Discerning Vocal Ministry—Another Test
January 28, 2018 § 7 Comments
An awful lot of messages in the meetings for worship I attend (I won’t call them vocal ministry, for reasons I’m about to get into) start with the pronoun “I”, often combined with a statement that pegs the time. There then inevitably follows one of two things, either an announcement and/or an anecdote. “I read in the New York Times this morning . . .” A few days ago, I heard . . .” “I’ve been thinking lately . . .”
These introductory announcements and vignettes sometimes are quite charming in themselves, but they almost always lead up to a point, so they are in essence, secondary to the message. Often the route to the point is rather slow, oblique, or peppered with side-trips, but eventually we get to a point. The point is the message the speaker wants to bring to us.
I must confess that every time I hear such an opening, I cringe. Very rarely, I think, does a truly spirit-led message start with “I” and an announcement or vignette. Or at least, I usually feel that we would have been better off with just hearing the point.
When I find myself thinking along these lines, I stop myself and force myself to go deeper. In my mind, I strip away the introduction and listen to the point on its own. If it stands on its own, then maybe I have some ministry to share. Time, then, to go deeper yet and sit with the point some more to see how it feels. Is the point something valuable I have learned for myself from that moment or experience? Or do I also feel led to go public with it? If so, why? Do I get something out of it, or does it truly feel like service? Does it still point back to me, or am I seeking to answer that of God in others?
The problem with these self-centered introductions is that, first of all, they pull the speaker toward his or her self, toward ego, rather than toward service and one’s center. In the process of telling the story your mind runs through the details and these details tempt you to share them, too. You start making connections with other things, and now you’re tempted to run off on a tangent.
Meanwhile, you’re pulling the listeners up to the surface, also. Now they are imagining the scene along with you. Their minds are activated, pulling them up from the alpha brain wave meditative state that they may have descended to in their deepening process toward the beta wave region of active, conscious, everyday thought. Then the point comes like a fly landing on the surface of the lake, and like a bass surfacing to catch the fly, we break the water line and swallow. Now the point has been made, but everybody has to start deepening all over again. Two or three (or more) such messages, and one is just treading water at the surface catching flies.
Introductory personal pronouns, announcements, and anecdotes disturb the dynamics of meeting for worship and tend to waste the point on an audience lured to the surface, away from the depths—even if the point was one worth sharing in the first place. But the point, delivered as prophetic utterance, might have pulled us all deeper into the cool still water of true worship.
Through the Flaming Sword 
I feel the deep ideas here, but also that it may be written from the perspective of our most recognizable Quaker standard for speaking, what is usually called “prophetic ministry.” It does not include enough regard for the broad range of vocal and musical ministries, including mystical, pastoral, teaching, healing, and more, that are appropriate in worship and meeting life in general. All of those, speaking for myself (!), I benefit from and value in worship, even when they are not meant for me. Sometimes those messages alert me to the needs of others, an important community function of worship. They can be distracting, but at the same time be pivotal for 1 person – a very important outcome of vocal ministry. It doesn’t have to speak to everyone equally to be a message from God.
I agree that we probably lack discipline in speaking and I appreciate Steve dissecting what goes into the slide into the too personal – I see myself in that. But I consider some of these preambles in two ways: a sign of humility in the speakers, acknowledging their human frailty and the possibility they might have gotten it wrong, and second, a form of preparing the ground before sowing the seed. From my point of view, that is a longing within vocal ministry (to make messages accessible) which is appropriate in worship.
Could we do more of that preparation outside of worship in both our personal and meeting activities? Sure thing. Will we? That’s a lot harder – and a lot harder to entice others to engage in. But if we try to clean up vocal ministry without doing that outside work, we risk both silencing the timid and (in hoping to be the trumpet) becoming a meeting of possibly opaque and rather pompous utterances, meant to impress with the proof of God’s presence in our midst, but without the humble human connections that bring the divine to life in this world – which is the movement of the spirit I am most familiar with in worship and throughout my own spiritual journey.
I’m sure many meetings struggle with spiritual depth. I think addressing that need is one of the two most important jobs of M&C (as well as direct pastoral care): bring learning experiences to deepen faith and spiritual practices. We often ask Friends to share what we currently think/believe with each other, so we get to know each other’s vocabulary and experiences. But that isn’t enough – we also need to explicitly, tenderly “challenge” and teach. And we need to hold ourselves accountable to AND be in creative tension with both our tradition and our personal journey with God. Otherwise we do risk slipping into an “anything goes” approach in worship and other meeting activities because we fear to offend others by insisting on the value of our history, theology, experience and traditions as Friends.
Hmmm. But what if God is telling you to share your personal experience, since we carry that of God in ourselves? Should we perhaps speak in the third person or adopt the royal “we”? Some of the most moving and powerful ministry I have ever heard has begun with “I”. I think the problem is less that people speak from their personal experience (we know the Truth, in Fox’s words, “experimentally”), but that they can’t discern what is Spirit-led and what is ego-led. Not the same thing at all.
I am reminded of a Friend now long passed who said of such ministry, “The water tastes of the pipes.”
I have experienced feedback that ministry might be better received if it is more about me… which I found quite troubling.
On the other hand, a blanket “never about yourself”, “never start with ‘I'” is also troubling. I don’t think there are any clear grammatical or syntactic indicators as to whether a message is spirit-led.
Thanks for this, Steve. You speak my mind better than I could have done.
The memorial minute of 8/1/1774 for John Woolman records, “Thus he found the Efficacy of that Power to arise, which, in his own Expressions, ‘prepares the Creature to stand like a Trumpet through which the Lord speaks to his People.'” When that Power stands us up like a Trumpet, we *know* we’re not to add folksy preludes like “I’ve been thinking . . .” or “There was a story in this morning’s newspaper . . . .”
But in cases where we weren’t stood up like a trumpet, but think we might have a call to give ministry anyway, we have to be brave and just give it. I think the folksy prelude is to make people like us, or forgive us, or approve of us in advance before we get to the point. If we’re afraid to risk people not liking us, not forgiving us, and not approving of us, we have a Shepherd who will gladly lend us all the courage we need to make our point without the folksy prelude.
It has been many years since someone or some reading pointed out that ministry in worship is poorly served when it begins with (I). This is the beginning point and I wish that this short blog could be shared with every meeting.
Sadly, many in my meeting would be concerned that we would inhibit Friends and attenders from participating in messages in worship. Perhaps our way forward is to set the example and raise it gently with our Ministry and Counsel/Worship Committees.
This is a vital concern and goes to the very heart of of why we gather in the first place.
Don Badgley
This has become a rather urgent concern in my meeting in the past few weeks as a number of relatively new members and attenders have been speaking fairly often without, seemingly, sufficient familiarity with the conventions that govern our worship or grounding in the Spirit. A few of us have been wondering what to do.
Because my own call to vocal ministry is mostly a call to a teaching ministry, and because we have basically no other venue or vehicle for educating or persuading these Friends besides a face-to-face eldering, which, of course, we are reluctant to pursue, I have, in the last couple of meetings for worship addressed the spiritual source of vocal ministry with my own.
I think I’ll publish what I remember of those messages, encouraged by some comments Friends made to me afterwards.