Holding Meetings Hostage
February 18, 2016 § 14 Comments
One of the meetings in New York Yearly Meeting withholds the portion of its covenant donation that would go to Friends United Meeting because of FUM’s personnel policy, which forbids sex outside of marriage, defined as between a man and a woman, for its staff and volunteers, which affects single heterosexuals and all homosexuals. Thus it’s often perceived as discrimination against LGBT Friends.
I know of a meeting in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that restored a sizable sum to its covenant donation after recovering from the Great Recession, but a committee in the meeting has asked the meeting to restrict the funds to the support of the yearly meeting’s anti-racism efforts.
Several Friends walked out of a New York Yearly Meeting session some time ago when the body could not come to unity on an apology to Afro-Descendants.
I have seen individual Friends hold their meetings emotionally hostage in a business session, too, saying one version or another of: “If you do (or don’t do) ‘x’, I’ll do ‘y’.”
The first three of these examples could have several motivations, but the effect of these Friends’ actions is to hold their meeting hostage to their will; that is, to punish or threaten to punish the meeting for crossing their will.
Motivations. A number of motives could be at play, at least in the first three examples. These Friends could be expressing solidarity with a victimized group. They could be protesting. They could be standing for a testimony, feeling that their action speaks with a prophetic voice. But holding the meeting hostage is a form of withdrawal and that amounts to a form of violence.
Withdrawal—of financial support, physical presence, or spiritual commitment—says I will not participate fully in the life of the meeting. This wounds the meeting in a number of ways. Thus, it is a form of violence. Some might rationalize this by saying that the meeting does a greater violence with its action or its inaction. Such a rationalization/accusation might well be the truth—and it might well compound the violence. At the least, it kicks the flywheel of action leading to reaction; it is not the third way of love.
Love. Like withdrawal, love in our religious tradition is an action, not just an emotion. Love is a commandment, something we do most especially when we least want to. Love is laying down one’s life for one’s Friends, using “life” here in an expanded sense—love is sacrifice. Love is staying at the table, maintaining one’s spiritual commitment even in adversity and discomfort. Love is not treating others as we would not want to be treated.
Trust. These actions evince a lack of trust. A lack of trust in the meeting community, in Quaker process, perhaps in the skills and discernment of the presiding clerk, and ultimately, lack of trust in the Holy Spirit. Now, it may well be that the community, with its present actions and/or its past history, does in fact deserve distrust, or that the clerk is in over her or his head. And we have all seen Quaker process go bad. In the face of these obstacles, it is hard to trust the Spirit, to really commit to worship instead of throwing ourselves into ceaseless wrangling.
The covered meeting. Friends tend not to trust the Spirit when they have never experienced a covered meeting, never seen the meeting break through into the Light against everyone’s expectations. You can’t blame them, really. This just doesn’t happen very often. You might attend a meeting for years before you see the dramatic in-breaking of the Spirit-reign. And even if you have had this experience, you can forget how holy it is and how we get there if you have a dog in the fight.
Faith is patience. Usually, the coming of revelation in a covered meeting requires faith. Faith means patience, and commitment to worship. It is our faith that we all can commune directly with G*d and that the meeting as a community also can commune directly with the Spirit of Love and Truth, and that revelation is, in fact, continuing. However, it can be very frustrating when it takes too long for others to see the light that blazes so brightly in your own mind. This frustration casts a shadow on the Light. This frustration is a cousin to anger, arrogance, and spiritual pride. It can be an ancestor of hate.
Forced agreement. Sometimes, a meeting submits to the coercion. This often happens simply out of exhaustion. Or sometimes, someone stands aside, or asks to be recorded as standing aside, either by name or not—we have a subtly gradated system for acknowledging disunity while still going forward. This gets into a difficult area of collective discernment and I have come to believe that it should virtually never be allowed, though I still have mixed feelings about it.
What to do? When Friends withhold themselves from the spirit of the meeting or when a Friend proposes to stand aside, the clerk needs to ask some probing questions. Have these Friends been given the opportunity to fully explain themselves? Do they fully understand their own feelings or leading in the first place? Has the meeting lost the spirit of worship? Can it be recovered?
If the dissenters have not really been heard, or if they have not really had a chance to hear their own inner Guide, more worship is required, just as we hold a clerk or recording clerk in prayer while s/he crafts a minute.
The bottom line. The question is this: are the Friends who seem to be holding the meeting hostage truly led by the Spirit or not (assuming the clerk and the meeting agree that s/he is neither incapacitated nor a jackass)? Is the Holy Spirit behind the withholding of funds, or the restriction of funds, or the stop in a Friend’s mind, or not?
How do you decide?
With worship. With love and faith.
Ultimately, either our faith in Spirit-led worship is genuine—or we feel that we can lead it better ourselves. If it’s genuine, then we pray and worship.
What’s in the Name?
February 15, 2016 § Leave a comment
Through the Flaming Sword is not my first blog. My first blog is BibleMonster. I started that blog when Dick Cheney misquoted Benjamin Franklin to claim that God’s hand had blessed the American empire he was building.
So I started BibleMonster to deconstruct the way that right-wing evangelical Christians were torturing Scripture to say things they wanted it to say, to say things that it otherwise never would have said. Well, maybe it would have said some of these things; the Bible says some pretty unsavory things here and there. But it never said yes to empire.
Anyway, I found I couldn’t maintain two blogs at once. It’s hard enough to keep up with one. So when I was clearly led to write Through the Flaming Sword, I laid BibleMonster aside.
Lately, BibleMonster has been asking for more attention. This entry could be some kind of bridge between the two.
A meditation for Valentine’s Day:
Love and the Religious Society of Friends
In the beginning, Friends called themselves the Children of the Light and the Children of Truth, among other things. At some point, however, Friends settled into what is now our formal name, the Religious Society of Friends, and they rooted this identity in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, and especially verse fifteen.
This passage, in fact, the whole fifteenth chapter up to this point, is a sermon on the mutual in-dwelling of God, Jesus, and his disciples (among whom early Friends included themselves, and by extension, us), an in-dwelling made possible through the medium of love and reinforced with the constant repetition of the words “remain” and “abide in”.
Jesus starts with the figure of the vineyard. “I am the true vine and the Father is the vinedresser,” proclaims Jesus (Jn 15:1). “I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abideth in me and I in him, the same shall bear much fruit.” (v. 5)
But after developing this maschal, this “proverb” or figure of the vineyard, Jesus turns to love. I was not able to format this passage (John 15:9–17) the way I wanted, scanned to illuminate some of the elegant and poetic semantic structure of these verses, so I have created a pdf file that you can download here. This represents my own adaptation of the King James Version.
