Matthew 18:20 and the Gathered Meeting—Timeframes #2
August 20, 2026 § Leave a comment
What Was Matthew trying to say?
RECAP: I’ve been exploring in recent posts the various levels of intention and meaning in Matthew 18:14–20, and especially Jesus’s promise to guarantee the church’s authority in dealing with conflict in the church with his “presence” in verse 20, from which we get the phrase “gathered meeting”. In this and in the previous post, I’m looking at the passage from the perspective of the timeframes in which we could read it: in the time of Jesus, in the time of Matthew, and in our own time.
Matthew writes for a community that believed in Jesus’s resurrection, or at least for a community that he feels should believe, one that perhaps needs reassurance. Matthew’s account of the resurrection, with its posted guards and the chief priests’ cover up of the event with the disinformation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’s body, seems designed to counter rumors to that effect, especially since neither Luke nor John mention this story.
So, like us, Matthew and his readers could have thought that Jesus in 18:20 might have been speaking about gatherings taking place after his death, that he might be promising to appear among them as the resurrected Christ somehow.
However, there’s no hint of such a projection in time in the actual wording of the passage; it seems very present tense. Jesus doesn’t say “there I will be” in your midst; he says “there I am.”
And the passage might be a part of Q, the collection of sayings from which Matthew and Luke drew to add sayings material to their narrative gospels. Furthermore, Matthew 18:14–20 is in the instruction form of Q sayings, like much of the Sermon on the Mount. These instruction sayings formed the original core of Q, according to some scholars. That instruction core may be the earliest look we have at the very early Jesus movement.
On the other hand, Matthew 18:14–20 sits in the middle of a whole chapter on the theme of forgiveness in a tone that might suggest a milieu in which Jesus’s followers are facing the problems of a mature community dealing with managing members’ behavior. Like the 1660s and’70s in the history of the Quaker movement with its beginnings of “gospel order”, rather than the wild and sometimes chaotic 1650s.
I think that this reinforces the conclusion that Matthew is giving us a Q saying that comes out of the living ministry of Jesus and is not necessarily a projection into the future of a promise of a resurrection presence. But he’s put this material together in a way that speaks in a coherent way to the concerns of his own community.
At the same time, Matthew 18:20, with its use of some kind of “name” theology, is hinting at a more mystical, or metaphysical, dimension that reflects the reality of Jesus’s death and the hope of the resurrection.
So we’ll dive into that “name theology” in the next post.
Matthew 18:20 and the Gathered Meeting—Timeframes #1
August 11, 2026 § Leave a comment
I tend to read the Bible as though what I am reading is addressed to me. I suspect that we all tend to do this. But it never is addressed to us in the 21st century. Every passage in the Bible is always addressed to someone besides us, who lived in a completely different time and cultural milieu.
In fact there are at least three timeframes at work in Matthew 18:14–20:
- Jesus speaking to his disciples;
- Matthew writing for his audience; and
- us reading the passage for ourselves today.
Or put another way: What did Jesus mean by this passage? What was Matthew trying to say—why did he include it in his gospel? What does it mean to us for our attempts to apply the passage to our situation as readers today? In particular, how do we understand its value in fostering the gathered meeting?
So the timeframe questions are: Who is speaking, whom are they addressing, and why?
Jesus speaking to his disciples
In Matthew 18:20, on the face of it, as the sentence comes to us, Jesus is speaking to his disciples while he is still alive, during his living ministry. He is laying out a protocol for dealing with conflict between his disciples. Presumably the church he refers to in verse 17 is one of the household churches he had set up during his ministry, like the one in Bethany in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
So when he promises to the disciples that he will be “in their midst,” he doesn’t mean literally, physically, because he couldn’t be everywhere that such a conflict occurs when it occurs. So he must be promising to be present in some other way—some “metaphysical” way.
The key to the answer seems to be in whatever he means by gathering “in [his] name” in verse 20. What does “in my name” mean?
