Ministry for and to Different Conditions
October 25, 2025 § Leave a comment
I’ve just finished reading Brian Drayton’s Messages to Meetings, a book of epistles to Quaker meetings and gatherings “written originally out of a motion of love and with the intent that they might help some readers on their path towards the more abundant life that Christ promises and makes possible.”
The book is a wonderful source of spiritual nurture, for both readers and their meetings. Parts of this book spoke to me so deeply that I want to share them more widely here. I’m going to pass on more from this book in future posts.
For instance, in letter number four, titled: “As we reflect on our meetings’ spiritual condition,” Brian writes about “Ministry for and to different conditions” in ways I found very useful as I work with my own meeting to bring my ministries into the life of the meeting. The entire letter, and especially the last paragraph, are an appeal to our meetings to be more proactive in our nurture of ministry, which resonates with my own calling to have more “fire in the Spirit” in the nurture of ministry in our meetings.
I quote Brian in full (page 16–18):
The ministry of the meeting, which includes the words spoken and the silent ministry, and the words or deeds of service or prayer with individuals or groups at other times, is rooted in a listening, loving focus on the actual people gathered and on the One in whom they are gathered.
As you consider the meeting’s condition this year, Friends, listen for the conditions within the community in compassion and honesty. Three conditions that have come particucarly to mind in my exercise are these: the “young” members, of any age, who are new to Friends; the “established”; and the “well-grown in the truth.” Each of these condition has characteristics that may require particular kinds of service to help them forward, and it is good sometimes for a meeting to reflect on whether the ministry is offering what it can under God’s guidance.
In the “young,” that is, those new to Friends, there may be exploration, enthusiasm, receptivity, and a need and desire to learn the foundations of the Quaker path. They need guidance, but not only instruction. They have come to you in curiosity, perhaps, but under that is a restlessness or inquiry, and it is through the witness of your acts and life joined with words of explanation and welcome that they will be helped to see that among you they can find a living path. Inquirers need to feel our humility, but also where we are touched with fire and the Holy Spirit.
In “established Friends,” there is a growth of discipline and order, a maturing exploration of and use of gifts, and a habit of bearing responsibility for the life and support of the meeting. But in this period, there can be an engagement with contradictions and continued mysteries in the understanding of Quakerism. Faith and discoveries that were nourishing and inspiring in the first days among Friends may feel stale or insufficient for the demands now encountered. New resources and opportunities are needed if such active Freinds are to rediscover their spiritual childhood—the place of wonder and gratitude, openness and receptivity. Fire and the Spirit!
Those well grown in the truth have a tested understanding of the value of the diverse paths people can follow as well as the dangers of a mere celebration of diversity. They have an understanding of the pirtfalls and dangers of life in the Spirit, for individuals and meetings, and a sympathy for questioning and doubt. Their expeirence has brought a reliance on the workings of the Lord in many situations, and they have learned to wait and listen; they have seen (or others have seen in them) a growth in tenderness, courage, freedom, and discipline in love and truth. At this stage, though, there are fresh challenges that come from habits long established, the same problems and challenges returning over and over. They can read the indicators of the meeting’s long-term good or ill health and stability, its growth and depth; caring deeply, they can yet feel taken for granted and that their own seeking and spiritual thirst is not seen.
Fire and the Spirit—the baptism is needed at every stage!
People in each of these stages of their spiritual life offer ministry rooted in the questions and findings of that condition, but each stage also has its temptations and problems. In each stage there are times of dryness, or misplaced complacency, of frustration, and of hope. Everyone needs to receive nurture and love, in meeting and out, if their gifts and strengths are to be confirmed and to grow. All need exhortation or inspiration, instruction, reasurance, consolation, gratitude, and challenge—accompaniment in the Spirit as individuals trying to walk in the Light.
Why Join A Quaker Meeting?
January 21, 2022 § 3 Comments
In a comment, John Edminster raised up what I feel is the best reason to join a Quaker meeting, which I had failed to do in my first version of this post, so I’ve added to it with red font. See John’s comment.
The best reason to join a meeting, which is my own reason, is that you feel led to join. Your Guide has brought you here and now it’s clear that this is a home where your soul can flourish. You might be able to identify some particulars about the meeting or about Quakerism that attract you; but deeper than that, behind this conscious appraisal, lies a less articulate and more compelling truth—God wants me here.
In many meetings, one can see no obvious or outward difference between being a member of a meeting and being an attender, beyond, perhaps, being able to serve on some committees, and even these strictures seem to be relaxing here and there. Meetings tend to expect more commitment from members, so that’s a difference, but they are less clear about what members can expect from the meeting. We are less clear about what the incentive to join really is—why join a Quaker meeting?
Joining a Quaker meeting is a little like getting married. Becoming a member changes you inwardly much the same way that getting married does. And it changes your relationship with the meeting and with the other members of the community much as getting married changes your relationship with your spouse and with your friends and other relations.
Inward transformation. This is hard to express. There is something about the declaration and commitment of membership that transforms your identity, your sense of yourself, your sense of who you are. It somehow makes you feel more whole, more expanded as a person while at the same time more rooted. This runs deeper than just a sense of alignment with the community’s values.
