Last weekend I was invited to speak to Abington (Pa.) Meeting’s First-day school (n.b. proper FJ stylesheet) to talk about vocal ministry in worship. I haven’t been to worship at that meeting for eons and can’t speak to the condition of its ministry, but I do know that vocal ministry can be something of a mystery for unprogrammed Friends. Many of us are “convinced,” coming to the Society as adults and often have a nagging feeling we’re play-acting at being Friends, but I’ve met many life-long Quakers who also wonder about it.
Perhaps as a response to these feelings, we sometimes get rather pedantic that whatever way we’ve first encountered is the Quaker way. The current fashion of vocal ministry in the Philadelphia area is for short messages, often about world events, often confessional in nature. What I wanted to leave Abington with was the radically different ways unprogrammed Friends have worshipped over time and how some of our practices outside worship were developed to help nurture Spirit-led ministry.
(written this a.m. but only posted to limited circles, cut and pasted when I saw the mix-up)
Google+: View post on Google+
Not sure if part two is better off as second post or comment, but I’ll try the latter…
The form of my presentation was a talk. This might seem obvious, as it was billed as one. But I try to test that assumption every time I’m asked to give a presentation. Quaker ministry is not the same beast as a speech. It’s supposed to be spontaneous, an unplanned impulse direct from the Holy Spirit, Jesus himself come back to bless and inspire our gathering as he did that of his followers at Pentacost. As Friends’ culture has shifted, we’ve adopted the models of the academy. As I wrote earlier a subtext for my presentation was an awareness of our models and customs.
I was there to talk about vocal ministry, not to deliver it. That’s fine by me, as I don’t think I have a particular gift for vocal ministry. My brain thinks much too systemically and I veer toward sociology when talking about Friends. That’s not bad – it’s one of the qualities that has helped me foster online communities, and it’s a good trait for a magazine editor. It’s just not a style that I think is compatible with true ministry.
Still, even a talk can be grounded. I was warned that this particular First-day school class could be chatty; a few people warned me that the previous week’s session had perhaps a bit too much discussion. So I started the talk with worship. My F/friend Barb introduced me and I went to the lecturn (a lecturn? A mic?) and asked that we start with worship, out of which I would speak.
Doesn’t every speaker do this? Don’t we know this is one of the best tools for a Quaker lecturer? You get to settle your thoughts but you also signal to the audience that you’re not expecting a free-for-all.
We descended into silence. This might be a good place to talk about the role of a preambling worship, especially the question: how long do we wait.
But the brakes are coming on, my station’s here. That’s a talk for the next commute…
Opening silence: on one end of the spectrum I’ve known spiritually-impatient Friends who would open a meeting with a “moment of silence,” stress on both the “moment” and the “silence.” They would spend the alloted twenty seconds reviewing the agenda, making notes.
Not much better was a Friends meeting where the stated custom was to have twenty minutes of worship starting business meeting, with an unstated parallel custom of always arriving twenty minutes late (one time I was clerking the meeting and found myself alone in the meetinghouse at the appointed starting time; it was not appreciated that I let worship go forty minutes so everyone could have that twenty minute of settling in time.)
I will assume we’re talking about real opening worship, authentically desired.
When there’s an event that’s organized as a speech or workshop there are times you need to estimate a time for worship, especially if there are co-leaders. You make a guess, laugh nervously at the irony that this is a very programmed event. When it comes time for the actual worship, I’ve found I use my nerves as a test. I settle into worship with the group. When I feel it’s time to break the silence and begin, I keep quiet. A minute later, I feel the impulse again and once more stay in worship. I keep the group in worship way longer than feels comfortable, because I’ve found I’m prone to treat worship as silence if it’s a predictable, bounded experience. I need a few rounds of internal prompts to go deeper before I start sensing those eternal waters of the living Spirit.
You also need to be able to let the expectations go if those waters start lapping up in waves over the worshipper’s feet. There are times where the agenda should be cast aside because he who calls us has brought us to a spiritually-covered state. A few days ago I had lunch with a Friend who described this in-breaking happening in opening silenceof a recent workshop (he had the good sense to get out the way and postpone the scheduled exercises).
There’s the story of the Friends minister who traveled a great distance to address a group of Friends. People came from a hundred miles around to see what this famous outsider would say. But when the group began in worship, the minister realized to some internal horror that he felt a stop in ministry. He had nothing to deliver. A large audience waitied and he surely could have gone into some stock speech and delivered a sermon that people would commend. But the spiritual stop was there and he too had the good sense to listen. The worship lasted hours, with nothing from the famous guest. It was only afterwards that the minister understood Christ’s plan, as a local Friend rushed to him in thanks. The group had been locked into politicized camps that used ministry as opportunities to argue their respective causes. What they needed was an outsider to remind them of the sacredness of worship. The traveling minister knew little of these battles, but was able to speak spoke to worshippers’ condition through complete silence because he remained faithful to God, who knows all and tenders all.