I see two sets of possibilities here (though we will return to this matter of the name in a later post). One set is “secular” in nature; the other is magico-religious.
One’s name is one’s reputation, especially in Jesus’s time; see Matthew 10:22 and 24:9, for instance. Or “in my name” could mean upon his authority—a “tell them I sent you” kind of authority; see John 14:13. Or “in my name” could mean “as I have taught you.” Jesus might have meant this promise in all of these ways.
But the fact that the second promise invokes the Father’s authority through the use of prayer suggests another dimension to this passage, a metaphysical one, if you will. Jesus repeatedly associates himself with the Father, even almost equates himself with the Father, especially in the gospel of John. In this regard he often speaks of being sent by the Father.
Meanwhile, ancient Israelite tradition has a rich and complex theology of the Name as God’s presence.
The writers of Deuteronomy, who had close ties to Jeremiah and Hosea, and who compiled the so-called Deuteronomic history—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings—considered Yahweh’s name as his presence on earth. A number of extra-canonical and inter-testamental Jewish texts went to town with this theology of divine presence in the Name. And Jesus seems to have adopted some version of this magico-religious understanding of the power of the divine name: “hallowed be thy name,” reads the Lord’s prayer, for instance. The name also has power to cast out unclean spirits in a number of accounts.
I think it is possible that Jesus’s promise in 18:20 ties the presence of the Father and his authority promised in verse 19 to the authority Jesus exercised on the Father’s behalf with this teaching regarding this protocol: through prayer during the proceedings of the protocol, the church invokes the presence of the Father, and also of his son by virtue of following his teaching, invoking Jesus’s name for authority—because, for these purposes, at least, the name/power/authority of the Father and of the son were one and the same, for, as his son, Jesus was his Father’s presence in the world. (Let’s put aside what being the “son of God” meant.)
I think Jesus was saying: conduct this matter as I have instructed you and pray to the Father as I have taught you, so that he will know that I sent you, and he / I—we—will answer your prayer; that is, your decision will have his / my—our—authority.
We will return to the theology of the Name in a later post.
Vocal Ministry and the School of the Spirit
August 6, 2026 § Leave a comment
As the signature form of ministry in the Quaker way, vocal ministry is a classroom and laboratory in the school of the Spirit, for the faith, the practice, and the experience of ministry of all kinds, for the fostering of its openings, the refinement of its discernment, and its nurture in the meeting.
Faith
In the vocal ministry, we believe in the Light within us, the light of the christ, God’s anointing spirit, which anointed Jesus as the Christ for his vocal ministry (Luke 4:18), and which is the source of our own openings, leadings, and callings.
In the vocal ministry, we have faith in the discernment of spirits, in an inner Guide who threshes the messages and winnows the kernels from the chaff.
In the vocal ministry, we have faith (or perhaps just hope) in the meeting’s eldership, in its proactive, Spirit-led tutelage and nurture of the vocal ministry and its ministers, and in its clarity and faithfulness in maintaining the peace of the Word.
Practice
In the vocal ministry, we practice the spirituality of inward listening that is distinctive to the Quaker way, of attuning ourselves to our inner Spirit-voice, who may call us to service; and as meetings we teach the ministry’s faith and practice and watch for those whose gifts are emerging, ready to water their sprouts with love.
In the vocal ministry, we practice the spirituality of discernment, testing whether the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart are truly from the Word of wisdom; and as meetings we mind the vines as they grow to maturity and we accept the fruits of their ministry in the Spirit in which it is given forth.
In the vocal ministry, we practice the spirituality of faithfulness, we are led by our Guide on the path of love and truth, lest we step through the traces or run past our guide; and as meetings we help to prune the vine so as to restore its fruitfulness, when necessary.
Experience
In the vocal ministry, we experience the joy of divine openings, the caring hand of our Guide, and the deep satisfaction of faithful service.
In the vocal ministry, we experience the Holy Spirit’s continuing revelation.
