Through the Flaming Sword

My current yearly meeting (Philadelphia) stopped recording ministers one hundred years ago, in 1920. My previous yearly meeting (New York) still records gifts in ministry (the better way to understand it, I feel) because the 1955 reunion of its Orthodox and Hicksite yearly meetings brought in a number of programmed, pastoral meetings and the Orthodox yearly meeting’s practice of recording. But I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of liberal Quaker meetings don’t record gifts and may even have a strong aversion to the practice, usually for reasons that, in my experience, misunderstand Quaker ministry and the meeting’s role in its discernment and support.

I’ve discussed this topic in a previous post that mostly raises questions and cites some resources, including an article I’ve written defending the practice. Here’s a link to that post. Here’s a link to that article. In this post, I want to offer a way to think about recording gifts that I hope speaks to Friends who aren’t comfortable with recording as generally understood.

We already record gifts in all our meetings. We write memorial minutes for deceased Friends. We just don’t necessarily think of memorial minutes as recording gifts or consider the implications of this practice for a richer engagement with those among us who have been called into service of the Spirit.

A good memorial minute records a Friend’s spiritual gifts. A weak memorial minute will even do so, but only by implication. By recounting all the things a Friend has contributed to her or his meetings and to society at large, we name the fruits of the spirit in her life—her ministries, if you will, though we may not call them that.

However, such a memorial minute is really just a secular obituary written by a religious community, in that it points only vaguely in the general direction of the deceased’s spiritual gifts and does not explicitly appreciate a signature insight of the Religious Society of Friends, that a spirit-led life bears fruits of all kinds, that the services we feel called to in life are ministries of divine origin, however we actually understand that to work.

In this way, weak memorial minutes resemble a lot of the witness minutes approved by our meetings: they might as well have been written by a secular social change nonprofit. They tend to use arguments from politics and the social sciences, rather than moral and religious ones. They almost never quote the Bible or even Quaker “saints”. Maybe they cite the modern liberal Quaker trope that there is that of God in everyone.

I am arguing for an approach to memorial minutes that is more faithful to our faith, that reflects our unique strengths as a religious society—that clearly and explicitly names gifts of the Spirit.

Then, as soon as we think of a dead Friend that way, why wouldn’t we think of her that way while she is still alive? At the very least, worship and ministry committees should begin recording gifts for its members all along, as their lives and their service in the meeting progresses, so that the committee is ready to assemble a meaningful memorial minute quickly upon their deaths.

But why would you stop there? Once you have “recorded” such gifts of living Friends, what could you do about it? How could you nurture those gifts and/or share them with the meeting? Just asking the questions internally as a committee would almost inevitably require you to become more engaged with the members you’re considering. For example, “We know you’re volunteering in a hospice once a month. Why are you doing that? Do you need any support when someone’s death affects you especially? What else are you doing? Do you think of this as a ministry, as Spirit-led? If so, why? If not, why not?” Etc.

If we already record spiritual gifts in our memorial minutes, if only unconsciously, without explicit religious attention or insight, why not use that practice for the living?