Community. Although we each identify with different aspects of the Quaker tradition, with its history, faith, and practice, and with its people, still there is something deep and meaningful that we all feel in common, however hard it is to express. We become members one of another, as the apostle Paul said (Romans 12:5); we come to know each other in the things that are eternal, as early Friends expressed it. This runs deeper than just loving the society of good, like-minded people. The spiritual dimension of this relationship comes blazing to the fore in the gathered meeting for worship, when we share with each other somehow psychically a sense of presence to each other that transcends all understanding. But this feeling is also there in some subtle way outside of the experience of gathered worship.
Reality check. This rosy picture is not always true, of course. It’s not necessarily true for everyone, and it is not necessarily true all of the time or for all of one’s life. Sometimes couples divorce, and sometimes members find they are members no longer in the inward ways that matter. But it’s safe to say that it’s true for most of us and for a lot of the time, and this identity and this immersion in religious fellowship, are deeply fulfilling for those who seek and find it in ways that are unique to the Quaker way.
Covenant Community and God
June 30, 2018 § 3 Comments
In my last post about covenant community (click here to read it), I defined covenant community as a community in which we help each other do our inner work, to become the people the Spirit wants us to be. However, contrary to the quote I offered from Lloyd Lee Wilson*, I think a lot of Friends do, in fact, see meeting rather as a place of shelter from the world than as a spiritual workshop. These Friends aren’t joining because they want help in their spiritual formation. They want community, yes, and a religious identity. And they want support.
But how many of us really want change. Rather, we want a refuge from change, from all the demands for change that beleaguer us. And a lot of us can’t embrace the “vertical” alignment that Wilson feels is essential to covenant community, an intimate relationship, personally and most importantly, collectively, with a God who offers relationship; that is, with Christ.
But can you have covenant community without God (assuming you want it in the first place)? In other words, Is it enough to just have each other?
Think of the question in more familiar terms. We say we conduct our business meetings under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. Or maybe we just say, the Spirit. But do we really do so? Just what is our faith, our belief, about what we experience when a meeting for business in worship is actually gathered? When suddenly, unexpectedly, even miraculously, our divisions dissolve? When as individuals we find ourselves releasing our own agendas in the swell of a mighty wind of the spirit? When the community sees its way open and clear before it, where once conflict and deep emotions had clouded it?
That Mystery, that Reality, is the anchor of the covenantal community. That is its pole star. That manifestation of Spirit, of God’s wish for us, is, theoretically, available to us, both individually and collectively, in all the other aspects of our personal and community lives. Meeting life as covenant community is the deliberate infusion of that manifestation, that Spirit, into all aspects of the meeting’s life.
The ancient Israelites entered into their covenant with Yahweh because they had collectively experienced the saving and creating power of their God. The disciples of Jesus exulted in the new covenant he offered them because they had experienced the creating power of the Father. The early Friends understood their community to be a new covenant with Christ because they had collectively experienced the unifying and creating power of Christ. Our attenders will seek to enter into the covenant we share when they too experience the gathered meeting for worship.
So a covenant community only exists when the direct experience of the divine exists. We say that this is the hallmark principle of our faith, that we commune directly with God—the Mystery behind our experience—both as individuals and as a community. We renew the covenant when we gather in worship. We exercise the covenant when we have faith in the promises and faithfully fulfill the responsibilities that define the covenant—that is, when we turn to the Spirit for our collective guidance.
I believe the most important factor in fostering this communion is Friends in the meeting who are mature in the Spirit. Thus spiritual formation of the members is the essential factor in reaping the blessings of the covenant. Thus, becoming a member should be an agreement, an invitation to the meeting on the part of the applicant, to seek help from the meeting with their spiritual formation. And conversely, membership obligates the meeting to answer that of God in its members.
This is a virtuous cycle: A covenantal community nurtures individual spiritual growth. Individual spiritual growth nurtures the gathered meeting, the direct collective communion with God. Direct communion with the Spirit renews the covenant.
Without “God”—without communion, without this alignment toward that Mystery that we sometimes touch in the gathered meeting, without that yearning as impulse and compulsion behind our shared practice, without a shaft that passes power into the community through the hub of the wheel of collective Quaker life along a third dimension, that of the Spirit, the sacred—we just have each other. We just have consensus. We just have group meditation. We just have brainstorming and visioning exercises. We just have a peculiar and quite complicated social nonprofit, however enriching and “effective” it might feel.
But we do have “God”. We do have this mysterious reality. At least some of us do; not everyone has experienced the gathered meeting or met the Spirit in their own inner lives. And that’s what we offer. In theory.
Declaring ourselves a covenant community, acting like a covenant community, means taking responsibility for the faith and the practice that our tradition has built around its experience of this Axis empowering us through the third dimension of spirit, beyond the dimensions of self and community.
And that means turning toward it, personally and collectively, in a life of the Spirit, and bringing those who have not experienced it home to the Light within them and to the Well in our midst.
* Meeting is not a place of shelter from the world so much as a place where we are shaped in order to become God’s instruments in the world. The primary reality is our relationship with God, and the world is an arena in which that relationship is lived out. . . . [living in a covenant community offers] a path to a transforming relationship with the One who makes all things new, who makes each one of us a new creation in Christ. (Lloyd Lee Wilson, Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order, page 71)
Through the Flaming Sword 