It’s not unusu­al to hear silent (Lib­er­al, unpro­grammed) Friends state rather assured­ly that our wor­ship is the tra­di­tion­al Quak­er for­mat. In their view, Friends who called their build­ings church­es and have hired min­is­ters are inno­va­tors who have lost some­thing impor­tant that the first Friends had.

Only it’s not exact­ly true. Mic­ah Bales answers a friend’s ques­tion about the dif­fer­ence in min­istry between pro­grammed and unpro­grammed Friends in his blog last week. As he points out, ear­ly Friends would typ­i­cal­ly min­is­ter for 20 to 90 min­utes. The semi-official birthing moment for Friends was a three-hour ser­mon by George Fox to 1000 seek­ers. They weren’t there to hear just him (he had just arrived in the area and was­n’t well known) but a whole gag­gle of preach­ers. I imag­ine it as a days-long Lol­la­palooza fes­ti­val with Fox elec­tri­fy­ing the crowd from the sec­ond stage. Silence was­n’t the goal. 

I don’t know a Lib­er­al Friends meet­ing any­where that would be com­fort­able with some­one min­is­ter­ing for 20 min­utes, much less three hours. As the Quak­er move­ment set­tled in, the ser­mons took on a dis­tinct form — explic­it­ly Chris­t­ian and bib­li­cal — and they were gen­er­al­ly giv­en by only by spe­cif­ic peo­ple rec­og­nized in the ministry.

Today, typ­i­cal­ly, any­one at all can stand in min­istry at a Lib­er­al Friends meet­ing. Two to five min­utes is the norm for a “mes­sage.” The top­ic cer­tain­ly can be Chris­t­ian but in many meet­ings that’s the excep­tion. At a Friends church, mean­while, the ser­mons are giv­en by spe­cif­ic peo­ple, will have Chris­t­ian con­tent, and will go on for an extend­ed peri­od of time. In those respects, the for­mat is clos­er to ear­ly Quak­er wor­ship. And this should­n’t be a sur­prise: they were respond­ing to changes in min­istry and expec­ta­tions just as we Lib­er­al Friends have done.

Mic­ah also talks about prepa­ra­tion and describes the idea of “rad­i­cal­ly extem­po­ra­ne­ous preach­ing” among Lib­er­al Friends as a kind of “fetish.” He might have a point. I love the sto­ry about a min­is­ter who would­n’t have a clue about what he was going to say until he rose to his feet¹. For him, the obe­di­ence to Christ was to trust that words would come if he were only to faith­ful­ly stand up. It’s such a cool sto­ry, but that’s not how my min­istry has ever come.

About six months ago we had a total­ly silent wor­ship at the meet­ing I’ve been attend­ing. It was nice but at the end the clerk rose, affirmed it was nice, but then said wor­ship should always have min­istry. It’s struck me as true and the state­ment has stuck with me. 

I often have min­istry form­ing in my head in wor­ship but am per­haps over­ly con­scious and keep it to myself. There’s always a bal­anc­ing act of course and some Friends feel free to say what­ev­er when­ev­er they want. But I think I myself have per­haps both over-fetishized an antipa­thy to plan­ning and also set myself an over­ly high bar for speaking.

1. I prob­a­bly read this in Bill Taber’s The Eye of Faith