The Hope of Our Worship
November 30, 2025 § 1 Comment
What do we hope for when we gather in our expectant silence?
Fellowship in the spirit, to know each other in that which is transcendental.
Some peace, a little respite from the troubles of the world.
Inner renewal, refreshment of spirit that we can take with us when we go back into the world.
Communion with a Spirit of Love and Truth, a Teacher and Guide who can lead us as we walk in the world.
And a deeper holy communion with a Presence in the midst, a Mystery Reality that gathers us into unity and love and gratitude.
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.
Vocal Ministry: A Garden, a School of the Spirit
October 6, 2025 § 1 Comment
Vocal ministry is the signature form of ministry in the Quaker way. As such, it is the classroom and laboratory in the school of the Spirit for Quaker ministry of all kinds. In our practice of vocal ministry, we can learn and experiment with all of the spiritual elements that make up the faith and practice of Quaker ministry more generally.
Listening for the Voice. The spiritual foundation of ministry is listening for the Voice that is calling us into service, an expectant attention to a possible anointing by the Spirit within us for service. Something there is within us that can hear that call, that can see that light, that can feel that prompt as a seed sprouting, pushing aside the soil of our soul and unfurling into the light of consciousness.
Nurturing the plant. Once you feel that baptism, then the attention changes into a form of waiting to see how the plant grows, combined with however we water such emerging shoots with deep contemplation. We nurture it, give it the fertilizer of this new kind of attention, until it matures and perhaps a flower blooms, a message, or a mission, that is taking more definite form.
Expectant waiting. Once the shoot, now a plant, has produced a blossom, a possible message, attention shifts again. We remain attentive and open, trying to hold onto the opening but not obstructing its development. Will we see it pollenated? Will new thoughts and feelings enter our regard and enrich it, so that some fruit begins to form? Or will the ministry of others bring some truth to the body ahead of our own that settles us back into silence? Or perhaps just the mystery of the deep silence itself will bring the fruit to maturity. If so, eventually a beam of Light shines upon it with clarity, a wind of the Spirit shakes the branch, and it falls ripe into your hand.
Discerning the Spirit. But we are not done yet. Another form of attention is required. Has it truly been pollenated by God? Is this fruit the fruit of the Spirit or of ego, or of a mind engaged but without a true spiritual transmission? Is it just for my own nourishment, or has it been given to me to serve to the meeting? If so, then, we become clear and out to the diners at the messianic banquet it goes.
Serving faithfully. Now, more deep listening even while speaking is required. If it has been given for the meeting, do I keep my ego off the plate in its delivery? Is my ministry truly service and savory in itself, or have I over-seasoned it? And do I know when the plate has been cleared, and I can sit down, having fulfilled my service?
Eldering. Once I’ve sat down, how do I feel—deeply at peace or quite energized, not in the satisfaction of self, but in some transcending sense of relief or of satisfaction? How does my Guide, the spirit of the christ, of the anointing, feel about my service? This inner reflection is just as subtle and delicate as all the other forms of spiritual attention we’ve exercised, just as reliant on experiment and practice. But we are not alone. What does the meeting think of my service? Is our meeting paying attention, deeply listening not just to the message but also to the Seed from which it grew? Is our meeting passing on the faith and tools for listening spirituality and ways to enter the depths of our being and listen? Is the meeting looking for opportunities to nurture those who are being called into service?
All of these forms of attention are versions of our listening spirituality, ways to attune ourselves to the movement of the Spirit within us and among us, to hear its message for us, as individuals and as meetings. Do we have teachers in this classroom? Have we given our ministers the tools they need to find their own faith and practices, so that they may grow in their service? And is the soil of our meeting’s garden fertile and ready to receive the new seeds that our ministry brings to us?
The Murmuring of the Spirit Within
September 15, 2025 § Leave a comment
In my previous post, I talked about what it’s been like for feel a calling to vocal ministry, which is for me a new experience. I had originally planned to share the ministry I had brought to meeting the previous Sunday, and ended up talking about the experience instead.
So here is that vocal ministry for 14 Ninth Month, 2025:
Listen!
The voice of the Spirit within us is often just a murmur barely audible over the noise in our brains.
It is calling out our true name, as Jesus did to Mary Magdalen in the garden; it is calling us back to the Garden with words of healing;
with words that can strengthen us in our troubles and comfort us in our sorrows;
with words to awaken us to the truth within us and to the beauty around us;
with words to guide us as we walk in the world, and correct us when we step off the path, and forgive us when we have stepped off the path;
with words to inspire us to acts of creative expression and to acts of courage;
with words to bring us into love, love of God, love of each other, love even of our enemies;
with words that lead us into fulfillment and joy.:
Meetings and Ministry, Part 6: Some Queries
August 26, 2025 § Leave a comment
One of the things I like about the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry, which I posted about on July 27, is its focus on the relationship between the minister and her or his meeting. In particular, both the minister and her or his meeting participate in the fellowship program they are sponsoring.
