Through the Flaming Sword

I have just finished reading An Invitation to Quaker Eldering: On Being Faithful to the Ministry of Spiritual Nurture among Friends, by Elaine Emily and Mary Kay Glazer, with Janet Gibian Hough and Bruce Neumann.  I highly recommend this new and valuable contribution to an important subject.

This book has many strengths:

• Inviting. The book is, in fact, very inviting. It uses diverse and mostly accessible language and is deliberately inclusive in its approach, not from a concern for political correctness, but because it includes so many voices, and not just those of the several authors.
• Yet traditional. While the language is usually quite accessible, it also uses our traditional language about eldering. The combination of modern and traditional language and approach encourages both understanding and a grounding in our tradition. The word “eldering” itself is a trigger word for some Friends and I was very glad to see a deft intention to bring such Friends along and into the stream of our tradition.
• Personal experience. It is full of sidebars with the heading Reflections on Eldering that are direct quotes from lots of Friends about various aspects of eldering. 
• Comprehensive. It is thorough and comprehensive. It covers eldering from a lot of different angles, though it is missing some aspects, as I discuss below. It includes “Interludes” by a variety of Friends who speak concisely on a specific subject, like Physical Experiences of Eldering, or Eldering as Decolonizing Action.

So, while I am very grateful for this book, I did wish that it addressed some things it didn’t and that it gave a bit more emphasis to others:

History. 

I would have loved a chapter on the history of eldering. In particular, I would have liked a review of how the practice began among us, the development of the practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the reasons for laying the recording of elders down in the twentieth.

The Bible. 

It might have been too much to take on in such a work, but a chapter on biblical sources for the practice of eldering in the early church and the use early Friends made of this guidance would have been a nice bonus.

Emphasis on holding rather than raising up. 

One of the appendices reports on a consultation on eldering held in 2013. Part of this appendix is the answers participants gave to a query: “The primary work of the elder is:” Of the forty answers, only five mentioned “To love and to name and nurture gifts of the Spirit in others,” as one respondent put it. Seventeen answered with a version of: “To hold the meeting in prayer.”  Eight answered with “love” in some form. 

These results reflect my own experience with the elders with whom I am familiar—holding the meeting in love and prayer, and a deep sensitivity to and emphatic interest in, the “metaphysical” dynamics of the meeting for worship, coupled with the ministry of spiritual companionship for ministers who are traveling or serving in some way, these are a priority. And these are really important. Well, the strong interest in how Spirit is moving in the meeting at the transcendental level is truly intriguing, and the Friends I know who love to do this have a very sophisticated vocabulary for discussing it. 

However, I personally feel that the most important function of elders is not the transcendental, or psycho-spiritual “holding” of the body, but the practical work of nurturing spiritual gifts in the members, recognizing their leadings and giving them the discernment and support they need. 

This, for me, is a matter of emphasis, not either/or. The holding is valuable, and as some of the first-hand accounts in the book testify, it is real. That is, sometimes some people can feel the difference, the grounding and deepening of the worship through such prayer, invisible though it is. But I think this more arcane aspect of eldering gets too much attention, relative to more important aspects.

Building a culture of eldership. 

There’s a chapter on Envisioning a Quaker Culture of Eldering, but it felt a bit weak to me. This is arguably the most important chapter of the book—how do we nurture greater spiritual maturity in our meetings for this work? The first sentence of the chapter says it all: “Elders and the ministry of eldering are foundational to the practice of Quakerism.” Yes!

Most of the chapter is comprised of descriptions of the growth of such a culture in New York Yearly Meeting, Australia Yearly Meeting, and Pacific Yearly Meeting, and these accounts are terrific and very useful. A lot of the rest of the chapter is first-hand Reflections on Eldering. But most of the rest of the chapter is a listing of “certain characteristics of communities where a culture of eldering is growing.” These are:

• Eldering is recognized as important.
• Communities are intentional about creating and sustaining such a culture.
• Elders practice communal and individual spiritual disciplines.
• Meeting leadership is involved.
• The community shares a “familiarity with and capacity for spiritual wilderness,” and a “fluency in wilderness spirituality,” by which they mean helping Friends and meetings who find themselves in wild places, uncharted, turbulent, and even dangerous situations.

But there is little attention to the practical problems and efforts required to nurture such a culture in our meetings. The only ideas for how to do this are:

• Elders forming a community of elders.
• Elders sharing news about the community’s eldering needs, while balancing the need for confidentiality against our tendency to a dysfunctional culture of silence.

Regarding these characteristics listed above: How do you teach a meeting that eldering is important? How do you generate collective intentionality in a community that might not even know what you’re talking about or in which there is some resistance? How do you engage meeting leadership in the project? And how do you prepare a meeting for conflict and hard times?

I realize that there are no easy answers to these questions. But the authors have a great deal of experience, and I suspect that they could have reached deeper and given us more practical advice on what they themselves recognize is one of their essential roles.

Vocal ministry. 

Almost completely missing from this book is the role of elder in the nurture of the meeting’s vocal ministry. This astounds me. 

For hundreds of years, care of the vocal ministry was the essence of the Quaker elder’s calling. It’s one of the great innovations of the modern period that we’ve expanded the understanding of ministry to include lots of service besides the vocal ministry, and thus we’ve expanded the role of the elder, and this book overs this role very well. But, for the vast majority of our membership, at least in the silent worship meetings, “eldering” means criticizing somebody’s ministry. Meanwhile, we do almost nothing to proactively nurture our vocal ministry or provide support and oversight for our ministers. We have a lot of work to do here.

We often don’t even think of those who speak in meeting as ministers, certainly not as Friends with a calling to vocal ministry—they don’t see their speaking this way, and neither do their meetings. THIS is the great calling to eldership that our times desperately need—a new, creative, proactive approach to fostering Spirit-led vocal ministry and the nurture of a culture of eldership in our meetings that understands how important Spirit-led vocal ministry is and the role that elders should be playing in its nurture. For, as a Friend who carries a ministry of service for love, peace, and nonviolence in north Philly once told me, all ministry, including this “activist” ministry, includes vocal ministry at its core; her ministry is about what she does, but also about what she says.

Nevertheless, this book is a tremendous resource, and I am grateful for it. I encourage my readers to check it out. Please don’t let the length of my more critical comments overrun my genuine and enthusiastic praise for this book.