Matthew 18:20 and the Gathered Meeting—Timeframes #2
August 20, 2026 § Leave a comment
What Was Matthew trying to say?
RECAP: I’ve been exploring in recent posts the various levels of intention and meaning in Matthew 18:14–20, and especially Jesus’s promise to guarantee the church’s authority in dealing with conflict in the church with his “presence” in verse 20, from which we get the phrase “gathered meeting”. In this and in the previous post, I’m looking at the passage from the perspective of the timeframes in which we could read it: in the time of Jesus, in the time of Matthew, and in our own time.
Matthew writes for a community that believed in Jesus’s resurrection, or at least for a community that he feels should believe, one that perhaps needs reassurance. Matthew’s account of the resurrection, with its posted guards and the chief priests’ cover up of the event with the disinformation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’s body, seems designed to counter rumors to that effect, especially since neither Luke nor John mention this story.
So, like us, Matthew and his readers could have thought that Jesus in 18:20 might have been speaking about gatherings taking place after his death, that he might be promising to appear among them as the resurrected Christ somehow.
However, there’s no hint of such a projection in time in the actual wording of the passage; it seems very present tense. Jesus doesn’t say “there I will be” in your midst; he says “there I am.”
And the passage might be a part of Q, the collection of sayings from which Matthew and Luke drew to add sayings material to their narrative gospels. Furthermore, Matthew 18:14–20 is in the instruction form of Q sayings, like much of the Sermon on the Mount. These instruction sayings formed the original core of Q, according to some scholars. That instruction core may be the earliest look we have at the very early Jesus movement.
On the other hand, Matthew 18:14–20 sits in the middle of a whole chapter on the theme of forgiveness in a tone that might suggest a milieu in which Jesus’s followers are facing the problems of a mature community dealing with managing members’ behavior. Like the 1660s and’70s in the history of the Quaker movement with its beginnings of “gospel order”, rather than the wild and sometimes chaotic 1650s.
I think that this reinforces the conclusion that Matthew is giving us a Q saying that comes out of the living ministry of Jesus and is not necessarily a projection into the future of a promise of a resurrection presence. But he’s put this material together in a way that speaks in a coherent way to the concerns of his own community.
At the same time, Matthew 18:20, with its use of some kind of “name” theology, is hinting at a more mystical, or metaphysical, dimension that reflects the reality of Jesus’s death and the hope of the resurrection.
So we’ll dive into that “name theology” in the next post.
Matthew 18:20 and the Gathered Meeting—Timeframes #1
August 11, 2026 § Leave a comment
I tend to read the Bible as though what I am reading is addressed to me. I suspect that we all tend to do this. But it never is addressed to us in the 21st century. Every passage in the Bible is always addressed to someone besides us, who lived in a completely different time and cultural milieu.
In fact there are at least three timeframes at work in Matthew 18:14–20:
- Jesus speaking to his disciples;
- Matthew writing for his audience; and
- us reading the passage for ourselves today.
Or put another way: What did Jesus mean by this passage? What was Matthew trying to say—why did he include it in his gospel? What does it mean to us for our attempts to apply the passage to our situation as readers today? In particular, how do we understand its value in fostering the gathered meeting?
So the timeframe questions are: Who is speaking, whom are they addressing, and why?
Jesus speaking to his disciples
In Matthew 18:20, on the face of it, as the sentence comes to us, Jesus is speaking to his disciples while he is still alive, during his living ministry. He is laying out a protocol for dealing with conflict between his disciples. Presumably the church he refers to in verse 17 is one of the household churches he had set up during his ministry, like the one in Bethany in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
So when he promises to the disciples that he will be “in their midst,” he doesn’t mean literally, physically, because he couldn’t be everywhere that such a conflict occurs when it occurs. So he must be promising to be present in some other way—some “metaphysical” way.
The key to the answer seems to be in whatever he means by gathering “in [his] name” in verse 20. What does “in my name” mean?
I see two sets of possibilities here (though we will return to this matter of the name in a later post). One set is “secular” in nature; the other is magico-religious.
One’s name is one’s reputation, especially in Jesus’s time; see Matthew 10:22 and 24:9, for instance. Or “in my name” could mean upon his authority—a “tell them I sent you” kind of authority; see John 14:13. Or “in my name” could mean “as I have taught you.” Jesus might have meant this promise in all of these ways.