In the vocal ministry, we experience the covering of the Spirit, the in-gathering of our collective consciousness in the cascade of Spirit-led ministry; we experience the Presence in our midst.
Patterns and Examples
In the vocal ministry, in all these ways we see how the blessings of the Spirit manifest in the patterns and examples of our vocal ministry for all the forms of Quaker ministry, in its faith and practice and experience, as the anointing/christ-ing Spirit of God in action within us and among us, calling us into service both personally and collectively.
Matthew 18:20 and the Gathered Meeting—The promise(s)
August 4, 2026 § 1 Comment
A promise more than a condition for gathering (and a thing with numbers)
I suspect that many of us tend to read Matthew 18:20 as a condition: If you gather in my name, then I will come. But he actually says wherever you gather in my name, there I am in your midst. He is making a promise, not necessarily establishing a condition for his presence, though I think it’s reasonable to think that he’s implying a condition. We will return to the role of his name and this possible condition for gathering in a later post.
The wider context for this promise is Matthew 18:15–20, which defines a 3-step process that Jesus prescribed for dealing with conflict in his household churches. The promise in 18:20 is the third in a series of three promises, and each promise relates to one of the three action steps in the reconciliation protocol.
The first promise confers on one person heavenly authority to “bind” or “loose”. “Binding” and “loosing”, which also appears in Matthew 16:19 in which Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, represents the authority of the church and its leadership to settle matters of doctrine and of discipline. The second promise confers on two people (or three) the Father’s authority through an answer to prayer.
The third promise—the promise we’re looking at specifically—confers on the whole church Jesus’s own authority through his presence to expel the offender. Or at least, to treat them as a Gentile or tax collector, an outsider of some kind. The gospels give mixed messages about Jesus’s attitudes toward Gentiles, but from the stories of Zacchaeus and the call of Matthew, we know he had a special mission of conversion focused on tax collectors.
Furthermore, there’s a subtle number thing going on here. The action steps involve first one, then one or two more people, then two or three more people, and so do the promises. Here’s what that structure looks like:
| If any member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. | Whatever you (singular) bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth with be loosed in heaven. |
| But if you ae not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. | If two of you agree on earth, about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. |
| If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you a Gentile and a tax collector. | For wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst. |
The three promises form a binding triangle of authority in which the disciple(s) derives authority from the Father through Jesus. Jesus somehow represents or mediates the Father’s ultimate authority through his presence.
We will discuss the nature of his presence and what his name has to do with it in later posts.
The Wings of the Spirit
July 26, 2026 § Leave a comment
Behold!
The wings of the Spirit
enfold us in divine love,
gather us into unity and joy, and
lead us to the Presence in our midst.
New Pendle Hill Pamphlet
June 5, 2026 § Leave a comment
Pendle Hill has just released my new pamphlet Nurturing Vocal Ministry: Toward a Vital Culture of Eldership.
In this essay, I explore ways to deepen our meetings’ vocal ministry, to support our ministers, and foster deeper worship and the gathered meeting through what I call a vital culture of eldership. By this I mean the faith and practices, the attitudes and agreements through which we nurture the spiritual lives of our members and attenders.
I worry that since we laid down the practice of recording ministers and elders in many of our yearly meetings, and even in those that still retain the practice, we’ve stopped paying proactive attention to vocal ministry and stopped offering support to emerging ministers. I lay out some reasons for why nurturing vocal ministry more attentively is so important to our spiritual lives, as worshippers, as ministers, and as meetings.
I discuss some ways that our meetings and our worship and ministry committees could do more to nurture Spirit-led ministry and deepen the worship. I answer some of the hesitations that Friends have regarding a more attentive culture of eldership and lay out the many benefits to both our meetings and our members of such a culture.
I point out that we are already there when it comes to nurturing other kinds of ministry, especially witness ministry—we are more likely to recognize when someone is called to service, we treat their leading as an essential aspect of Quaker faith, and we are much more likely to know how to support them in practice.