As an aid for applicants to prepare for their interviews, the Incubator has put together a great set of queries.
I found them very well thought out and extremely useful in helping me reflect on my own ministries. I’ve listed them below, with omissions and revisions to make them more general in scope, more useful to ministers and whatever committee in their meeting has care of ministry (if there is one), and less specific to the Incubator’s needs in the fellowship discernment process. (A few days ago, they already had forty applicants for five fellowships.)
I offer these queries in the hope that others will find them useful, too, and that meetings will feel led to consider how they support their ministers:
Discernment & Leadings
- What is your sense of leading or call?
- How do you know when something is truly a spiritual leading?
- Are there specific ministries, concerns, or experiments that are newly unfolding for you?
Support & Accountability
- Has your meeting helped to test or support your leading or call ? If so, how? If not, do you know why?
- Who has offered you eldering or accompaniment in recent years? What has that looked like?
- What kinds of support do you hope for in your meeting?
- What is the spiritual and relational climate in your meeting right now?
- How do dynamics like conflict, trauma, or trust (or lack of it) shape your ability to move forward in ministry—personally or communally?
Meetings and Ministry, Part 5: Transferring Travel Minutes and Ministry Support Groups
August 7, 2025 § 1 Comment
As I said in a previous post, I have a minute of travel for the fostering of the gathered meeting among Friends, originally adopted by Central Philadelphia Meeting (CPM), and a spiritual support group that is nominally under the care of CPM’s Gifts and Leadings Committee. When I transferred my membership to Princeton Meeting in New Jersey, it wasn’t clear to anybody what to do with the minute or the support group. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice offers no help, so the two meetings have had to work it out on their own. Having just been through that process, I have some ideas about how to handle the transfer of minutes of travel and service and of care for the minister.
Review of discernment. Before writing a letter of transfer, I feel that the transferring member’s meeting should consider whether the Friend they are writing the letter for is still under the leading that originally led to the minute and whether she or he has been faithful in its service. If so, the meeting should recommend in its letter of transfer that the new meeting conduct some kind of discernment itself regarding the minute and any spiritual support group that the transferring member’s meeting has convened.
The minute. Regarding the minute, the new meeting could do one of three things:
- adopt the minute as it is on the recommendation of the transferring meeting;
- invite the new member to meet with worship and ministry or some committee to determine next steps; or
- convene its own clearness committee for discernment of a leading, along the lines laid out in Patricia Loring’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet Spiritual Discernment, #305.
In my case, we followed the second option, which worked fine. I met with Princeton Meeting’s Care and Concerns Committee (its pastoral care committee), and they crafted a revised version of the minute and recommended it to the meeting, which then approved it. This process was simple and it worked well.
The spiritual support group. Regarding any spiritual support group or anchor committee that may have been formed by the transferring meeting to support the minister and her or his ministry, the new meeting’s actions would depend on circumstances. The basic principle should be this, though: that the support committee should at least have members from the minister’s new worshipping community and it should probably be under the new meeting’s care.
In my situation, because the members of my committee are from different meetings and regions and even continents, and because all of the members of my current support committee want to remain on the committee, and because we meet on Zoom, my current committee is staying in place. So we have asked Princeton Meeting to name at least two new members to the committee, so that my support and my support committee will have a direct relationship with my worshipping community. We have yet to work out whether Princeton Meeting will formally take the committee under its care, but as I said, I think that that would be rightly ordered.
However, if the support committee has been meeting in person, and/or some of its members don’t want to continue serving, then the new meeting and any committee members that do want to continue serving will have to decide whether to start meeting virtually. Or, if the new meeting feels that in-person meeting is important, it might want to convene its own all new committee. Ultimately, care of the ministry is now up to the new meeting.
Meetings and Ministry, Part 4: Reviewing Faith and Practice
August 7, 2025 § Leave a comment
Yearly meetings should review their books of Faith and Practice to ensure that they treat minutes of travel and service fully, including what to do with such minutes when a member transfers membership. The recommendations below are based on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s entry on minutes of travel and service, which is rather brief but it covers the essentials pretty well.
The F&P entry on minutes of travel should:
- Process. Lay out the process for clearness regarding the leading—to whom a Friend with a leading should go and what the clearness for discerning a leading should be. Lay out the process for writing the minute, and for its approval.
- Minute’s content. Provide guidelines for the content of the minute—nature, scope, and duration of the proposed service, affirmation of the meeting’s support, room for endorsements.
- Support. Consider forming a spiritual support committee of some kind for the minister while pursuing their ministry.
- Release. Recommend that the meeting consider ways to help release the minister from obstacles to their service, if there are any.
- Companionship. Recommend traveling with an elder or companion, if possible.
- Meeting endorsement. Recommend endorsement by the regional meeting and the yearly meeting if the travel will extend beyond the region or the yearly meeting.
