Dear Friends,

After two years of deep listening, the Life and Power: Quaker Discernment on Abuse project, for which I served as convener, is releasing this “common testimony.” This common testimony is to be used by your meeting in a process of continuing revelation, the process for which will be explained in this letter. You can find the common testimony here: Coming Together for Continuing Revelation: Common Testimony on Abuse

What is the Common Testimony?

The three pages included here represent the testimony of 41 Friends who responded to the call for testimony of response to the query:

Do we live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of child abuse, as well as intimate partner abuse and all forms of violence within the family and community?

You will perhaps recognize the form of this query as coming from one common to Quakers on the topic of war, it having its roots in a statement by George Fox in the 17th century affirming that he lived in that life and power which did away with the occasion of all wars. This statement was later one of the bases of our peace testimony. 

Details have been removed from the common testimony to ensure that each speaker remains anonymous. Sometimes multiple testimonies pointed to the same truth and in those cases only one speaker was chosen to represent what many said. The testimonies were then arranged together in such a way as to make one cohesive testimony, much like a State of the Meeting report might, while retaining the voice of the speaker.

A Prophetic Context

Survivors of interpersonal violence often wonder what to make of our peace testimony when our own experience of war, in our Friendly homes and Friends’ communities, is not altogether different than that of any other community not in possession of a peace testimony. Interpersonal violence is very alive in the world around our meetings, and indeed, it is alive within them, too. I will not bore you with what social science tells us about the overwhelming presence of interpersonal violence, including that rooted in systematic oppression, in our world. Many of us know of this. But in our experience as survivors in our own Quaker communities, we are quickly shushed when we attempt to express the overwhelming presence of this violence in our lives. 

In a theology that stresses experience over any other form of divine knowing, there is too often little, beyond an increasing appearance of child safety policies our insurance companies or the state have demanded, to tell us that our experience of violence is one to bring to the divine in each of us, to be shared, learned from, and healed in a Quaker community.

The common testimony coming from the Life and Power project is intentionally not representative of the graphic details of the violence committed against those who participated in sharing personal testimonies. Those intimate testimonies were shared in a space of confidentiality with a receptive listener who, after meeting with each Friend, would return a typed copy of their personal testimony for them to keep, and for only them to keep, to know that they were heard and to keep hearing themselves, in a space of safety and love. 

The process of listening from 2022-24 was meant to be informed by the trauma theory espoused by Judith Herman, a Harvard psychiatrist who says that trauma is not a psychiatric issue, but a justice issue. Herman tells us that to address trauma we must create safe spaces for it to be recalled and, from there, we must transform our communities to integrate those with trauma and to eventually find leadership in what she calls a “healing justice.” I and the other listeners tried. We may have failed, and if we did, we apologize. And this potential failure too, I recognize, is rooted in shushing. 

The Life and Power project did emotionally hard, skilled labor while remaining a deeply materially impoverished effort. It was accomplished on stolen time in which we all really needed to be employed in ways that enabled our own survival. Public ministry in the Quaker traditions, especially on the things that are most pressing and pointed, is shushed by its ongoing impoverishment. And that too is a kind of violence, to those who are called, and to the labor our communities should be committed to. It is a violence to the Spirit and the Light.

How Do I Use This Common Testimony?

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. 

What is Coming Together for Continuing Revelation?

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. 

First Session: First worship sharing (approx 1 hour)

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.

Second Session: Second Worship Sharing (approx 1 hour) 

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.

Third Session: Work Session

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.

Why Might This Be Helpful?

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.

Gratitude

My first set of gratitudes as convener is to those who trusted us enough to share their testimonies with us. I obviously cannot name you, but I will always carry your stories with me. I carry you, your face, your heart. I am grateful that you trusted all of us to try to carry you as you carry others. 

Our listeners, always ready to be challenged and to grow and to care, were Lynette Davis, Kaia Jackson, Harold Page-Jamison, Trayce Peterson and Jade Rockwell. Sarah Allen contributed our guiding query in the first phone conversation we ever had. Margaret Webb helped to create the process that later became known as Coming Together for Continuing Revelation in her role as my supervisor during Supervised Ministry at Earlham School of Religion. In our attempt to be professional looking, Mandy Ford made us a stunning logo. 

We received initial financial support through a fellowship I had with an interfaith NGO, Odyssey Impact, and when it looked like we simply didn’t have the Quaker-derived material resources to do the work we were called to do we received generous personal donations from Friends, including Sarah Allen, Betsy Bragg, Melinda Wenner Bradley, JT Dorr-Bremme, Rebecca Cromwell, Della Stanley-Green, Andy Stanton-Henry, Nikki Holland, Gail Koehler, Diana Rutherford, Emily Savin, Lori Pineiro Sinitsky, Lisa Smith, Elizabeth Terney, and Holly White. Thank you for coming to help in a very dark time. 

I am grateful to QuakerSpeak for their excellent treatment of the project last year. I am also grateful to Judy Maurer for her full-length interview with me for Sierra Cascades Yearly Meeting’s newsletter that explained so well what the Life and Power project was doing and why.

You would not be reading this without the Friends General Conference and Quaker Leadership Center, especially their respective staff, Rashid Darden and Andy Stanton-Henry. Thank you both for publishing the common testimony and this accompanying letter.

Many thanks to the Obadiah Brown Benevolent Fund for funding some infrastructure improvements and a change of leadership and mission at Life and Power, which will follow the completion of the common testimony and for which I am very grateful. 

It is with this that I feel released from my more than a decade-long ministry around interpersonal violence, at least in this form. My Prayer From Shame from 2012, when I was a survivor looking for a place in this world, has been answered, and my new prayer is that we all find that power to be present.

With life and power,

Windy Cooler

Embraced Public Minister, Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting (Baltimore Yearly)

Convener, Life and Power: Quaker Discernment on Abuse 2022-24