Early Friends knew not the ins and outs of the Greek that would have equated “friends” with “beloved” in their understanding, both of which are variations on “philos”, but they got the idea just the same.
So our identity as a movement they rooted in this idea of love as the sap that brings life to the vine, as the medium through which we dwell in Christ and he in us, just as love binds Jesus to his Father and his father to him. In this love, God’s truth is revealed. Out of this love, we bear much fruit, the fruit of love and service in the world.
This love is not (just) a good feeling that arises from good chemistry between friends, but a law, a commandment. It is something we do, even when we don’t want to.
Elsewhere, Jesus lays out the clauses in the law of love, quoting the law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus: you shall love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Heart, soul, strength, and neighbor mean specific things in Torah, and not what we would expect, since the meanings we ascribe ti them come from a Greek understanding, rather than the Semitic, and from modern denotations of the English words we use in translation. But that’s for another sermon.
The point here is that this love in which early Friends chose to root our identity is not (just) an emotion in the worldview of Jesus and his disciples. It is a set of mutual responsibilities under the law, obligations that are quite thoroughly defined in the law.
Early Friends seem to have intuited this, while at the same time applying our modern English understanding, expanding “friends” to mean “beloved” and taking love as a commandment seriously while adding the emotional dimension we usually mean when we say “love”.
Collective Witness
February 5, 2016 § Leave a comment
Activist Friends sometimes get upset because their meeting has not taken up their cause and this apparent indifference feels hurtful. At the same time, meetings sometimes feel that they should have some collective witness, that the meeting as a whole should be engaged with some concern. At the very least, meetings sometimes feel that they should at least have a vital peace and social action committee, and are unhappy when they don’t.
The answer to both forms of discomfort, I believe, is the energetic and creative embrace of the faith and practice of Quaker ministry.
For the activist Friend, this means thinking of your impulse to engage some concern as a leading from the Spirit. Following a leading in the framework of Quaker ministry focuses the minister on several questions.
First, am I clear what my leading is and is it from G*d? Do I know what I am supposed to be doing and am I confident in my purpose?
If I am uncertain, then the next step is to ask the meeting for a clearness committee for discernment (for which the primary resource is Patricia Loring’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Spiritual Discernment: The Context and Goal of Clearness Committees Among Friends). Even if I am certain about my leading, it’s still a good idea to ask for a clearness committee. Here’s why.
First, of course, is the clearness. Even if you are clear in your concern, you will almost certainly learn things about yourself and your call that you didn’t know before.
But also, the clearness committee will go a long way toward easing your disappointment in the meeting’s lack of interest in your concern. A handful of Friends will become intimately familiar, not just with the character of your impulse toward social or ecological justice (along with yourself!), but they will also get to know you better as a person.
In my own experience as a participant in such a clearness committee, I came out of the clearness committee a champion of the ministry. This doesn’t necessarily translate into action alongside the minister in the cause, but it does at least bring the concern into my prayer life.
If the committee and the minister agree, then the next step would be to bring a minute for travel or service to the meeting. Now the whole meeting (or at least, those gathered for business in worship) learns about the call and brings to it the corporate discernment of the whole meeting.
If such a minute gets written and approved, then the next step is for the meeting to form a care committee, or a committee for support and/or oversight, for the leading. Now another small group of Friends becomes intimately engaged with the concern and with the activist.
Finally, as the activist reports periodically to the meeting about their leading, the meeting’s engagement is refreshed.
One more thing. Properly practiced, the structures and processes of Quaker ministry keep returning the focus to the ministry, and not just to the minister. This also goes a long way toward relieving the activist’s unhappiness with the meeting. It’s not really about you, it’s about the divine call to action. Your job shifts from trying to get the meeting to come on board to seeking to be faithful to the call.
And all this works to alleviate the discomfort the meeting might feel about not having a collective witness—for now they do. If several Friends go through this process of clearness and support committees, the network of relationships spreads through the meeting, deepening this sense of action on the part of the meeting. With this spirit-led dynamic at work in the life of the meeting, the meeting comes to feel that the Spirit is, in fact, at work amongst you.
And of course, chances are fair that, through this intimate contact with it and the Friend, some other Friends will join in the work of the leading more actively.
This is one of the reasons why I feel very strongly that we should not organize our witness in committees, but rather through the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. Committee’s are almost by definition silos of activity that only make contact with the meeting when they present business to the body, much of which amounts to reports and their budget.
There will be the occasional call to action, of course. But this almost always takes the form of asking for approval to act as a committee, which returns the action to the silo, or of approving a minute of conscience, which has its place, but a minute is not much to crow about as an act of collective witness.
Quaker-pocalypse: Collapse and Renewal in Quaker Social Witness, Part Three
January 31, 2016 § 7 Comments
Radical witness today?
I think the liberal, committee-based approach to Quaker witness has run its race.
The liberal approach: Study the problem, find the causes, develop a program, fund it with public money and action—we’ve been doing this since the New Deal, but since the 1960s, this approach has become increasingly impotent.
The committee-based approach: Someone feels led to engage some new concern—say, earthcare—so you form a working group. If you get enough people behind the concern, form a standing committee. Then spend half your time developing a budget, spend the rest of your time seeking unity over your direction, negotiating your leading with Friends who are maybe led in some other direction within the concern, or who have no direction at all; resort to brainstorming or visioning sessions when the group can’t find its corporate direction; call the seven minutes you sit in silence at the beginning of your meetings “worship”; hope nominating committee can find enough people to keep you going, linger on after the fire has died out because some Friend in the wider body can’t imagine your meeting without an [xyz] committee, become a zombie committee. X years later some Friends feel a new leading for the concern, the committee gets a defibrillator, and the cycle starts over again.
We may be standing today on the cusp of a new stage in the evolution of Quaker witness. I hope so.
We have awakened to the total integration of oppression across all areas of life, culture, economics, and politics. All of our problems are interrelated. The whole system is corrupt. Nothing less than a total social-cultural-economic-political-constitutional revolution will do. Civilization itself must change. How do you do that?
We are paralyzed by the enormity of the challenge. We are bereft of a prophetic vision that could take on this kind of monolithic global evil. We are chipping away at things here and there, and with some remarkable success. But a sense of helplessness and dread often looms over our efforts, as we seem to be losing ground on a number of really important fronts, especially ecologically. The human race seems bent on following the passenger pigeon into oblivion. It is as though the Book of Revelation has become our playbook.