- Visitation endorsement. Recommend asking that the bodies being visited endorse the minute, on its back or on an attached page, giving the name of the body visited, its location, and the date of service, comments on the character and quality of the service, and a signature and date of signature by the person(s) presiding in the visited body.
- Reporting. Provide guidelines for reporting back to the meeting, perhaps annually.
- Laying down. Provide guidelines for discernment and the laying down of the minute with final reporting when the minister and the meeting are clear that the minister has been released from their leading by the Holy Spirit.
- Transfer of membership. Provide guidelines for both the transferring meeting and a member’s new meeting regarding the transfer of the minute and of care for any spiritual support that the transferring meeting may have convened for the minister.
Spiritual Pastoral Care
July 8, 2025 § 2 Comments
I found myself thinking last Sunday morning in worship about something that happened a long time ago and is still an issue for us Friends, I think.
Sometime in the 1990s when I was serving on New York Yearly Meeting’s Ministry and Counsel Coordinating Committee, someone came to the committee during annual sessions looking for spiritual counseling, pastoral care for their spiritual life. I don’t know anything about the particulars of that person’s request and I wasn’t involved in how we ultimately dealt with it, but I do remember the meeting in which the committee struggled to meet this person’s needs.
No one in our memory had ever come for pastoral care of their spiritual life and we weren’t really sure what to do or who should do it. We had to meet the need on the fly. We had no collective structure or experience in place.
So this experience woke me up to some things that I’ve not paid attention to for a while and they came back to me that morning in meeting.
The first is that our pastoral care committees often are not prepared to offer spiritual nurture and pastoral care to Friends in need of spiritual counseling. We tend not to think of pastoral care as including spiritual nurture. We’re focused on helping with health problems, family problems, maybe even financial problems, and so on. Not on Friends who find themselves in a spiritual dry spell, or feeling that their prayer life is going nowhere, or feel cut off from God somehow, when God had before seemed present and nurturing, or who feel lost in a “dark night of the soul,” or who don’t feel motivated to continue whatever spiritual practice they have, but who feel guilty about abandoning it, Friends who know how good it is for them, how good it has been, but now just don’t feel like it.
Meanwhile, this is one of those areas that falls between the charges of pastoral care committees and worship and ministry committees. Which committee should prepare for this, and to which committee would members go? Have we ever posted some kind of notice, so that they would know? Maybe w&m committees are the place to answer these needs. And would the committee be ready to meet the need?
The practical reason that our committees aren’t often prepared to meet this need is, I think, that our members just don’t come to us with this kind of request, so we’ve not been forced to figure it out, and we haven’t had the imagination to prepare in advance. I imagine that this is because most of our members don’t actually have that kind of spiritual life, and maybe our committee members don’t either. How many of our members have a regular prayer or devotional life that could inexplicably dry up, or a practice of some kind that no longer calls to them, even though they want it back. Or they haven’t ever felt the active presence of the Spirit in their lives and in their souls in some way that could leave them feeling bereft if that presence were to go away.
I suspect that for most of our members, going to meeting for worship and embracing “Quaker” as part of their personal identity is the sum of their spiritual lives. Which for many Friends is enough; maybe. Or maybe some members do have a deeper spiritual yearning, but it hasn’t quite consciously emerged yet, or they don’t know what to do about their sense of something missing.
What would our meetings do about it? Should we do something about it? What is Quaker spirituality beyond just attending meeting for worship and identifying with the Quaker way?
A practical way to approach these questions would be to simply ask our members: do you want more in your spiritual lives than just meeting for worship? We might start by asking our committees to ask themselves what their committee members’ own answers are to these questions and whether the committee is interested in furthering this project, including getting up to speed as spiritual nurturers somehow. Then maybe hold a worship sharing session with a committee member in each small group, or make this question part of however our pastoral care committees keep in touch with members and attenders.
This is spiritual formation at work: finding out what our members want from their spiritual lives and, for those who want it, providing the resources and support they need to pursue it. Quite a few may not want it. That’s fine. But for those who are willing to explore or deepen their own spiritual formation, we would be fulfilling what I think is one of a Quaker meeting’s primary missions. I would work on the “build it and they will come” principle: get prepared, spread the word, invite Friends to programs.
A Comforter in the Hour of Need
February 2, 2025 § Leave a comment
In several places in Christian scripture, Jesus promises to send a Comforter, an Advocate, to his disciples in their hour of need. Do you have a spiritual Comforter to whom you can turn in your hour of need?
Perhaps a spiritual ally, Jesus himself or a Spirit who fills your soul when you invite their presence?
Or a person in your life, or a historical personage, or even a fictional personage who brings you joy when you think of them?
Or an experience or memory that gives you joy when you recall it?
Or some piece of art or an image that lifts your spirits when you bring it to mind?
Or some piece of music that calms you and brings you to your center?
We can hold such an Advocate in the chapel of our heart as a reflection of the Light within us, whose presence there brings peace and strength and hope, even in these very difficult times.
I have such an ally and I can testify that it never fails to give me joy.
Through the Flaming Sword 