“In Quaker faith and practice, the individual and the meeting are in a dynamic, mutually supportive and reciprocal relation.”

In this essay, Tom Gates examines many of the factors affecting the relationship between the Seeker and the Meeting, before and during membership. While a person may be drawn to Quakerism for a particular reason, over time the individual’s needs, and the way in which the Meeting community is able to meet them, can change. There are stages to be gone through as we grow into the life of the meeting community. Is it peace we are after? Service? Shared values? A deepening of our faith? What, exactly, is a leading? Tom Gates examines the many aspects of membership and the obligations it may impose on us, individually and as a faith family.

In this essay Tom Gates examines many of the factors affecting the relationship between the Seeker and the Meeting, before and during membership. While a person may be drawn to Quakerism for a particular reason, over time the individual’s needs, and the way in which the Meeting community is able to meet them, can change. There are stages to be gone through as we grow into the life of the meeting community. Is it peace we are after? Service? Shared values? A deepening of our faith? What, exactly, is a leading? Tom Gates examines the many aspects of membership and the obligations it may impose on us, individually and as a faith family.

Gates looks at membership in terms of four aspects.
1. a sense of belonging
2. shared values
3. transformation
4. obedience

I admit to being startled at the thought that we are called to obedience, yet after reading this pamphlet, I think I do understand the meaning Gates attaches to it.

The first two, belonging and a sense of shared values, came easy to me when I began attending my first Quaker Meeting. The notion of being transformed seems so heady, so other worldly that I hesitate to claim it, yet I realize I am being transformed, and I hope to go on being transformed my whole life. And obedience? Surely not obedient to the Meeting, but obedient to God's call to me? Yes, I do try. Some days I am more successful than others. ( )

This very wonderful pamphlet is about what belonging to a living spiritual community offers, and is both a vision and a challenge to us. Is our meeting a community that nurtures the spiritual growth and the lifelong process of spiritual maturing and transformation of its members?
Gates explains the Quaker meeting as a place of acceptance and loving welcome, a place of shared values as lived out in our Testimonies, a place of transformation offering both challenge and support, and a place of obedience and faithfulness to the leadings of the Spirit. These can be seen as stages of deepening our understanding and developing our practice as we live in the spiritual community that the meeting can and should offer. The challenge to the meeting is to meet each participant where they are, while at the same time lifting up to them a vision of and support for where they might be going.
Note that despite the title, it is not about the formal process or meaning of institutional membership in the RSF. ( )

Wonderful way to view the role of the local Quaker community (i.e. one's Quaker meeting) vis-a-vis our relationship to one another, and to the meeting, as a convenant community. ( )