Quaker witness now needs to recover the genius of all four stages of our witness history at once. We still need liberal activism and programs that alleviate the sufferings of the people and the planet. We still need the government—legislative reform and executive regulation and enforcement. We still need the truth and intelligence of science and the leverage of technology. We still need to threaten pharaoh in his own court with the prophecy of the plagues he is bringing upon us all.
But we also need a new evangelism, a message of good news that can bring individual people to the altar of light and life with a new consciousness. And that good news needs to be more than just the truth of salvation from sin in Christ.
And we need to recover, adapt, and embrace the faith and practice of spirit-led Quaker ministry, to rebuild a culture that is adept at recognizing and supporting G*d’s call to prophetic action, as we had in the 18th century. Now that we’ve expanded our understanding of ministry to include witness leadings, we need a robust infrastructure for the discernment and support of that ministry.
And we need a new Lamb’s War, a radical, unreasonable, Spirit-led assault on the roots of our civilization’s downturn, as we had in the 17th century. But with a new focus, a new sense of urgency, a new understanding of what the endtimes and the second coming of the Christ mean now that the seven seals are being opened and the Four Horsemen have been set loose, for real.
In short, we need the Holy Spirit.
We need a new apocalypse, a new revelation, one that gives us some hope and faith with which to overcome the fear and dread we feel and that helps us embrace the failure that we certainly face. For we are going down. The end is near—depending on what you mean by “the end” and “near”. My wife Christine just came back from a planning conference in which scientists studying the New Jersey shore say that the barrier islands won’t be there in 25 to 30 years; South Cape May is already under the Atlantic Ocean.
Climate change, sea level rise, species extinction, the death of our oceans, the spread of ideological evil, the collapse of old institutions, including our own—all this calls for something new, a lamentation that can reach the ears of God, a Seed that can awaken a new consciousness in at least a critical mass of the people.
We may be the only religious community on the planet that is already equipped to receive and nurture that seed, for whom continuing revelation is a concrete reality, a movement that knows that any one of us could hear that call and answer it.
This is very unlikely to happen in our witness committees. We have had committees for a hundred years and they, too, have run their course; they have become part of the problem.
If we take our faith in continuing revelation seriously; if we really believe in Spirit-led ministry, then meditation, prayer, and worship are where we will receive the Seed, not in some committee brainstorming session. Like the Seekers of the 1650s, we need to stand in expectant waiting for the Word to come.
Do we have the discipline, the patience, and the faith to do this? I’m not sure that I do. But I don’t know what else to think. I don’t know where else to turn, except radically, toward G*d, who century after century, has come through for us.
Quaker-pocalypse: Collapse and Renewal in Quaker Social Witness, Part Two
January 31, 2016 § Leave a comment
This is the second installment in a five-segment series on the history and future of Quaker witness, focusing on how we organize it.
Evangelical witness
Into the desert of late-18th century ossified Quaker ministry emerged evangelical Quakerism around the turn of the 19th century, giving rise to a third phase of Quaker witness. Evangelical witness had a new willingness to engage with the outside world and to minister to some of its needs. The new witness impulse took the forms of social witness against slavery, ministry to prisoners, the temperance movement, expanding women’s rights, and a few others I’m certain I have missed. It matured into the philanthropic movement as wealthy Friends felt compelled to use their wealth in positive ways for social change. Friends led the movement toward philanthropy that you see typified in scenes from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Evangelical witness had organizing principles that had been missing in the previous period: the cause of social ills was sin, and thus the solution was evangelism, calling people away from their lives in sin to a life in Christ. I think of Joseph John Gurney’s deep soul searching after the economic crash of 1828 in Britain, a depression that was worse in some ways than our Great Depression. The Gurney family nearly went under and Joseph John agonized over whether his greed had brought on his trials.
For evangelical political economists (the dominant economic school of the time) and evangelical ministers were laying the blame on those who had overextended themselves in debt through greed. The cause was the sin of greed. The solution was an avalanche of pamphlets and sermons against greed in particular, and sin in general. A clear understanding of business cycles, of boom, bubble, and burst, that would emerge in classical economic circles, had yet to find its adherents.
Evangelical witness was somewhat confrontational, but hardly unreasonable. The discourse was flooded with moral reasons, biblical reasoning, and intelligent argument. But it wasn’t radical. This was no real departure from 1,500 years of Christian religious culture, just a more focused intensification of an already seasoned message about sin and salvation. Thlnk of Elizabeth Fry teaching the women in Newgate prison to read the Bible.
The rise of liberal witness
The next phase of Quaker witness was a radical departure in very important ways from its evangelical roots. My poster boy for this revolution is Seebohm Rowntree, a member of the Rowntree chocolate dynasty located in York, and a member of the cohort of young Friends who gave birth to liberal Quakerism around the turn of the 20th century, a group that included Rufus Jones and Seebohm’s brother John Wilhelm Rowntree. Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Town Life was the first widely-read sociological analysis of a social problem in human history. He interviewed virtually all of the households in York and tabulated their economic condition, then drew some conclusions and made his arguments.
His central conclusion about the cause of poverty was truly radical at the time, though it seems obvious to some of us today (though obviously, not all of us): sin was not the problem. Most poor people worked hard, they just didn’t have enough money. Their poverty was not the consequence of their character, as the evangelical model had insisted. It was not lust (too many children), intemperance, gambling, etc., that made them poor; it was the low wages their employers paid them.
Rowntree gave us the first systematic analysis of systemic evil, and he saw that it called for structural solutions. Moral exhortation of the poor would never raise their wages; only their employers could do that, and they weren’t likely to do it on their own. Seebohm Rowntree himself reformed the labor relations in his own family business after writing his book, but he did not substantially raise worker’s wages. Meanwhile, he also argued that the government had an important role to play in making up the gap, in relieving this human suffering, and in trying to regulate business toward greater compassion.
This, too, was a radical departure. Evangelical witness had actively opposed government involvement, seeing it as intervention in a process of conviction and repentance that rightly involved only the sinner and God. Helping poor people with alms actually enabled the sinful life, in the evangelical view. Rowntree saw that the only agent powerful enough to affect the behavior of business—the real source of poverty—was the government. Poverty played a significant role in the creation of the Liberal Party in Great Britain and of Britain’s welfare state. Among other breakthroughs, the book popularized for the first time the brand new idea of a “poverty line”, a formula for measuring poverty and therefore for evaluating programs. His formula was picked up wholesale by Roosevelt’s New Deal labor department and is still the basic framework for policy thinking and poverty metrics today.
