On Ministries and Ministers
The ministry and ministers we plead for are such as are immediately called and sent forth by Christ and his Spirit unto the work of the ministry, so were the holy apostles and prophets, as appears by these places: Matt. 10:1,5; Eph. 4:11, Heb. 5:4.
Liberal Friends have become uncomfortable with the idea of having ministers. They think that it sets up some sort of hierarchy, that by naming a minster it raises that person up and pushes down the rest. I have a friend who has tried to resolve this issue by talking about ministries and not ministers. But this formulation denies something very fundamental about the way God works. God does nothing in the abstract. God always works in the particular. There is no ministry separate from the minister that embodies that ministry. God does not speak to us in a voice from the clouds. We always hear God in the voice of a person, either in the voice of someone speaking to us, or writing on a page or computer screen. I don't know how it is for others but even when I hear a voice speaking to me internally, it speaks with my accent and my phrasing and my language. The voice sounds much like our own which provides an ongoing opportunity to hone my sense of discernment. God does not call forth a ministry without calling forth the minister. Likewise, a minister is not called without a ministry.
“And one does not presume to take this honor, but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was.” (Hebrews 5:4) According to Friends tradition, one does not seek to be named a minister but is someone whose gifts are recognized and named by the community. By and large, liberal Friends have abandoned that responsibility and have been hurt by it. The first tentative shoots of a new ministry may cease to grow from lack of nourishment. A person new to the ministry may lack someone to turn to for guidance. Traditionally, the people responsible for recognizing new ministers and encouraging them were the elders. If any role is in lower regard among Friends today than that of minister it is that of elder. The journals of many of Friends ministers record the important work of ministers and elders in helping them get started and grounded in their ministry. Ministers and ministry emerges from the community and the community has a responsibility to nourish and encourage it.
Today, people with a ministry often find themselves in an awkward position. Our Quaker culture says to wait until you are recognized. But then we don't recognize anyone. In this environment it means that people who do come forth are people who are willing to put themselves forward. Sometimes this is the result of God's promptings, sometimes it is their own pride and ego and most of the time it is some mix of the two. The community doesn't have the tools in place to help the minister learn to distinguish between the two and the ministry and the community are both hurt. It is also denied the contribution of those who may not be so assertive.
In my last post on this subject I said that we cannot, in our unbelief, prevent God from raising up ministers. At the same time, we can, and do, hinder the development of those who are being raised up. There are two forces working to do this. The first is American society's increasing emphasis on individualism. The idea that an individual can and should be self-sufficient has a corrosive influence on community. Communities need opportunities to care for their members. Individuals need times of being cared for. A minister grows out of the community and relies on the community for support. While we need prophetic ministry, we need to move beyond the image of the prophet living as a hermit in the desert and coming as an outsider to proclaim a message, usually of doom and misfortune, on the poor, benighted and wayward sinners. God is found where people gather and if prophets speak for God, that is where they will be found as well. This is not to say that a minister does not need to take times of retirement and solitude to nourish themselves and to come to hear the voice of God. After all, Jesus was always going off by himself, often to empty and barren places to pray. But ministers also need the community of their meeting and a community of other ministers to nourish them and help them grow. The meetings need the ministers for the same reasons.
The second way in which we inhibit ministry from arising among us is our insistence on egalitarianism. By egalitarianism, I do not mean our testimony on equality or our insistence that God speaks to all of us without an intermediary. I am having trouble finding the words to describe what I mean so I will use an example from economics and politics. In American civic life everyone is assumed to be middle-class. This is a useful fiction. It makes the poor disappear which eases the conscience of the better off. It also makes the rich disappear so they do not become a target of resentment and people don't notice how the wealthy get that way by extracting wealth from those below them. Anyone, especially a politician, who dares to challenge this assumption and point out the very real class differences in our society is accused of promoting class warfare.