But the fact that the second promise invokes the Father’s authority through the use of prayer suggests another dimension to this passage, a metaphysical one, if you will. Jesus repeatedly associates himself with the Father, even almost equates himself with the Father, especially in the gospel of John. In this regard he often speaks of being sent by the Father.
Meanwhile, ancient Israelite tradition has a rich and complex theology of the Name as God’s presence.
The writers of Deuteronomy, who had close ties to Jeremiah and Hosea, and who compiled the so-called Deuteronomic history—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings—considered Yahweh’s name as his presence on earth. A number of extra-canonical and inter-testamental Jewish texts went to town with this theology of divine presence in the Name. And Jesus seems to have adopted some version of this magico-religious understanding of the power of the divine name: “hallowed be thy name,” reads the Lord’s prayer, for instance. The name also has power to cast out unclean spirits in a number of accounts.
I think it is possible that Jesus’s promise in 18:20 ties the presence of the Father and his authority promised in verse 19 to the authority Jesus exercised on the Father’s behalf with this teaching regarding this protocol: through prayer during the proceedings of the protocol, the church invokes the presence of the Father, and also of his son by virtue of following his teaching, invoking Jesus’s name for authority—because, for these purposes, at least, the name/power/authority of the Father and of the son were one and the same, for, as his son, Jesus was his Father’s presence in the world. (Let’s put aside what being the “son of God” meant.)
I think Jesus was saying: conduct this matter as I have instructed you and pray to the Father as I have taught you, so that he will know that I sent you, and he / I—we—will answer your prayer; that is, your decision will have his / my—our—authority.
We will return to the theology of the Name in a later post.
Vocal Ministry and the School of the Spirit
August 6, 2026 § Leave a comment
As the signature form of ministry in the Quaker way, vocal ministry is a classroom and laboratory in the school of the Spirit, for the faith, the practice, and the experience of ministry of all kinds, for the fostering of its openings, the refinement of its discernment, and its nurture in the meeting.
Faith
In the vocal ministry, we believe in the Light within us, the light of the christ, God’s anointing spirit, which anointed Jesus as the Christ for his vocal ministry (Luke 4:18), and which is the source of our own openings, leadings, and callings.
In the vocal ministry, we have faith in the discernment of spirits, in an inner Guide who threshes the messages and winnows the kernels from the chaff.
In the vocal ministry, we have faith (or perhaps just hope) in the meeting’s eldership, in its proactive, Spirit-led tutelage and nurture of the vocal ministry and its ministers, and in its clarity and faithfulness in maintaining the peace of the Word.
Practice
In the vocal ministry, we practice the spirituality of inward listening that is distinctive to the Quaker way, of attuning ourselves to our inner Spirit-voice, who may call us to service; and as meetings we teach the ministry’s faith and practice and watch for those whose gifts are emerging, ready to water their sprouts with love.
In the vocal ministry, we practice the spirituality of discernment, testing whether the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart are truly from the Word of wisdom; and as meetings we mind the vines as they grow to maturity and we accept the fruits of their ministry in the Spirit in which it is given forth.
In the vocal ministry, we practice the spirituality of faithfulness, we are led by our Guide on the path of love and truth, lest we step through the traces or run past our guide; and as meetings we help to prune the vine so as to restore its fruitfulness, when necessary.
Experience
In the vocal ministry, we experience the joy of divine openings, the caring hand of our Guide, and the deep satisfaction of faithful service.
In the vocal ministry, we experience the Holy Spirit’s continuing revelation.
In the vocal ministry, we experience the covering of the Spirit, the in-gathering of our collective consciousness in the cascade of Spirit-led ministry; we experience the Presence in our midst.
Patterns and Examples
In the vocal ministry, in all these ways we see how the blessings of the Spirit manifest in the patterns and examples of our vocal ministry for all the forms of Quaker ministry, in its faith and practice and experience, as the anointing/christ-ing Spirit of God in action within us and among us, calling us into service both personally and collectively.
Matthew 18:20 and the Gathered Meeting—The promise(s)
August 4, 2026 § 1 Comment
A promise more than a condition for gathering (and a thing with numbers)
I suspect that many of us tend to read Matthew 18:20 as a condition: If you gather in my name, then I will come. But he actually says wherever you gather in my name, there I am in your midst. He is making a promise, not necessarily establishing a condition for his presence, though I think it’s reasonable to think that he’s implying a condition. We will return to the role of his name and this possible condition for gathering in a later post.