Rowntree went on to serve in government in several capacities for the rest of his life. Rufus Jones went on to help found the American Friends Service Committee. With the onset of World War I, Friends recovered their testimony against war and, for the first time since the late 1600s, Quakers were again being persecuted for their witness. Thus the Great War forged a new consciousness in Quakerism and we have been much more focused on “mending the world” ever since.
AFSC illustrates the arc that this witness took as the twentieth century roared on. While many men went to jail rather than serve in the military, AFSC and similar efforts aimed to reduce the suffering that the war was causing. The genius of the Orthodox Quaker Herbert Hoover at organizing relief efforts put him on the political map.
But gradually Friends turned their attention more and more to the structural causes of our problems, as the consciousness that Seebohm Rowntree had ignited began to mature. Committees on industry and the social order in both Great Britain and the US published amazingly searching and radical pamphlets. A small but vocal and influential socialist movement eventually spawned some collective communities in the UK.
World War II returned us toward the peace testimony again. Then the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution of the 1960s helped broaden the “peace testimony” beyond just a testimony against war into a deeper understanding of violence. The Alternatives to Violence Project was born. AFSC became increasingly an advocacy organization rather than just a service organization. And other testimonies began to proliferate, as we woke up to new evils: environmental degradation, women’s rights (again), racial equality, then an even broader understanding of equality that could include the sanctuary movement, LGBTQ concerns, and so on.
Liberal witness is reasonable in the extreme and not radical, by definition; it is liberal. It works with existing institutions. it studies problems, proposes solutions, argues from science, develops programs, and seeks to move governments into the roles that only governmental scale, reach, and resources can assume.
And it is pursued by Friends through committees organized around concerns—a peace and social witness committee, Quaker Earthcare Witness, Friends Committee on National Legislation, the American Friends Service Committee. AFSC, I think, ,may have led the way into organization by committee. But the rise of liberal Quakerism settled the already significant trend toward abandoning the traditional infrastructure for Quaker ministry that had developed in the 18th century and continued into the 19th. It increasingly relied on membership donations and the operating budgets of local and yearly meetings rather than on the largesse of wealthy philanthropist Friends. And it was inspired by a more reasonable energy than the apocalyptic fervor that had ignited the Valiant Sixty.
Quaker-pocalypse: Collapse and Renewal in Quaker Social Witness, Part One
January 31, 2016 § Leave a comment
I think I feel led to return to my Quaker-pocalypse series, to focus a bit on our witness life. But my leading for this blog has been sputtering lately and I find myself darting from one theme to another without clear coherence, so I’m not sure where I’ll be led next.
Meanwhile, this post, when I finally finished it, was so long that I decided to break it up into segments. This one takes a historical look at our witness—how we have organized it—in the first two of four—possibly five—stages. These first two stages are The Lamb’s War and “Quietist” Ministry. The next two segments are Evangelical Witness and Liberal Witness. Finally I look at Radical Quaker Witness Today.
I think we need a new approach to witness. And to work my way feebly toward such an opening, I found myself reviewing how Quakers have organized our social witness in the past. I see four modes of organizing witness in our history, in which energy followed by maturity and then decline—or in the first case, persecution—has led to a new form with new energy. It’s as if the Holy Spirit wants us to keep at it, providing new openings, and—hooray!—finding us with ears to hear. One big reason we believe in continuing revelation.
The Lamb’s War
The first phase was the Lamb’s War, the Apocalypse of the Word (see Doug Gwyn’s groundbreaking book of this title). It focused on the world with the zealot’s intensity and often was confrontational. It was unreasonable, being founded on religious faith. It engaged virtually all the Children of the Light, in the sense that virtually all Friends eschewed hat honor, used plain speech, etc., in their everyday lives. It aimed at what early Friends believed to be the root of social ills—false religion, as the agent of an even deeper cause, alienation from God. And it was radical, not just in its critique, its methods, and its proposed solutions. It also arose from radical discipleship and it aimed at the roots, as they saw it, of a world that could not comprehend the light that was coming into the world.
Then came the persecutions, the backlash from the established church and the state, bringing the wholesale death of our early leadership in Britain’s gaols—the collapse of the Apocalypse of the Word and the need to change our stance toward the world.
“Quietist” ministry
The result was the second phase of Quaker witness—the reliance on Quaker ministry that characterized the 18th century. Think of John Bellars and John Woolman. Friends who felt a divine leading to mend the world in some way who took their leading to their meeting and, if the meeting discerned that the leading was a true one, off they went. It tended to be focused internally (think of Woolman visiting Friends to persuade them against slaveholding) and it was not, generally speaking, confrontational or radical. Putting aside the vigorous culture of travel in the gospel ministry, this period’s social witness ministry did not, as far as I can tell, engage very many people as either ministers or recipients.
There was no overarching organizing vision for collective action, as there had been for the first generation, no sense of mission like the earlier apocalyptic belief that the second coming of Christ was at hand. As Doug Gwyn describes in The Covenant Crucified, Friends had cut a deal with the powers of the world after the persecutions gave way to some level of tolerance: you leave us be and we’ll leave you be—that was the deal.
This witness was morally reasonable, in that it relied on arguing from a scriptural and a moral stand. But it was not yet reasonable in the secular humanist sense that so dominates Quaker witness today, in which we argue from a stand in social science and use liberal political rhetoric.
This witness was radical in that Quaker ministry still relied radically on the movement of the Holy Spirit, at least in theory, but it was much more contained and far less focused on the world outside the Quaker community than the Apocalypse of the Word had been.
But Quakerism became more and more quietist, more withdrawn from the world into Quaker distinctives and an ossified culture of eldership that tended to quench the spirit.
Nurturing the call to vocal ministry
January 22, 2016 § 7 Comments
So, given that most of our meetings are never going to record the gifts of their vocal ministers, if we are going to abandon the centuries-old infrastructure that our forebears used, how do we nurture and elder those who are called to vocal ministry?
The infrastructure we use nowadays for the care of ministry is the committee for worship and ministry. Some meetings have committees for ministry and counsel or pastoral care, combining the pastoral care of members with the spiritual care of members. In theory, this combination makes a lot of sense, because there is always a spiritual dimension to a Friend’s pastoral concern or condition and a pastoral dimension to a spiritual concern or condition.