The way this plays out in our meetings is that we say that we cannot single out gifts in vocal ministry because we are all ministers and besides it ignores those who may have other less valued ministries. While it is true that we are all ministers and that in any given meeting for worship, God may use anyone to give a message, it is also true that God does not appear to distribute gifts uniformly. We have no trouble recognizing that some people have been given more or less athletic ability, singing ability or physical beauty. But for some reason we are reluctant to admit that not everyone has the same level of spiritual gifts. And it is not as if, by not recognizing gifts in ministry, we are giving honor to those with less visible gifts. I have not seen any sign that the meetings that are reluctant to recognize and support gifts in the ministry go out of their way to recognize and encourage those Friends whose gifts may lie in any other area either. People whose contribution to the meeting is that they always provide fresh flowers, or see to it that the meeting room is tidy and ready for meeting, or that always clean up after the potlucks are invisible across the board. Insistence that we are all ministers in some way often turns into acting as if none of us are ministers. This is similar to the way in which Quaker insistence that all days are holy seems to have created a situation in which all days are secular.
God does not want us to all be alike or to do the same thing. The image of the Body of Christ captures this. 1 Corinthians chapters 12-14 explores this issue. We all have a role to play. Gifts are not given equally and not everyone gets the same gifts. We need to recognize and celebrate the diversity of gifts that we have all received and honor them all. If God blesses someone it does not mean that there is less for everyone else. In 1 Corinthians 14:1 Paul explicitly encourages all to seek after the gift of prophecy. If we are all encouraged to this, then there must be enough to go around because God does not set us impossible tasks. God has an abundance of gifts for us. We cannot let our fear of scarcity prevent us from accepting that abundance.
O children of Zion, be glad
and rejoice in the Lord your God;
for he has given the early rain for your vindication,
he has poured down for you abundant rain,
the early and the later rain, as before.
The threshing-floors shall be full of grain,
the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.
You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
and praise the name of the Lord your God,
who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame.
Then afterwards
I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.
Even on the male and female slaves,
in those days, I will pour out my spirit.
Joel 2: 23,24,26,28,29
Blessings to all,
Will T
posted by Will T | 8:54 PM
20 Comments:
Thanks, Will.
Thank you so much for this post. I agree that there is some uncomfortableness with the idea of ministers among unprogrammed Friends (also among semi-programmed Friends...I'd comment on Programmed Friends, but have no experience there).
I think some of the uncomfortableness may come from the idea that a minister does only certain things (give vocal ministry, elder, specific pastoral care of members, etc) and not others things. I'm not able to read minds, but sometimes I get the impression that certain activities are put in the category of "ministry" and others (like working with the homeless, teaching children, etc.) are considered something anyone can do and not a special leading.
I'm *not* saying we all do this, but I wonder if it is an unconscious assumption that some people make.
Anyway, as you point out, there are many ministries, each called through a particular person.
One of the most profound periods of my life was the Clearness process I went through regarding my own leading to ministry of a very specific type.
However, since that time, I have found that the Mennonites have embraced the enactment of my ministry much more than Friends have. I consider a local Mennonite Church to be a real resource for support and opportunities for going forward with my ministry.
This is not to say that my Meeting doesn't consider the leading valid; I believe they do (or at least the members of the Clearness Committee do). But the Meeting as a whole seems to regard my ministry as something I will be doing in my spare time and not as something the relates to my being a part of the gathered community.
It's very frustating.
cath
Will, I'm a little confused. I understand that different people have different gifts, that some are more generously gifted than others, that ministry can and does come in many different forms, and that we don't always do a good job of recognizing and using our many ministers.
But it sounds like you're implying that the tradition of named ministers addresses that problem. I don't see how. It seems to me that naming specific people as the ministers in a meeting implicitly suggests that those not named are not ministers. To my mind, this would exacerbate the problem of our many, many ministers not being recognized as such.
P.S. The "word verification" challenge I got on posting this message was an anagram of "quake."
Will, thank you. Our meeting is taking the first tentative steps toward recording one Friend as a minister, and this post is timely--the person in question has asked for a clearness committee, and it is being convened next week. Divine intervention, I do believe.