The wider context for this promise is Matthew 18:15–20, which defines a 3-step process that Jesus prescribed for dealing with conflict in his household churches. The promise in 18:20 is the third in a series of three promises, and each promise relates to one of the three action steps in the reconciliation protocol.
The first promise confers on one person heavenly authority to “bind” or “loose”. “Binding” and “loosing”, which also appears in Matthew 16:19 in which Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, represents the authority of the church and its leadership to settle matters of doctrine and of discipline. The second promise confers on two people (or three) the Father’s authority through an answer to prayer.
The third promise—the promise we’re looking at specifically—confers on the whole church Jesus’s own authority through his presence to expel the offender. Or at least, to treat them as a Gentile or tax collector, an outsider of some kind. The gospels give mixed messages about Jesus’s attitudes toward Gentiles, but from the stories of Zacchaeus and the call of Matthew, we know he had a special mission of conversion focused on tax collectors.
Furthermore, there’s a subtle number thing going on here. The action steps involve first one, then one or two more people, then two or three more people, and so do the promises. Here’s what that structure looks like:
| If any member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. | Whatever you (singular) bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth with be loosed in heaven. |
| But if you ae not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. | If two of you agree on earth, about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. |
| If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you a Gentile and a tax collector. | For wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst. |
The three promises form a binding triangle of authority in which the disciple(s) derives authority from the Father through Jesus. Jesus somehow represents or mediates the Father’s ultimate authority through his presence.
We will discuss the nature of his presence and what his name has to do with it in later posts.
Matthew 18:20 and the Gathered Meeting—Introduction
August 4, 2026 § 1 Comment
Friends get the phrase “gathered meeting” from Matthew 18:20: “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst.” I believe that the promise and experience of the gathered meeting—direct communion with God as a worshipping community—is what makes us a religious society and that it is one of the most distinctive and important gifts we offer to seekers and our members and attenders. As a result, this foundational Bible passage deserves our special attention.
The wider context for Matthew 18:20—verses 15–20—describe Jesus’s 3-step process for reconciling a conflict in his household churches. Early Friends adopted this protocol for their own practice, calling it “gospel order”—bringing gospel order to a situation. This wider context is key for understanding Matthew 18:20’s promise.
And as always with the sayings of Jesus, once we read below the surface, we uncover one nuance after another. This passage (Matthew 18:20) and its wider context are very rich in this regard.
So this introductory post begins a series of posts that seek to unpack what this passage means and how it can foster and deepen our experience of the gathered meeting. Each of the posts that follow offers a careful reading of the passage from a different angle.
Here are the headings for the posts in the series:
- A promise (not a condition) of a gathered meeting, a culminating promise out of three promises corresponding to the three steps in Jesus’s protocol for resolving conflicts in the church.
- Timeframes—We can read this passage in three different timeframes: Jesus speaking to his disciples; Matthew writing for his audience; us reading the passage for ourselves today; OR: what did Jesus mean by this passage? What did Matthew mean? And what do we mean?
- Literary structure—what can the passage’s literary structure tell us?
- “Name”—what does “name” mean in this context?
- “The midst”—what are the ‘geographical’ metaphysics of Jesus’s presence?
- Conclusions— How do we read the passage in the light of our own experience? How does all this foster and deepen the gathered meeting?
The Wings of the Spirit
July 26, 2026 § Leave a comment
Behold!
The wings of the Spirit
enfold us in divine love,
gather us into unity and joy, and
lead us to the Presence in our midst.
Through the Flaming Sword—Fox’s Vision
July 5, 2026 § Leave a comment
I’ve been reading The Great Angel by Margaret Barker, an exploration, among other things, of the origins of Jesus’s title as the Son of God, Messiah, and Lord.
On page 39, Barker discusses the vision and exaltation of the shaman king in ancient Near Eastern mythology. She starts by quoting Psalm 89:19:
“Of old thou didst speak in a vision to thy faithful one, and say:
‘I have set the crown upon one who is mighty,
I have exalted one chosen from the people.’”