In practice, however, in my experience the pastoral concerns almost always shove the concern for the worship to the side. They are usually just too pressing to ignore, and the worship usually is just going along as it always has, at least until some problem arises. In my experience, proactive attention to the quality of the worship and the vocal ministry almost never happens. So I think meetings should have separate committees for pastoral care and for worship and ministry if they are going to give the worship and its vocal ministry any real attention.
But even when a meeting has a separate committee for worship and ministry, proactive eldership of vocal ministry almost never takes place. I think the main reason is that the wider meeting usually has never clarified for itself how it wants the infrastructure for spiritual nurture of vocal ministry to operate, so the committee feels uncertain about its charge. The meeting and the committee share a concern for judgmentalism regarding the vocal ministry, even when many in the meeting are quite dissatisfied with its quality.
But this gets into the eldering of vocal ministry and I want to focus on the care of those who feel called to a ministry of speaking in meeting. I want to focus on the ministers.
It seems to me that Friends feel the call to vocal ministry with varying degrees of self-awareness. Some know they have been called. Some find themselves speaking fairly often, perhaps even along some theme, but don’t really know what to make of it or what to do with it, and end up dealing with it in the moment as they feel led to speak. And finally, some Friends just speak a lot.
These three groups of Friends need different kinds of support. And the meeting or the committee needs to be clear about which kind of support to give.
Those who know or strongly suspect that they are called to vocal ministry need corporate discernment to test the leading, to give the minister confidence and the meeting clarity. And then they need support and oversight, probably in the form of a committee for care or nurture of the ministry—a group to go to when doubts arise or some other problem, and just to proactively maintain faithfulness to the call; and a group that can step in when the minister steps through the traces or runs past his or her guide. For this is a covenantal relationship, in which the minister and the meeting mutually agree that eldership includes both support and nurture and discipline, a corporate agency for discipleship, or faithfulness to the call.
Those who are emerging ministers, who find themselves speaking often enough to notice a pattern but may not be clear about their call, need the same things, but with a different emphasis. Here, a clearness committee for discernment might be in order, for the first charge of the committee for worship and ministry is to help the minister gain clarity about the call and to reassure the Friend that more support is waiting if the discernment clarifies a leading—or even if it doesn’t, for that matter.
Those who just speak quite often need the same things, also, but with a different emphasis again. This is delicate. In fact, all of this is delicate. But if a meeting is going to actively nurture vocal ministry, if you are going to do more than just react when some vocal ministry seems so inappropriate as to require a reaction, then it needs to engage with its vocal ministers at all stages of their development.
How do you start this conversation?
If the meeting has never openly discussed the focused nurture and eldership of vocal ministry and the committee therefore has no clear charge in this area, then approaching such a Friend will seem odd and possibly criticizing. The wider conversation needs to take place first. So ministry and worship committee needs to bring the matter of support and oversight for vocal ministry to the wider meeting for discussion. They need to feel confident that they can act with the meeting’s blessing and be at least a little bit clear about who can do that, when, and how.
In any of these cases—even in the case of inappropriate ministry that you feels needs your attention—if you feel you can approach a Friend about their vocal ministry at all, then I would offer this way to open the conversation: “We have noticed that thee speaks fairly often in meeting and we wonder whether thee feels a call to vocal ministry? If thee is not sure—but especially if thee is sure—then we offer ourselves as a possible source of discernment and support. Would you welcome a deeper conversation?”
Recording Gifts in Ministry
January 18, 2016 § 3 Comments
Our faith regarding vocal ministry has changed dramatically since the elder days, from believing that we were inspired by the spirit of Christ and were therefore speaking God’s word to being vague and uncertain now about the source of our ministry, seeking only to be “spirit-led” in some mostly undefined way.
This relaxing of the faith—the “theology” if you will—of vocal ministry has opened up the scope of its content. We no longer expect our vocal ministry to be “gospel ministry” in the old sense, that is, aimed at bringing the listeners to Christ or at keeping them in his embrace. Just as we now include as “ministry” a wide range of spirit-led service beyond just vocal ministry, so we also now feel free to speak about just about anything in meeting for worship.
Furthermore, this relaxed faith about vocal ministry has utterly transformed our corporate practice, as well. In most of our meetings, we no longer have elders. Modern meetinghouses don’t have facing benches. We no longer consider vocal ministry to be a calling that needs or requires engagement by the meeting, at least not until some Friend’s ministry becomes very disturbing to the meeting. We have almost unanimously abandoned the practice of recording gifts in ministry, or “recording ministers”, as many Friends perceive it.
In a subsequent post, I want to look more closely at how our relaxed faith regarding vocal ministry affects the content, but here I want to look at the practice of recording gifts in ministry with fresh eyes. What follows was first published in New York Yearly Meeting’s print newsletter Spark in November 2012.
Recording gifts in ministry
Recording ministers is a difficult issue for some Friends. Many Friends do not know very much about the practice, they may not know anyone whose gifts have been recorded (or they may not know that they know), and for some, what they do know makes them uncomfortable. In fact, some Friends feel pretty strongly that having “recorded ministers” is unQuakerly and that we shouldn’t be doing it. I have heard a number of reasons for this opinion:
- Some Friends cite the belief that all Friends are ministers (that we “laid down the laity, not the ministry”), so there is no point in singling out individuals for a status that all of us possess.
- Many cite the testimony of equality, fearing that recording ministers somehow confers an exalted status on the person who is recorded.
- In a similar vein, many fear that the practice will lead to a subtle but dangerous form of hierarchy among us.
- Most, I think, do not see what benefits recording brings to the meeting, or even to the minister.
- And they may associate the practice with the programmed and pastoral tradition, which they may feel has abandoned essential Quaker practices (silent meeting for worship) while taking up practices that early Friends denounced (programmed meeting for worship and, especially, paid professional ministers). They may think that the only recorded ministers we have are pastors of what were originally Orthodox meetings and that therefore the practice is irrelevant to an unprogrammed, formerly Hicksite meeting.
Let me say up front that I believe that recording gifts is a very valuable part of Quaker practice for a number of reasons. So I want to make a case for recording gifts in ministry by looking at each of the worries listed above in turn. Besides offering some reasons for recording gifts, I also want to clarify the terms we use in talking about recording and review aspects of the practice with which its detractors may not be familiar. But I want to start with my own experience.
My own experience
I helped write the original version of the current guidelines for recording gifts in ministry in New York Yearly Meeting and I served on the committee that first used these guidelines to record someone’s gifts. We did not slide down some slippery slope of personal hubris and collective hierarchy when we recorded this Friend’s gifts. On the contrary, the experience deepened the spiritual lives of everyone involved.
