Unlike peace churches that withdraw from a war-making society in order to establish islands of nonviolence, the Quaker meeting usually aspires to be fully engaged while remaining radically unassimilated. This results in intense temptations to adjust by introverting and isolating our faith practice. We are often extraordinarily persistent in asking ourselves about the state of our consciences rather than our personal and communal relations to others. As a faith practice, sanctuary brings back into focus our community’s covenant to serve the Peaceable Kingdom. First, sanctuary cannot be reduced to or dismissed as a matter of individual conscience. An individual may provide refuge to the violated and may even prophesy, but only a congregation can gather as church and enter into the communion that is sanctuary. Second, the practice of sanctuary fuses concerns that are separate and even competing issues when relegated to the faith practice of individuals. Asking not “what can I do?” but “what can we do?”, we open the way for each individual offering to be incorporated into a cathedral of love and service that our life as a people builds for the Kingdom in human history. Third, individuals can resist injustice, but only in community can we do justice. When the corporate guidance of the gathered meeting leads to corporate rather than individual practice, it can make the difference between socially sterile gestures of individual protest and socially creative community breakthroughs toward a peacemaking way of life.
Sanctuary issues are not new; they are fundamentally prophetic rather than innovatively theological. They are, in fact, the primal queries addressed to us by the prophets and the Gospel. Sanctuary is a perennial task for any people that covenants to serve the Peaceable Kingdom. We Quakers are among the lastborn of the Covenant peoples, yet we, too, gather in Sinai’s stillness and hear ourselves instructed to become a people that hallows the earth. All about us, we see that humanity has not yet been fully created into the communion that is an image of the Holy; many among us are violated. And, meeting in Sinai’s stillness, we also hear this: The communion that unites us is sanctuary to the violated. Through the corporate practice of love and service, we are to enter into the full community with the violated that heals humanity into one body.
–Jim Corbett in Pendle Hill Pamphlet 270: The Sanctuary Church