Meanwhile, however, vocal ministry is the signature form of ministry in the Quaker way. Why would we not support spoken ministry in worship with the same focus and care that we give to other forms of ministry, especially since virtually all forms of Quaker ministry involve Spirit-led spoken word, anyway?
For vocal ministry in worship is the classroom and laboratory of the school of the Spirit. Through spoken ministry in worship we can learn to listen for the call to service, discern what that service is and whether it is of God, and learn how to be faithful while we serve.
And I explore the role that faith plays in our vocal ministry. By what “Spirit” am I being led when I rise to speak?
My answer is that I am led by the spirit of the christ, little “c”, the Spirit that anointed Jesus as the Christ for his ministries of leading, healing, forgiving, and teaching—his vocal ministry; that anointed his first followers for vocal ministry at the Pentecost; that anointed George Fox when he convinced the Seekers on Firbank Fell in 1652 and jump-started the Quaker movement, and that anointed them all in that moment in a second Pentecost.
That same anointing/christing Spirit (for the Greek word christos means anointed) that has been anointing Quaker ministers ever since, including those who will rise to speak this coming First Day in our own meetings—in theory. Or so I am suggesting.
What can we do to nurture this essential blessing of Quaker worship and the Quaker way? This pamphlet tries to answer that question.
The Unifying Course of the Spirit
April 25, 2026 § 3 Comments
In meeting for worship today (February 15, 2026) I had an opening about what I’ll call “the unifying vector of the Spirit,” a thread or path that passes through and unites four essentials of Quaker faith in its course.
These four essentials of the Quaker way are: 1) the Light Within, in which we can commune directly with God without any mediators; 2) the gathered meeting, in which the worshipping community can commune directly with God; 3) continuing revelation, in which the Spirit is always active and productive, within us and among us; and 4) living our lives as testimony and sacrament. (By God I mean the Mystery Reality behind our religious experience, whatever our experience is.)
So this is a meditation in imagery on a dynamic figure of the movement of the Spirit conceived as a kind of vector. By vector I mean something that has magnitude and direction, as in Euclidean geometry, represented by an arrow, used here as a metaphor. Think of it as a beam of light with intensity (weight) and direction (truth), sometimes refracting into new directions as it passes from one “medium” into another.
The point source for the “vector” of Light is God, the Spirit, however we experience and name the transcendental Mystery Reality that brings animation, identity, meaning, guidance, and transformation into our lives, which our “souls” can touch somehow.
The essential opening of the Quaker way is that each of us can commune with God directly, without any mediating persons, rituals, substances, or texts. This immediate relationship with the Spirit arises from the Light Within us, the indwelling presence of the Spirit within us. So the Spirit’s first motion is its animating presence within us.
Vocal ministry. And sometimes this focus of Spirit takes on “material” substance during worship in vocal ministry. Some opening takes shape in one of the worshippers, some truth. It coalesces, gains definition and clarity and a kind of solidity, becoming a seed, as it were, until it precipitates out from the swirling soup of collective mystical Life into Truth, into a message, into continuing revelation. Now the vector has emerged from the medium into which it was seeded in a worshipper onto the body’s surface, buoyed up and embraced by the collective.
The gathered meeting. Now, just as each individual can commune with God directly, so also the worshipping community can commune directly with the Divine, as a community, collectively. We call this the gathered meeting. In worship, the vector moves through us inwardly in our prayer, in our intention, in our attention in worship on God, on Love, on Truth, on the Good, on Mystery, on the Sublime, on Christ, on Spirit—on whatever our individual attention and yearning in worship has as its focus.
And sometimes this focus of Spirit in motion by individual worshippers takes on collective metaphysical substance somehow. It may be because some vocal ministry has planted a seed, and perhaps subsequent ministry has joined with earlier ministry to add weight/light and direction/truth to that seed. Or it may be all in the transcendental realm, working just with our inward prayer and attention and intention, rather than with some vocal ministry.