The practice of recording
Before we look at the reasons Friends often give for feeling that we should not “record ministers”, let’s clarify what we are talking about. Though we speak of “recording ministers”, we are really using this as shorthand for “recording gifts in ministry”. There is a subtle but important difference.
We “record” gifts in the same spirit that we record our minutes, as a record of what God is doing among us. Unlike ordination in other religious communities, recording does not confer authority. It only recognizes outwardly and formally the gifts that have already been conferred inwardly by the Holy Spirit.
On the other hand, in practice it’s hard to separate the gifts from the minister. And in fact, recording does confer something in the same way that a marriage ceremony does. Some of us go into marriage thinking that being married will change our legal status, but otherwise, we expect inwardly to feel the same about ourselves and about our partner. But we never do feel the same. Getting married is sacramental, in the sense that some alchemy takes place in us that transforms us as individuals and transforms us as a couple.
Just so with recording gifts in ministry. But more about this later.
Because recording is a way of recognizing gifts, the process is normally initiated by the minister’s meeting. You cannot ask or lobby to be recorded, unless your circumstances require some form of certification to pursue one’s ministry in the world, as chaplains often must, for instance, or those working in prisons. This is one of the reasons why we do not need to fear establishing some kind of Quaker hierarchy when we record someone’s gifts: the minister is not the one who starts the process. In fact, it seems to be fairly common for the prospective minister to resist the idea of being recorded at first.
Finally, the process for recording someone’s spiritual gifts is quite rigorous. I invite you to go to New York Yearly Meeting’s website and look at the yearly meeting’s guidelines. I don’t want to go into any more detail here, but you can see that recording takes time, effort, prayer, and real discernment, and the process is guided by practices that are designed to invite the Holy Spirit’s guidance in the best tradition of Quaker discernment.
So let’s take a look at the reasons Friends give for opposing the practice of recording gifts in ministry.
Objections to recording
We are all ministers, so why single one person out?
It’s not true, really, that we are all ministers, at least not in the way that people usually mean. A Quaker minister is one who has answered the call to ministry. Early Friends believed that no outward education or ceremony of ordination could make you a minister, but only the inward calling from God, that that call was all the authority you needed, and that the call could come to anyone because everyone was possessed of the Seed. But—you still have to answer the call. So yes, we are all potential ministers. But we only properly become ministers when we realize that potential—when we answer the call. Or to put it another way, when we faithfully follow our leading into the service of the Spirit.
Equality.
Yes, we are all equal in our possession of that of God within us. Yet we each are given a unique set of gifts for ministry. And yes, each of these gifts is necessary for the spiritual health of the community. Thus all ministries also are equal. So a radical equality does guide our attitudes regarding ministry.
At the same time, though, the unique giftedness we each possess—the measure of the Light we each have been given, to use the language of our forebears—calls for personal, “customized” recognition and support by the meeting community.
Here is where the true equality lies: the gifts that you and I possess and the ministries we pursue all equally deserve recognition and nurture by the communities we serve.
So—how is your meeting doing? Does your meeting know what your gifts are? Does your meeting recognize your gifts and help you develop them? Does your meeting support the spirit-work you are led to do in the world?
This is the role of the meeting in nurturing Quaker ministry and the spirituality of its members. And this is where recording comes in. Your meeting does not need to record your gifts in ministry to give you the spiritual nurture you need, but they do need to do something. We will return in a moment to the value that recording brings to both meeting and minister.
So we take the equality for granted, yes. But the unique, person-specific nature of spiritual gifts calls for unique, person-specific action on the part of the meeting.
Since the minister is not, according to our practice, supposed to ask to be recorded (rather, the meeting is supposed to recognize God’s work and initiate the process), our meetings should be very busy looking for and recognizing the gifts of all its members, whether by recording or by some other process more agreeable to the meeting. Ideally, virtually all of our members would be recognized in their ministry in some way, if not by recording.
This is the equality that naturally arises from a robust culture of eldership—not a failure to recognize anyone’s gifts, but an energetic effort to recognize everyone’s gifts. If we are going to reject recording anyone’s gifts out of the testimony of equality—and yet still believe that all are gifted and deserve our support—then we should come up with some alternative for nurturing everyone’s gifts. Faithfulness to the testimony of integrity requires that if we believe the one, then we should do the other.
Unfortunately, many (most?) of our meetings do not think or operate this way. Believing erroneously that we have laid down the practice of recording, or simply ignoring it, or even feeling hostile toward it, many of our meetings have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and do nothing at all to recognize and build up spiritual gifts in our members.
Hierarchy.
Here we get to the heart of the matter: doesn’t recording ministers raise them up above the rest of us? On the contrary, it has exactly the opposite effect. Or rather, it has a constellation of effects, all of which foster true humility in the minister when exercised properly.
First, recording does in fact strengthen the minister in her call in many ways. That is its purpose. But this confidence is not to be confused with arrogance. We want confident ministers. We want a spirituality that gives us strength. We can afford to suffer a little spiritual pride now and then, if the price of doing the opposite—policing our ministers—is to quench the Spirit instead. This is the unrecognized downside of ignoring or resisting recording gifts, or failing to do something else proactively to recognize and nurture them: you quench both the Spirit that would energize our (potential) ministers and the spiritual vitality of our meetings.
The benefits of recording.
Recording brings a lot of wonderful benefits to both the minister and his meeting. It strengthens a Friend’s spiritual gifts and fosters effective ministry. It brings the minister and her work under the care of the meeting. It strengthens and empowers the meeting. And it brings discipline—gospel order, our forebears would say—to both the meeting and the minister by enriching the culture of eldership.
In positive terms, recording gives the minister access to clearness, discernment, support, oversight—and joy. We inevitably face obstacles in our ministry, confusion or indecision, or times of drought or anguish in the experience of our gifts. In these times, we should be able to turn to our meetings for support. Ideally, they are there already, perhaps even recognizing the difficulty before the minister does. Formally recording ministers helps a great deal to insure that such an infrastructure of spiritual support—the positive side of eldership—is in place.
And having one’s gifts recorded can bring tremendous joy. For those of us for whom our ministry is at the heart of our spirituality, nothing brings greater joy than to exercise one’s gifts on behalf of the community and the God that we love—except maybe the loving and joyful embrace of our work by our community. Everybody feels good when others recognize and support the good things we are trying to do. When your meeting recognizes and supports your ministry, it feels terrific.
