I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to this Sun­day’s talk by Chris Stern at Crop­well Quak­er Meet­ing. I reg­u­lar­ly wor­shipped with him when I attend­ed Mid­dle­town Meet­ing a num­ber of years ago and I always knew when he rose to speak that we were in for unusu­al­ly thought­ful and Spirit-led min­istry. We talked on the phone prepar­ing for this event a few weeks ago and I real­ly like the sim­ple prompt, “What are we wait­ing for?”

One of the dis­tinc­tive qual­i­ties of my Friends meet­ing¹ is that there is a lot of vocal min­istry, espe­cial­ly for such a small group (we aver­age about 10 – 20 peo­ple depend­ing on time of year and sched­ules). It’s does­n’t feel “pop­corny,” the mild­ly derog­a­tive Quak­er term for mes­sages that come one after anoth­er in rapid fire suc­ces­sion. There is ample time left between mes­sages and they often have the kind of unin­ten­tion­al syn­chronic­i­ty that is one sign of “a gath­ered meeting.”

There are occa­sion­al Sun­days in which we’ll spend the whole wor­ship in silence. It’s usu­al­ly quite sweet. When we break wor­ship, our clerk will acknowl­edge that spe­cial feel­ing but then say with a gen­tle defin­i­tive­ness that Quak­er wor­ship should always have min­istry and that there should always be some­thing from the Bible.² What our clerk has done is set the expec­ta­tion that min­istry is nor­mal and easy. We’ve had wor­ship in which half of the peo­ple gath­ered have spoken.

I’ve been try­ing to under­stand this approach. See, I’m some­one who tends to over­think min­istry and I’m not alone. Some Friends have gone to the trou­ble to cre­ate elab­o­rate flow charts, a multi-step check­list to deter­mine whether a mes­sage ris­ing in our hearts is one we should speak aloud. Seri­ous­ly, how is any­one expect­ed to get to “Speak!” in under an hour’s time?

There’s per­haps even more pres­sure in Friends meet­ing with pro­gram­ming. There’s often the expec­ta­tion that the min­is­ter will be trained and cre­den­tialed and their ser­mons con­struct­ed the week before over many hours. I appre­ci­ate this sort of lec­ture for­mat and get a lot from them but the bar to par­tic­i­pa­tion is incred­i­bly high.

I was talk­ing recent­ly with Chris Stern, a sea­soned min­is­ter from Mid­dle­town Meet­ing in Lima, Pa.; I reg­u­lar­ly attend­ed there for awhile cir­ca 2006. He’s going to be giv­ing a talk at Crop­well in a few weeks and I was try­ing to explain to him what I’ve been experiencing. 

I think what it boils down to is a con­fi­dence that God (the Holy Spir­it, the Inward Light) is present in our wor­ship. And of course that’s true. God is every­where, all the time: “And remem­ber, I am with you always, to the end of the age.“³ If we expect that the Spir­it is present, we should also expect it to speak to us and through us while we sit togeth­er. We can expect a nudge from the Inward Christ to rise and give ministry. 

Vocal min­istry can be an expect­ed mir­a­cle. The bar to par­tic­i­pa­tion can be just our faithfulness.

The Quak­erQuak­er social media site has been offline for a few months but is some­what back now. I made an archive of the old Ning-powered site and put it up. There have been a lot of impor­tant con­ver­sa­tions there since 2006, includ­ing much of the dis­cus­sion that became the “Con­ver­gent Friends” dis­course, so I’ve want­ed it pre­served. Even­tu­al­ly Google will suc­cess­ful­ly re-index the site and there won’t be so many page-not-found errors. 

The sec­ond phase will be putting a new social media site up. It’s going to be built on Word­Press, so this ver­sion of Quak­erQuak­er should stay use­ful for a while. It will retain the “Prim­i­tive Chris­tian­i­ty Revived, Again” tagline and I will try to repli­cate some of the dis­cus­sion groups. I need to pur­chase some plug-ins for this to work; the ini­tial cost will be $228. If any­one can help out with that with a dona­tion, that would be won­der­ful; there’s also ongo­ing month­ly serv­er bills so if mul­ti­ple peo­ple help out it will all go to good use.

In The Friend, Geof­frey Durham recounts the “reli­gious white-knuckle ride” of his first Quak­er wor­ship expe­ri­ence—and what led him to come back again and again. Fun­ny and pro­found, glad they made it a free article.

Friends Jour­nal cov­er­age of Indi­ana Year­ly Meet­ing’s deci­sion to leave Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing (I gave some back­ground a few weeks ago).

The Sep­tem­ber episode of Quak­ers Today pod­cast dropped, this time an unusu­al look at whether untruth can some­times be more accu­rate than real­i­ty. Bonus: a Bar­bie tie-in!

Also, a new Quak­er­S­peak inter­view, this time with Carl Blu­men­thal talk­ing and Friends and men­tal health. Carl has writ­ten a his­to­ry on this for the mag­a­zine and I had a low-tech video inter­view with him. 

I can relate to Kath­leen Wooten’s metaphor about search­ing for the per­fect pen­cil that would make her effi­cient enough to do every­thing she want­ed (for what it’s worth, Kath­leen always seems to be accom­plish­ing a lot regard­less of mag­ic tools).

Johan Mau­r­er on the spir­i­tu­al resources and iden­ti­ty that a local Friends meet­ing might expect from a year­ly meeting.

The mas­sive dig­i­tal­iza­tion of old news­pa­pers in recent years has allowed his­to­ri­ans to deter­mine the source of the “Under­ground Rail­road” name.