Why Vocal Ministry Is Important
September 17, 2018 § 2 Comments
A few weeks ago, I didn’t go to meeting for worship because I was weary of the kind of vocal ministry I expected to hear. I’d never done that before.
Now, I am probably the most judgmental person I know when it comes to vocal ministry, but I know I am not alone with my feelings. I know of at least one other Friend who sometimes doesn’t come for the same reason. I suspect there are more.
Not that the vocal ministry is terrible or deeply disturbing. We have a couple of people who speak fairly often whose ministry some find somewhat annoying, maybe even a little disturbing, but neither of those persons is disturbed. No, mostly it’s a matter of shallow messages, personal sharings, messages that are really announcements, ignorance or ignore-ance of the conventions of Quaker worship, and such like manifestations of luke-warmness. None of it is egregious enough to bring all the members of Ministry and Worship Committee to unity on the need for some more focused action.
I suspect that this is the condition of most meetings and most worship and ministry committees. If there is some problem with the worship, and most of the time that means with the ministry, there are always a couple of people who dread the specter of discipline so much that they stand in the way of dealing forthrightly with the problem. And “dealing forthrightly” is so difficult, anyway, so fraught with the possibilities for hurt or misstep, so bereft of a clear path forward, so apt to cause deep anxiety even in the more action-inclined, that the rest of the committee acquiesces to inaction. And so the problem continues. Sometimes it deepens over time until some crisis point is reached.
But vocal ministry really matters, and for a lot of reasons not related to the sensibilities of the judgmental. So this is an open letter to members of ministry and worship committees about the wider context in which to consider how to elder vocal ministry. And by “elder” I do not mean just the efforts to “correct” those whose ministry might not be appropriate. More importantly, I mean the meeting’s culture around vocal ministry, the nature of the shared agreements about what we’re doing in our worship, and the efforts the meeting takes to nurture vital worship and ministry.
In the next few posts, I want to explore the reasons I’ve come up with for why vocal ministry is too important to leave to passive attention, behind-the-hand complaints, and belated and faltering action only in egregious cases.
Through the Flaming Sword 
[…] Why Vocal Ministry Is Important […]
The key is where vocal ministry comes from. Early Friends believed it must be prepared, not in the sense of preparing the text, but in terms of a true convincement and repentance followed by daily time with the Lord to get the Friend truly in the Spirit of Christ. If one “takes on the mind of Christ” the effect on vocal ministry is transformative.
So discipline narrowly in terms of inappropriate and appropriate ministry will not be of much avail. The need is more basic – the true spiritual formation of Friends. In that regard, the movement among Friends in recent decades towards programs of spiritual formation and the like is more promising. Probably they are generally not deep enough to do the full job, but they recognize the basic need and make at least some efforts to meet it.
If one is truly living one’s life in the Spirit of Christ, the vocal ministry (and the silence) will be rich. If one is not, we are likely to see the shallowness noted here.