Recording also gives the minister oversight. If the meeting knows and practices the traditions of Quaker ministry, it will prevent the hierarchy that the critics of recording fear. And this is not just discipline in the usual, negative sense. Such discipline is positive spiritual nurture.
For it is very scary to feel a call to do God’s work. You know that you could “run past your guide”—end up doing things you were not called to do. You know that you could “step through the traces”—get tangled up in the work until you trip, the way a horse can get a leg tangled in the harnesses—the traces—that tie it to the carriage. Usually, the ego is involved. The faithful minister is eager for this discipline, eager for the meeting to help prevent these things from happening. And the faithful community is there to do that service. This covenant between minister and meeting is the main reason to formally record gifts, in my opinion. So I feel the question really is, not why would you record the gifts of a minister—but why would you not?
As a meeting, would you not want to recover, pass on, and experiment with the incredible tradition of Quaker ministry, its faith and its practice, rather than let it languish out of fear and ignorance? Do you not believe that all your members and attenders possess unique spiritual gifts and that these gifts deserve to be recognized and nurtured? Would you not therefore want to proactively seek to recognize your members’ gifts and support the ministries that will certainly arise if you do nurture them?
So how would you do that? Why not accept the gift that Quaker tradition has given us in our tradition—the practice of recording—and adapt it to your meeting’s needs?
Let’s do it
The traditions of Quaker ministry and eldership have been steadily eroding over the century or more since many of our meetings began laying down the practice of recording ministers and elders. But they’re not dead yet. Thanks to our rich written tradition, meetings that no longer retain a working knowledge of how to nurture the spirituality of Quaker ministry can still find accounts of these practices in action and a wealth of resources for recovering these traditions from oblivion.
At the same time, because we laid down some of these practices for good reasons, I hope that we will continue to adapt them and experiment with them in the spirit of continuing revelation. Since we began losing these traditions, the spirit of continuing revelation has already given us the brilliant practice of clearness committees for discernment. And in the past few decades we have opened up our understanding of ministry way beyond its original conception as just vocal ministry in meeting for worship to include a very wide range of service and witness. I have no doubt that we will continue to develop new ways to nurture the spiritual lives of our members in the future.
The main thing, though, is to be much more proactive in recognizing and developing our members’ gifts of the Spirit, those ways in which God has endowed them with talents, skills, and character traits that could serve the meeting and God’s work in the world. We could do this through
- personal mentoring by elders in the meeting (or if you prefer, “weighty” Friends, Friends who know the tradition and have a gift for spiritual nurture),
- programs of spiritual nurture focused on naming and nurturing spiritual gifts, and
- programs of religious education focused on the faith and practice of Quaker ministry.
As for recording, if we really do proactively nurture spiritual gifts in all our members, then it would in fact be redundant, exhausting, and silly to record everyone in the old way. But I suspect that it will still be useful to record Friends who are called to specific ministries, especially those that take them beyond the meeting or even beyond the wider Quaker community. The two common examples already common among us, as I’ve said, are chaplain work and prison ministries.
Your meeting may decide that recording does not fit well with the culture of your meeting, once you have examined it in a faithful way. Please don’t just dismiss it without learning about it, though; our tradition and our ministers deserve better than ignorant and arrogant out-of-hand dismissal of this ancient and valuable practice and its benefits.
Here, again, the most important thing is: do something to actively seek out and nurture the spiritual gifts of your members and to support the ministries that will miraculously arise from those gifts when they are nurtured. It would be a tragedy if you let the Seed within them die for lack of watering. And when your meeting figures out how it wants to support the gifts and spirituality/ministries of its members, please share your journey. For this is one of the essential callings of the Quaker meeting, to recognize and nurture the gifts the Spirit has bestowed upon its members and attenders in order to foster Spirit-led work in the meeting and in the world.
A final word
Recording gifts in ministry once applied only to vocal ministry. The practice worked in the context of a share community understanding that God called people into service as vocal ministers. One of the biggest changes in our faith and practice regarding vocal ministry is that we no longer think of our members as having a call to vocal ministry.
Oh, we know some Friends are likely to speak more often than others. Often, we wish that they wouldn’t. We actually tend to be somewhat critical of the Friend who speaks “too often”, especially if they tend to do so at some length.
All the more reason to have some spiritual infrastructure in place for the nurture and eldering of vocal ministry beyond a cautious and uncertain committee for worship and ministry that has no clear charge from the meeting for their eldering work. In subsequent posts, I want to look at both the need to support those who are called to vocal ministry and how we bring “gospel order” to our worship.
Snippets on vocal ministry
January 15, 2016 § 2 Comments
As I said at the beginning of this thread on vocal ministry, I have been much stimulated by reading Michael P. Graves’s Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric. Here are some snippets from my notes.
A biblical source for the belief in divine revelation through vocal ministry
1 Peter 4:10–11: Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.
Summary of Fox on vocal ministry by Graves (p 109):
“His characteristic positions regarding preaching included:
- rejecting formal theological education for clergy, and generally distrusting “learning” as a necessary part of a call to ministry or as preparation for preaching;
- questioning church traditions, especially as witnessed in rejection of the common Christian vocabulary of the time, which used terms like “church”, “temple”, and “gospel” in what Fox saw as unbiblical ways, and the rejection of church hierarchy, rituals, etc.;
- emphasizing the role of the Spirit in audience analysis;
- defending women’s right to speak and prophesy;
- rejecting the accepted notion of a ministry paid by tithes, or the “hireling” ministry;
- expressing utter dependence on a sense of the immediate revelation before preaching or praying aloud;
- presenting a cautionary approach to preaching as evidenced by a willingness to wait, sometimes for what on occasion appears to be an excessive period of time, until the Spirit gives utterance;
- insisting that ministers live holy lives;
- instructing hearers to be tender with novice impromptu preachers; and
- relying on a biblical hermeneutic that emphasizes types and figures drawn from scripture applied to the lives of the hearers.”
Barclay on the “supernatural” mechanism of spirit-led ministry working on the hearer:
The human has divinely implanted within us supernatural ideas that we perceive with inward supernatural senses, just as there are implanted within us natural ideas that we perceive with inward natural senses. We see the color “red” inwardly because our outward senses stimulate the inward idea of red within us and we perceive red therefore with our inward natural senses.