She goes on to say:
‘Vision’ and ‘exaltation’ are highly significant words, especially if exaltation means ‘raising up’ in more than just the sense of conferring high status. . . . The heavenly journey reinforced the belief that the ordinary world of human existence and the upper world of their [the visionary’s people’s] mythology were once in a harmony which had been destroyed by the action of evil forces. The shaman had to repel these forces and thus restore the cosmic harmony. As a result of his initiation he had enhanced powers of vision and hearing; he could see into the very nature of things and understand the processes of life itself. Thus he became a healer. The commonest way to induce the experience of ascent was by fasting, lightening the body so that the soul could fly. Once the shaman figure had ascended to the heavenly places and knew the secrets of the creation, he enjoyed a life which had already passed through death, and he became a being from another world.
Immediately upon reading this, I thought of George Fox’s account of one of his visions:
Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that i say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue. And I was at a stand in my mind whether I should practice physic [medicine] for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord. But I was immediately taken up in spirit, to see into another or more steadfast state than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall. And the Lord showed me that such as were faithful to him in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell, in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof, may be known, through the openings of that divine Word of wisdom and power by which we were made. Great things did the Lord lead me into, and wonderful depths were opened unto me, beyond what can by words be declared; but as people come into subjection to the spirit of God, and grow up in the image and power of the Almighty, they may receive the Word of wisdom, that opens all things, and come to know the hidden unity in the Eternal Being. (Journal, Nickalls edition, pages 27–28)
So many common themes in these two passages: the fall, that is, the destruction of cosmic harmony by evil forces, and its restoration; vision and ascension to a higher world; enhanced senses and understanding; the power of healing and insight into the secrets of creation; passage beyond the normal mortal human condition into a quasi-divine condition.
And both accounts echo the ascent of the Son of Man to receive royal status by the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7, with which Jesus identifies himself. But that is another subject.
The Quaker Spiritway–A Meditation
July 5, 2026 § 3 Comments
The Quaker way of the Spirit:
We each have within us
an Inner Teacher and Guide;
we seek to have ears that hear
the quiet, murmuring Voice
that offers us comfort and strength
in times of adversity
and the Word of Wisdom and Truth.
We each have within us
a Light that shines within us;
we seek to have eyes that see
how we should walk in the world,
and to be corrected
when we step off of the path;
a Light that can awaken us
to the hurts of the world
and to the beauty in the world;
that inspires us to acts
of love and compassion,
of kindness and creativity;
that leads us into service
and advocacy on behalf
of those who are oppressed
and into nonviolent witness
against their oppressors
and the systems of oppression
which they serve and maintain;
a light that can lead us
into joy and thankfulness,
into personal fulfillment,
and into the peace that passes
all understanding.
New Pendle Hill Pamphlet
June 5, 2026 § Leave a comment
Pendle Hill has just released my new pamphlet Nurturing Vocal Ministry: Toward a Vital Culture of Eldership.
In this essay, I explore ways to deepen our meetings’ vocal ministry, to support our ministers, and foster deeper worship and the gathered meeting through what I call a vital culture of eldership. By this I mean the faith and practices, the attitudes and agreements through which we nurture the spiritual lives of our members and attenders.
I worry that since we laid down the practice of recording ministers and elders in many of our yearly meetings, and even in those that still retain the practice, we’ve stopped paying proactive attention to vocal ministry and stopped offering support to emerging ministers. I lay out some reasons for why nurturing vocal ministry more attentively is so important to our spiritual lives, as worshippers, as ministers, and as meetings.
I discuss some ways that our meetings and our worship and ministry committees could do more to nurture Spirit-led ministry and deepen the worship. I answer some of the hesitations that Friends have regarding a more attentive culture of eldership and lay out the many benefits to both our meetings and our members of such a culture.
I point out that we are already there when it comes to nurturing other kinds of ministry, especially witness ministry—we are more likely to recognize when someone is called to service, we treat their leading as an essential aspect of Quaker faith, and we are much more likely to know how to support them in practice.
Meanwhile, however, vocal ministry is the signature form of ministry in the Quaker way. Why would we not support spoken ministry in worship with the same focus and care that we give to other forms of ministry, especially since virtually all forms of Quaker ministry involve Spirit-led spoken word, anyway?
For vocal ministry in worship is the classroom and laboratory of the school of the Spirit. Through spoken ministry in worship we can learn to listen for the call to service, discern what that service is and whether it is of God, and learn how to be faithful while we serve.
And I explore the role that faith plays in our vocal ministry. By what “Spirit” am I being led when I rise to speak?
