The Importance of Vocal Ministry: Worship Culture
September 20, 2018 § 1 Comment
As I said at the end of my previous post about the importance of ministry for shaping the experience of newcomers, worship—worth-shape—is how we give shape to that which is of ultimate worth. And we give it that shape primarily through our vocal ministry. Our vocal ministry is the main vehicle by which we build our meeting’s culture of worship. It gives the worshipping spirit of the meeting its definition and character. It is what gives wings to the angel of our meeting.
Shallow ministry or ministry that comes from the self reinforces the sense that that is what worship is for. It encourages newcomers to bring self-defined, sharing-style ministry themselves. And it undermines the prospects for a meeting more gathered in the Spirit.
Without active nurture of Spirit-led ministry, newcomers will learn what we want from osmosis. When its seems that we are not looking for something more, we add to our worship people who are satisfied with something less. And the more people who are satisfied with something less, the more that is what we get.
This cycle of reinforcing feedback can gradually degrade the quality of the worship even further. Since truly prophetic or deeply Spirit-led vocal ministry requires discipline—or effort, if you will—of several kinds, both personal and collective, the quality of the ministry is unlikely to improve by itself. It is much more likely to get worse.
The discipline of the seasoned minister actually reinforces this cycle. The more people who speak, the less time there is for such a minister to center into her or his own ministry, to discern its source and readiness, and find the peace or inner assurance that one needs to speak. In the meantime, someone else speaks. One stops to listen, to ponder, to absorb the message, and then one returns to one’s discernment anew. More time passes. But in the meantime someone else speaks. . . . And so on.
Similar things happen when some ministry pulls you away from the center or up to the surface of one’s own thoughts, interrupting or interfering with the minister’s centering and discernment.
Weak ministry crowds out seasoned ministry. And this reinforces a worship culture that fosters weak ministry—and tends to hinder efforts to deepen the ministry.
Cultures tend to sustain and defend themselves. That’s what cultures do. While they inevitably evolve over time, they still are conservative by nature and instinct. Of course, a culture is the collective consciousness of a group of individual people. To sustain itself—or improve itself—a culture has only individuals to work with. So, almost inevitably, some Friends take up the task of defending the worship and ministry status quo from whatever they perceive as a threat to their understanding of Quaker worship and ministry. Almost inevitably, someone on a worship and ministry committee or in the meeting resists change, especially if it seems to them intrusive or “eldering” in its negative disciplinarian connotation.
Meanwhile, some Friends might seek to change the worship culture, because, if the ministry seems weak to them, they will want to do something about it. However, the efforts to actively change the quality of the vocal ministry is likely lead to this resistance. The incipient conflict over what to do about the ministry then triggers one of the other dominant forces in Quaker culture—the avoidance of conflict. But even if the committee or the meeting decides to take the issue on, still we must come to unity on both the need to act and, much more difficult, what to do about it.
And so, almost all the time, nothing happens. Often for years. Sometimes until some crisis occurs. Often past the point at which some Friends stop coming to worship. Which is its own kind of quiet crisis.
The only way I see to improve the quality of the ministry in such circumstances is to try to model what we’re looking for. But because of the suppressive dynamics of the meeting for worship that I described above, that often means lowering one’s own bar in order to have a chance to speak at all. Which is exactly NOT what we’re looking for. You can’t model deeply Spirit-led vocal ministry by shortchanging your own processes for listening and discernment.
This is the dilemma of Quaker worship culture when the meeting has no active or effective culture of eldership (in the full and positive sense) for vocal ministry and worship in general.
Through the Flaming Sword 
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