However, the motion takes place, the individual “vectors” so intermesh that they coalesce. They become a single spiritually viscous medium, and this “medium” begins to move, it gains direction: it curls in upon its unified collective center, the Presence in the midst, as a cycling psychic matrix, like a spiritual hurricane forming around a divine eye, a vortex of gathering Presence in which some or all of the worshippers find themselves in a dynamic unified identity, sharing meaning and guidance and transformation as a corporate spiritual body, the body of the Christ, of the Spirit’s anointing (for the Greek christos means “anointed”). The individual vectors within each of us and from each of us retain their reality and their roots within us, still the same Spirit that comes from that mysterious Source and animates us as individuals, but now augmented and extended, shared and transfigured, a holy communion connecting us to each other and to the Presence in our midst.
Fruits of the Spirit. But the Spirit vector may still be in motion yet. The seed may sprout and aim for the Light. It may leaf out, mature, and blossom. It may bear fruit, as a leading, a call to God’s service in some form, carried out into the world by one or more of the worshippers to bring some meaning, guidance, nurture, or transformation into the world, with a new intensity of the Light of Truth and a new direction of Divine Love in motion.
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.
Many Lighted Candles
November 22, 2025 § Leave a comment
In his Apology, Robert Barclay offers a lovely metaphor for the gathered meeting (page 280 in Dean Freiday’s modern translation):
He [God] also causes the inward life to be more abundant when his children are diligent in assembling together to wait upon him. . . . The mere sight of each other’s faces when two persons are gathered inwardly into the life gives occasion for that life to rise secretly and pass from vessel to vessel. Many lighted candles, when gathered together in a single place, greatly augment each other’s light and make it shine more brilliantly. In the same way, when many are gathered together into the same life, there is more of the glory of God. Each individual receives greater refreshment, because he partakes not only of the light and life that has been raised in him, but in the others as well.
With his description of the life rising secretly and passing from vessel to vessel, Barclay is describing the transcendental, psychic dimension of the gathered meeting. By “secretly”, I think he means invisibly, without a tangible mode of communication or transference, and inwardly, coming to abide within each of us as vessels. And I suspect that he means the image of many candles augmenting the light in the same transcendental way.
But we can carry the candle metaphor further. The tangible reality of many candles in a real meeting room augments the light by revealing many areas that would be in shadow with fewer candles. One candle would cast many shadows in the room. But the more candles you add, the more of these shadow regions in the room become illuminated.
In this way, the metaphor obviously applies to vocal ministry, in which the Spirit can work through more vessels, more life stories, knowledge, and experiences, more perspectives, more openings into truth, and more faithfulness, to illuminate the shadows in each other’s hearts.
But the worshippers also bring these qualities with them into the silence, as well as into their ministry, to animate and shape the transcendental dimension of the gathered meeting. This is more of a mystery. How do the inward unspoken qualities of the worshippers give the gathered meeting its energy and joy? How do their intentions and focus and spiritual yearnings bring the Life into the gathering? And what provides the medium through which this Life flows from vessel to vessel?
A subject for another post.
The Goal of Quaker Meeting
July 9, 2025 § Leave a comment
I’ve just read Building the Life of the Meeting, the Annual Michener Lecture for 1994 presented to Southeastern Yearly Meeting by William and Fran Taber, published as a pamphlet and available from SEYM. In it (page 11), Fran Taber defines “the goal of Quaker meeting” this way:
“to open each participant to the ongoing work of God, which is to renew within me the image of the Divine in which I was created; to draw all present into a sense of unity in which the living presence of the Holy Spirit is enjoyed together; and to lead us individually and corporately into faithfully carrying out the varied ministries and service to which we are called.”
I could paraphrase it thusly: the goal of worship is inward spiritual transformation, gathering in the Spirit (the gathered meeting), and the activation and support of ministry. This seems both succinct and thorough to me, and inspired truth.
Thank you, Fran. I remember you with warmth and deep gratitude.