One of the questions we got when we began talking about this was whether it was a form of canonization, which sounds like the question James may be asking. Our sense was that while it might at first appear as though we were setting one above the others, that it was more what you indicated, a recognizing of one person's gifts, and not a comment on other's lack thereof. These things all come in God's time, after all, and just because we recognize one person at one time doesn't mean that at another time, if others move into that realm of ministry, that we wouldn't recognize them, too.
Sorry, I forgot to put my name on my previous comment. It's Mia.
Right on target, Will.
Many of us have felt and said similar things. It's time really, don't you think that we actually start to take more concrete steps in this direction. It's hard because a lot of people from liberal traditions don't understand community or the diversity of gifts. As you say they think that being realistic and practical about this is somehow limiting or dishonors other people.
So we will need to continue to do what you've done in this post: state our case again and again until more people get it. But I think it is equally if not more important to discuss this in the concrete not the abstract. Instead of just worshipping together and then running off to live our other lives we should take the time to have deep and serious discussions about our spiritual struggles and victories. If we do this regularly we will build up the concrete knowledge of each other's real spiritual conditions and once we understand each other well the difference and diversity of our gifts becomes not theory but palpable fact. "Recording" a gift of ministry or eldering is not some bureaucratic rigamorole, it is ideally the public declaration of a publically recognized fact.
So the resistence to recording ministers and elders is partly due to an excessively individualistic mindset some liberal Friends have but it is also due to simple lack of experience and knowledge. If we really knew each other well, there would be little resistence to the recording of these gifts.
Cath wrote "the Meeting as a whole seems to regard my ministry as something I will be doing in my spare time and not as something the relates to my being a part of the gathered community."
I'm going to have to think about that. I have a sense that there's something very important in that idea--that ministry is part of the relationship with a gathered community.
I remember when a young couple in our meeting, very active in peace work and with a family started, made an appeal to the meeting to help them replace their dead car, how happy and grateful I was to be in a position to do that--we were just about ready to trade in a car, and this was clearly so much better an idea. I think that part of what made that experience so great for us was that we could tell we were, in fact, participating in a ministry--supporting it as members of a community, in that case, in a fairly simple and direct concrete way.
The idea of ministry in spare time is pretty individualistic, isn't it? It doesn't really take in a mutual relationship between minister and meeting. And it should, even though we don't, as denizens of the 21st Century, have internalized a sense of how to make that work.
I know that, as a Pagan, I learned not to count on my community for discernment and support. I could get envy, I could get adulation, I could get fame from the Pagan community, but corporate discernment and support around spiritual leadings--no. Not yet, if ever.
I'm trying to learn to seek such things from my Quaker community. Friends are better at this than anyone I know. But it's still hard to trust Other People with a thing that intimate.
I'm working on it, as I said...
You need to publish this more widely Will. I think it's that important.
Please contact Friends Journal through their website.
Please.
Thank you friends for your comments. It would appear that I have touched a tender spot with people. I am afraid that my response to all this is a bit long as well.
Cath, I want to be clear that I do not limit ministry to vocal ministry or eldering. One of the first people in our meeting to come forward looking for support in the ministry was looking to be released to work in prisons. Unfortunately she had to deal with the meeting starting to work through the issues around recognizing ministry while it was considering her request. Needless to say, this was a difficult period for her and for the meeting. She ended up starting her own non-profit organization and while she has support from many members of the meeting, she doesn't have the support of the meeting in the same way she would have had if the meeting could have united with her original request. I think that this has been a loss for both her and the meeting.
I can also relate to your frustration with people regarding your ministry as a spare time activity. As Thomas Kelly points out, having a concern becomes an organizing principal in your life. Having a concern influences how you use your time, your money, your energy. It can influence what you do for employment and can color your career, whatever it is. Having a ministry is just one case of having a concern. Think, for instance, of John Woolman who gave up shopkeeping, although he was successful at it, because it took too much time and energy. He became a tailor and orchard keeper because he wanted more time for his spiritual life. When something is this important to you spiritually you want it recognized, validated and supported by your spiritual community.