So also, “As there are natural ideas concerning the things of the natural world [light, color, voice, sounds, etc.] . . . there are ideas of supernatural things. . . . And as the natural ideas are stirred up in us by outward and natural bodies; so those divine and supernatural ideas are stirred up in us by a certain principle, which is a body in naturals in relation to the spiritual world, and therefore may be called a divine body: not as if it were a part of God [not a divine spark], who is a most pure spirit; but the organ or instrument of God, by which he worketh in us [Fox’s “that of God” in us] and stirreth up in us these ideas of divine things. This is the flesh and blood of Christ.” (Graves, p 118, quoting Barclay, Immediate Revelation)
So “on the receiving end of immediate divine revelation there must be receptors in the “mind” created specifically to respond to the supernatural ideas generated by the Inward Light.”
This is the purpose of vocal ministry, to stir up these divine ideas with the word of God acting upon the Light within us.
Vocal ministry—My discernment
January 9, 2016 § 7 Comments
Early in my Quaker career, I read Howard Brinton’s Guide to Quaker Process and I think its discussion of vocal ministry strongly shaped my expectations and my inner process of discernment regarding vocal ministry. It’s been almost thirty years, and I now only clearly remember the feeling I had of gratitude for some guidance. In other words, I was a bit afraid of doing it wrong, as I think most Friends are.
But I’m a trained and seasoned public speaker. I’ve done it a lot, all of my life since my teenage years, and I’ve done some stage acting. Yes, I feel a little frisson every time a speak in public, but I actually like that thrill. So I think it was probably easier for me to get over the initial barrier than for some Friends. Still, it took a while. And I’m not sure how well I adhered to Brinton’s advice.
For a long time—decades—I relied on a set of internal feelings to guide whether I rose to speak, feelings that I had first experienced while meditating when yoga was my spiritual path. These feelings amounted to a gradually increasing sense of “pressure” in my skull that ultimately leads to quaking, what yogis call kriyas, though usually, only a close observer would notice that my spine was jerking. I put “pressure” in quotes because that’s not quite the right word; it’s not painful for one thing. It’s located in the back of my skull and reaches down into the back of my neck. Sometimes this mounting feeling reaches a kind of threshold, and I experience quaking—in yoga-ese, kriyas.
Kriyas. Imagine your nervous system is a plumbing system in which nerves serve as pipes for conducting prana, the Sanskrit word for life force (and also breath, as in Hebrew and Greek). Karma—stored tension in the system—acts like constriction or the build-up of material on the inside of steam pipes. If you turn on the faucet full blast (by meditating), sometimes the pipes can’t conduct all that extra life force freely—and the pipes shake. That’s quaking, the nervous system firing randomly from overload, releasing the tension, the karma.
So I would usually wait until the pipes started shaking before I felt ready to speak.
This still happens to me, but I no longer rely on it so much. Something more subtle is often going on now that is harder to describe. It feels more like the faint perception of need, as though I can hear a call from somewhere asking for something. Is that something some vocal ministry?
Maybe. It’s hard to tell, most of the time. I wait to see whether the call comes more clearly. Usually, it doesn’t. I’m left to decide some other way.
If I don’t quake and I have no other clear indicator, my default position is no—no ministry. And if I do quake, I still might not speak; it depends on . . . what?
Three other factors. First, the structure of the ministry. If the ministry begins with “I”, I let it go. If I feel tempted to refer to some event, or reading, or encounter with people or some media, I let it go. “I read an article in the New York Times . . . ” “I heard a piece on NPR . . . “ “I’ve been thinking about . . . “ “This week, I . . . “ All of these frames for a message suggest to me that I am about to share some opening from the surface of my spiritual life, rather than from its depths.
Second, I have a calling to vocal ministry. At least I think I do. It has never been submitted to corporate discernment. I feel led to a ministry of teaching. I know Quaker faith and practice and history pretty well. Sometimes an opportunity to share something timely or relevant about Quaker tradition comes up, in the moment, or in the life of the meeting, and sometimes I feel led to take that opportunity in vocal ministry. This is especially common for me in meetings for worship with a concern for the life of the meeting.
When one of these teaching messages rises up, the other confirming indicators might not be so strong. The need is not an internal compulsion, but rather a sense of need or opportunity in the meeting bolstered by my sense of calling, which is often reinforced by Friends’ comments afterwards, and the knowledge that meeting for worship is really the only place where many members and especially attenders actually have an opportunity to learn their Quakerism.
This call to a teaching vocal ministry does lower the bar for me for a bit, I think. Not to the level of, “I saw a documentary this week that . . . “ But it encourages me to serve the meeting rather than the Holy Spirit, though of course, all Spirit-led vocal ministry serves the meeting, as well. This nervousness I feel is about the apparent source of the prompting, not the end result.
Finally, for other vocal ministry not attended by the internal sense of pressure and release I have discussed, or answering to the call to teach, my process is much more subtle. It’s neither physical nor cognitive. It’s intuitive, I guess I would say. It just feels right in a certain hard-to-define way.
It requires a dedication to the silence, a stripping away of the signal noise to better hear the small signal that’s trying to get through. It’s hard to relax that way when you feel like working at it; I feel like digging it out, rather than letting it be. So it takes a while. Meeting often closes before I get there.
It also depends on how clear the message itself is. Everything I’ve ever read on vocal ministry stresses how being articulate doesn’t matter, only the immediacy, the integrity of genuine leading, being faithful. But that’s not how I work most of the time. The faithful part, yes. But attending to the wording, the process of “crafting”, is also part of my discernment. I very often realize the ministry is not for sharing when I become clear what it is I think I am given to say.
Once I am clear, I sit with it. I release even the clarity and wait. In that final release or commitment to “the silence of all flesh”, as early Friends used to say, then the yea or nay may rise up. Often it is just then that the kriyas come on.
When I rise to speak, I always have to stand there for a few seconds. I have to get past the anxiety and try to get back to the peace. I make a point of speaking loudly. I’m a little hard of hearing myself so I’m sensitive to the needs of people like me across the room.
No matter how clear I am about the content of the ministry, it almost always takes off on its own. Usually, it hews fairly closely to the general outline, but new openings often come in the act of speaking.
Sometimes the messages are pretty long, though usually not much longer than those of some other Friends who might have spoken that day. Many of us go on a bit.
All the guides for vocal ministry stress succinctness. I don’t really understand that. It’s a contradiction to emphasize faithfulness and at the same time emphasize succinctness. What matters is that the ministry is spirit-led and that you do not run past your guide. What matters is that the body has been drawn deeper and closer to our collective Guide when we are done.
Through the Flaming Sword 