Coming Together for Continuing Revelation:
Common Testimony on Abuse
Guidelines by Windy Cooler on how to use this resource in your Meeting
Guidelines by Windy Cooler on how to use this resource in your Meeting
The common testimony is to be used in a process of communal discernment created from the Quaker traditions. The process is called Coming Together for Continuing Revelation. The process has been used since 2021 to address intractable conflict inside of Quaker communities and the presence of crisis in Quaker communities. It has been taught at Woodbrooke and at Friends General Conference Gathering and an upcoming course will be available through Woodbrooke online in 2025.
Coming Together for Continuing Revelation is a discernment technique that is based on the wisdom in a traditional clearness committee. Still, instead of stopping with individual clearness, we move to more of a sense of the meeting through the experiential wisdom and reflections of individual Friends inside the context of a community.
In the case of the common testimony on abuse, step one, the one-on-one listening and individual clearness, has been completed. This is the most tender part of the work. If you feel called to create a common testimony on abuse specifically for your meeting, please consider taking a course on this process.
To participate in Coming Together for Continuing Revelation: Abuse in Quaker Communities you will begin by setting aside at least four hours with your meeting to discern queries that can be used in future work. It is best to do this discernment in one day, to maintain the cohesiveness of the experience. Please have food available and schedule breaks, including an hour-long break to walk or stretch and rest yourselves. It is best to meet in person or online, not to create a hybrid environment where technical problems and distractions are more apt to occur while you are doing this sensitive work.
Be prepared for two periods of worship sharing and a work session that is somewhat like threshing. Appoint roles for convener, reader and notetaker. Please take notes by hand, in a notebook, if at all possible. This creates intimacy and thoroughness with the testimonies.
The convener’s role is to explain the process and to keep Friends within the process, even when they express anxiety. Often anxiety is expressed about “not getting anywhere” or about the testimony itself. This is to be expected, and the convener can say so, but ultimately, for the process to result in wisdom, it needs to be followed in the time you have set aside to do so.
A reader will be appointed to read the common testimony to those gathered. It will be read twice. In the spirit of worship sharing, those gathered will be asked by the convener to reflect on what they have heard, to say what they have heard in the testimony. What this is not: This is not a time to share a story of your own, this is not a time to express disagreement or agreement or any opinion about the common testimony, this is not a time to ask questions about the testimony, as in any worship sharing this is not a time to share conversationally with one another about the process or anything else. What this is: This is when those gathered repeat back what they are hearing in the common testimony. The notetaker records these reflections in their notebook.
This is followed by a short break.
The reader reads back once what they recorded those gathered as saying in the first session. They ask: is this right? They make corrections as asked.
The convener asks those gathered what they are curious about in the testimony they just heard. The convener makes clear that this is a time to ask questions and remark on what they are curious about in the testimony but not a time to answer questions or make statements or share stories of their own or argue. This is again in the spirit of worship sharing so again we speak once, succinctly and completely from the silence, leaving space between messages. A notetaker records what is being said or asked during this time.
This is followed by a one-hour long break to eat and to get exercise or reflect privately. It is good to have pastoral care presences available during this break to serve as accompaniment given that many participants will have experience with interpersonal violence, themselves. Participants should not speak about the process with one another during this time, but take every opportunity rest, including being accompanied by a pastoral care presence if needed. The convener can expect that someone will come back from this break agitated. Conveners should be chosen for their ability to be a non-anxious presence and should prepare for this to occur and to help everyone maintain the flow of the process. Work is about to be done with the material from the previous two sessions.
The reader will read the questions and curiosities gathered in the previous session. They will ask for corrections and make them. The convener will then invite those gathered to create together two to four formal queries that are based on the curiosities and questions raised. This is an interactive process of refinement familiar to us in our committee work and in threshing. What is unique about it is that it is based entirely on what has been said in that space at that time, immediately previous to the work. You will decide together how to use these queries to guide your work in addressing, remembering past and preventing future, abuse.
The Coming Together for Continuing Revelation process is a trauma and Quaker-informed process of discovery in which emotional and spiritual habits of shame and anxiety that have disabled us from addressing the most important questions in our lives as a community are disrupted. These habits manifest themselves differently when powerful Friends and oppressed Friends commit them, but they are all too common.
This process is trauma-informed in that it creates safe (structured, predictable) space for our memories to be engaged and for truth to come forward, in much the way that Judith Herman speaks of, and to integrate that truth through the intentional behavior of curiosity into our collective consciousness.
It is Quaker-informed in that it builds on structures we are familiar with theologically and culturally to help us move forward. Continuing revelation, the idea we have that the divine is making and remaking the world through our relationships every day, is an essential part of our Quaker future together. As convener of this project, I hope that our Quaker future is one of integrity and true peace, a healing justice, from which we can remake the world together.