My answer is that I am led by the spirit of the christ, little “c”, the Spirit that anointed Jesus as the Christ for his ministries of leading, healing, forgiving, and teaching—his vocal ministry; that anointed his first followers for vocal ministry at the Pentecost; that anointed George Fox when he convinced the Seekers on Firbank Fell in 1652 and jump-started the Quaker movement, and that anointed them all in that moment in a second Pentecost.
That same anointing/christing Spirit (for the Greek word christos means anointed) that has been anointing Quaker ministers ever since, including those who will rise to speak this coming First Day in our own meetings—in theory. Or so I am suggesting.
What can we do to nurture this essential blessing of Quaker worship and the Quaker way? This pamphlet tries to answer that question.
The Unifying Course of the Spirit
April 25, 2026 § 3 Comments
In meeting for worship today (February 15, 2026) I had an opening about what I’ll call “the unifying vector of the Spirit,” a thread or path that passes through and unites four essentials of Quaker faith in its course.
These four essentials of the Quaker way are: 1) the Light Within, in which we can commune directly with God without any mediators; 2) the gathered meeting, in which the worshipping community can commune directly with God; 3) continuing revelation, in which the Spirit is always active and productive, within us and among us; and 4) living our lives as testimony and sacrament. (By God I mean the Mystery Reality behind our religious experience, whatever our experience is.)
So this is a meditation in imagery on a dynamic figure of the movement of the Spirit conceived as a kind of vector. By vector I mean something that has magnitude and direction, as in Euclidean geometry, represented by an arrow, used here as a metaphor. Think of it as a beam of light with intensity (weight) and direction (truth), sometimes refracting into new directions as it passes from one “medium” into another.
The point source for the “vector” of Light is God, the Spirit, however we experience and name the transcendental Mystery Reality that brings animation, identity, meaning, guidance, and transformation into our lives, which our “souls” can touch somehow.
The essential opening of the Quaker way is that each of us can commune with God directly, without any mediating persons, rituals, substances, or texts. This immediate relationship with the Spirit arises from the Light Within us, the indwelling presence of the Spirit within us. So the Spirit’s first motion is its animating presence within us.
Vocal ministry. And sometimes this focus of Spirit takes on “material” substance during worship in vocal ministry. Some opening takes shape in one of the worshippers, some truth. It coalesces, gains definition and clarity and a kind of solidity, becoming a seed, as it were, until it precipitates out from the swirling soup of collective mystical Life into Truth, into a message, into continuing revelation. Now the vector has emerged from the medium into which it was seeded in a worshipper onto the body’s surface, buoyed up and embraced by the collective.
The gathered meeting. Now, just as each individual can commune with God directly, so also the worshipping community can commune directly with the Divine, as a community, collectively. We call this the gathered meeting. In worship, the vector moves through us inwardly in our prayer, in our intention, in our attention in worship on God, on Love, on Truth, on the Good, on Mystery, on the Sublime, on Christ, on Spirit—on whatever our individual attention and yearning in worship has as its focus.
And sometimes this focus of Spirit in motion by individual worshippers takes on collective metaphysical substance somehow. It may be because some vocal ministry has planted a seed, and perhaps subsequent ministry has joined with earlier ministry to add weight/light and direction/truth to that seed. Or it may be all in the transcendental realm, working just with our inward prayer and attention and intention, rather than with some vocal ministry.
However, the motion takes place, the individual “vectors” so intermesh that they coalesce. They become a single spiritually viscous medium, and this “medium” begins to move, it gains direction: it curls in upon its unified collective center, the Presence in the midst, as a cycling psychic matrix, like a spiritual hurricane forming around a divine eye, a vortex of gathering Presence in which some or all of the worshippers find themselves in a dynamic unified identity, sharing meaning and guidance and transformation as a corporate spiritual body, the body of the Christ, of the Spirit’s anointing (for the Greek christos means “anointed”). The individual vectors within each of us and from each of us retain their reality and their roots within us, still the same Spirit that comes from that mysterious Source and animates us as individuals, but now augmented and extended, shared and transfigured, a holy communion connecting us to each other and to the Presence in our midst.
Fruits of the Spirit. But the Spirit vector may still be in motion yet. The seed may sprout and aim for the Light. It may leaf out, mature, and blossom. It may bear fruit, as a leading, a call to God’s service in some form, carried out into the world by one or more of the worshippers to bring some meaning, guidance, nurture, or transformation into the world, with a new intensity of the Light of Truth and a new direction of Divine Love in motion.
Through the Flaming Sword 