems insurmountable.
It’s been my sense all along that what came from this research would be relevant beyond just Friends, and I received a grant from the Louisville Institute back in the United States to develop it into a book for ecumenical and interfaith audiences. That’s in progress. But here’s what I wasn’t expecting: a couple of weeks ago, I shared the first of the ninety-two minutes with a new friend while sitting in the back of a van waiting to cross the border from the West Bank to Jordan. She’s a dual citizen, Mexican and American, and self-describes as secular. When she finished reading the first minute, which begins with the phrase “we are the children of God’s new covenant,” her mouth had dropped open. She said, “Based on what you told me about where this came from, I would not have expected this to be for me. But this is for me. This is a message for me.”
It’s a message for me, too. I keep going back through those minutes, and every time, I find something I hadn’t quite registered before, something new that is directly relevant to my life. I hope very much that your experience will be the same.
Emily Provance will deliver the 2025 Swarthmore Lecture on Saturday 24 May from 19:00–20:15 as part of Britain Yearly Meeting 2025. The lecture will be livestreamed on the Woodbrooke YouTube Channel. Read more about the Lecture here.
