Wrestling with “Ministry” in the Religious Society of Friends

Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom
28 January 2021

I want to share that part of the reason that the hosts felt clear to kind of have this piece be brought this morning is because we have been wrestling with some of these conversations ourselves. And so I share this this morning with a sense of exploration and hope that there's some resonance. If it helps for you to kind of think about the head category, the thing that I think this is about is wrestling with this idea of what ministry means in the Religious Society of Friends.

It seems to me that one of the most distinctive parts of this Quaker tradition that we have is the existence of what gets called the unprogrammed, waiting, or expectant worship. And the fact is that fully unprogrammed meetings of this kind  only use that kind of worship. Many of us are familiar with that. My sense is that here in this Three Rivers experiment, the unprogrammed worship is still at the heart of the experience. My thought is that these small messages are just an on-ramp to listening to the deeper message that Spirit brings to each one of us in prayer and in gathered open worship.

But not all branches of contemporary Quakerism still use the practice of open worship. However, there is no denying that it was a powerful early influence on what Quakerism came to be. That’s just history. One of the early consequences of the priest-less, pastor-less meeting for worship in Ye Olde Quaker Days is that how early Friends spoke about ministry was different than the way that most other Christian traditions and denominations talked about it.

So the First Friends took Martin Luther’s idea of “the priesthood of all believers” to an extreme conclusion. While other Christian traditions had categories of “laypeople” and “clergy,” Friends did away with the idea of laypeople entirely, meaning that all Friends were responsible for ministry. In fact, George Fox, a founder of Quakerism, reminded people often to “keep your testimony against hireling priests, and their tithes.” And this word, “hireling,” while undeniably connected to the idea of being hired for work, also has a Biblical basis that isn’t just about money. John 10:11-13 has Jesus say this -- this is the Jesus text here:

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hireling, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away —and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.

Now, what I see there is that the problem seems not to be so much that the hired hand is hired as the fact that that his heart isn’t really into caring for the sheep. And I think this is what Friends were opposed to: people going through the motions of caring but not actually having the care or concern. To put it another way, Fox was not opposed to ministry or the idea of ministers. He was opposed to people play-acting at ministry and getting a paycheck for it. And one of the ways to stop this is to stop the paychecks. Indeed, Fox is quite vocal about how ministry -- when it is authentic -- is exciting and important. He says,

At the hearing of the speech of the true minister, there is a joy to all that seek and thirst after righteousness: for the preaching of the gospel is the glad tidings, the joyful news, and is a comfort to the soul, body and mind

And this gives us a thorny problem, I think: if everyone is a minister, what the heck is a true minister, and is that phrase even useful at all? And the situation actually gets more sticky when we look at the writing of second generation Quaker, a guy named Robert Barclay, who wrote in a book called The Apology -- that’s what we call it today: 

To those who claim that we make no distinction between the minister and the people, that is true if they are referring only to each person’s  freedom to speak or prophesy when moved by the Spirit. However, we also believe that some have a more particular call to the work of the ministry and that therefore they are especially equipped for that work by the Lord.

So (in the late 1600s at least) all Friends are at liberty and must be rightly considered as people who might give ministry and… apparently some people are more regularly called on to do this, than others. And this initially paradoxical seeming situation is sometimes called the “twofold ministry.” In 1959, a guy named George Selleck, who was from Cambridge, some Friends may know him or remember him, wrote this -- I love this text -- he says,

We have had in our Society a recognition of the place of both the universal ministry and the particular ministry. Both apparently have had an important and essential place in our Society. Ministry in the Meeting should be open to all members, but the Meeting would be poorer if there were not some who had a particular concern for it. We might say that a healthy Meeting carefully preserves and encourages both the universal and the particular ministry. A corollary of this would be that when either the universal or the particular ministry is weakened or abandoned the whole Meeting loses something of its spiritual health.

Thank you, George. I feel it is important for Meetings to nurture and name that all members have a responsibility and a capacity to serve as called and to be watchful for the fact that some might be called to more regularly give over hours of energy to service of varying types.

The whole topic, though, is hard to talk through, and I think there’s three big reasons why that’s the case. First, most folks, me included, come to the Religious Society of Friends from other traditions, and oftentimes what they are moving away from is an overly-domineering pastoral figure or theology in some other denomination that does not feel life-giving to them. So the association with ministry is sometimes hooked into painful and traumatic histories. Second, the fact is that as Quaker we ourselves historically have messed up this whole “ministry” thing pretty significantly in the 1800s, and we allowed those with a particular ministry (what we call “recorded” Ministers and Elders) to become a kind of in-group that -- though not paid -- began to exercise authority and control in some pretty damaging ways that we have not always accounted for. Finally, having conversation about ministry is hard, because it can easily feel like what is being said is that those that are feeling called to a particular ministry are somehow more important, or valuable, or holy than those serving in other ways. And that’s just plain wrong. 

I love Selleck on that, he says: 

When either the universal or the particular ministry is weakened or abandoned the whole Meeting loses something of its spiritual health.

I think that’s right. Behind and underneath and maybe permeating throughout the whole of it, I think what I want for Friends, both those gathered here today and those who will never hear this, is to know the invitation to two things that are intimately bound up together. 

I think our Meetings ought to be ministerial laboratories, workshops of service, and greenhouses of spiritual giftedness. Each of you should know that you are loved and good exactly as you are. AND… you may be called to give more. The second thing is that if you are called to service, either by giving vocal ministry, teaching, or being in public leadership, or being a grounding presence, an eldership role, that call to service must be grounded in a community of care and accountability. The awesome beautiful consequence of this is that when we are all together looking for those new seedlings of Spirit we can trust others may see something we have missed.

I want all to hear that the hope and promise of The Gospel is indeed “glad tidings, joyful news, and a comfort to body, soul, and spirit.” I want us all to know that as we listen for Inner Teacher’s promptings we will be yoked to one another and into a greater love for Creation. My prayer is that as we are each listening to see what comes next, what we are listening for at the taproot is faithfulness. However that call for what comes next looks and sounds, and wherever it leads, it is a glad and joyful and soul-lifting thing. So my prayer is you follow it. You ask others to help you hear it better. And you know that we will all follow it better together. All of us. And I think that is the Good News.