Through the Flaming Sword

I’m starting a new series of posts that looks at how our meetings recognize gifts in ministry, how we help emerging ministers discern their calling, and how we support their ministries.

I’ve been away from this blog more or less for quite a while, but I think I’m back. I have been paying attention to publishing my poetry and more recently, I’ve been working on a couple of submissions to Pendle Hill. One of these is on the meeting’s role in supporting vocal ministry. At the same time, while thinking and praying and writing in a deep and sustained way about vocal ministry for many months, my own ministries are in an exciting and exercising period of engagement and transition.

In the middle of all this, I became aware of the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry, which I mentioned in my last post, and I participated in the development of “The Public Friends Recording Process,” which the Incubator’s convener Windy Cooler shepherded

Back in 1992, I had been part of a three-person team that updated New York Yearly Meeting’s process for recording gifts in ministry and soon after that, I served on the first clearness committee convened under the new guidelines to consider the recording of a Friend’s gifts. We did recommend recording to the Yearly Meeting and they approved it. So I have been carrying a concern for the recognition, discernment, and support of gifts in ministry for a long time.

All this focus and activity around our meetings and their support of our ministers and their ministries has reactivated my own call to a ministry focused on fostering greater attention in our meetings on these concerns. It has produced new openings that I want to share with you my readers and raised questions that I hope my readers will be led to answer, here in this blog, but also in your own meetings.

Much of this exploration will be personal, as many of these issues are front and center for me and my meeting right now. But some of it will be about our tradition, our faith and practice, our history and our experience.

In the next post, I want to start with the story of my own first call to ministry and how it has led to this moment.

Tagged: bible, Christianity, faith, Jesus, ministry