And this gets to the issues that James Riemermann raises. First of all, I am not sure if the tradition of recording ministers is the correct model for Quakers today. We may need to find another way of doing a similar thing that works for us now. It is a useful model in the lack of a better but it isn't the only possibility. Naming ministers (or recognizing gifts in the ministry which may be a better way of saying it) does not mean that anyone not named is not a minister. I said as much in my original post. Certainly everyone is free to speak in meeting or to minister to one another in a myriad of ways without requiring approval or recognition by the meeting. In the classical Quakerism, it was only after one began speaking in meeting that the ministers and elders would take notice and provide encouragement and this might eventually lead to recording. But you were a minister and offering ministry before the recognition. The real issue is that of commitment, and this only started becoming clear to me as I was responding to Cath's comment.
For some people going to meeting is something they do if they can fit it into their schedules. I know of families who disappear from meeting for long periods of time because someone in the family has soccer games on Sunday morning. Other people come to meeting regularly but do not undertake much of the work of the meeting. If someone is under the weight of a concern to the point that it has become an organizing principal in their lives, and if this concern expresses itself in some form of ministry, it is proper for the meeting to recognize it. It binds the meeting and the minister together in a tangible way. This not only provides support for the minister, it also provides accountability. Bringing your ministry explicitly under the care of the meeting, which is part of what recording does, implies a willingness to be guided and directed, in some ways by the community. This is not always an easy thing to do, especially in a culture so steeped in individualism and that puts such a strong value on individual initiative. I had to wrestle with my support committee for a number of months before I was clear to start this blog. It was a bit of a shock to me because I had anticipated that they would have said, “No problem, go for it.” Parts of the process were difficult, frustrating and painful. I also learned a lot about myself and how to communicate better and the blog and I are better for the experience. The accountability side of recognizing gifts in the ministry is perhaps not obvious to people not directly involved but I have spoken to enough people to know that having difficult times with support committees is not uncommon. All of this might not be appropriate for someone who is not seriously committed to what they are doing. Perhaps we need to recast our thinking from recording gifts in the ministry to recognizing a commitment to ones gifts and ministry.
And James, that was a neat word verification challenge.
Cat and Richard and others, I think that some of what is happening is that many people are trying to figure out how this whole ministry and support and accountability thing works. The old tools have been unused for so long that no one really knows how to work them anymore. So there is a fair amount of fumbling around figuring out what works and what doesn't. It requires a certain amount of resilience, forbearance and forgiveness for everyone in the process. In the process we do also get to know each other better.
Ben Lloyd,
You are kind but this discussion here isn't done yet. Not only are there now 8 comments on this post on the first day, but I am not done yet with my meditations and ruminations on what Barclay said about ministry.
Blessings to all.
Will T
You said: "Cath, I want to be clear that I do not limit ministry to vocal ministry or eldering."
I'm sorry if my comment gave you the impression that I thought you were limiting your discussion of ministry. I was speaking about the Quaker world at large and as I have experienced it.
Sorry for the confusion.
I think you've said some very important things.
cath
Will,
Thank you for this timely piece. I have been called to full-time ministry for almost 20 years, and have lacked the courage until recently to ask my Meeting to enter into some sort of relationship with my ministry - as yet I'm not clear on what that relationship might look like, and it would of course depend on my Meeting's discernment, too. Your blog post was the final affirmation I needed to muster up the courage to ask my Meeting to discern with me, and I included a link to this blog in my request. Hope that's OK.
I love that among Friends ministry is shared throughout the community. I am so amazed at the way Friends shine in this capacity. One of the problems with Protestant ministry, in my experience, is that the congregation expects the professional minister to be all things at once: business executive, therapist, healer, scholar, public speaker,musician, youth leader, etc. This can have a degrading influence on the greater spiritual community as folks become dependent, even lazy and unwilling to develop their own ministries. It results in exhaustion and emotional burn-out, even break-down in many professional clergypeople.
On the other hand, paid ministry at least acknowledges and supports those people who commit their lives to the service of God. When someone changes a career, attends graduate school, or otherwise immerses themselves wholly in service, they need community support. Our individual ministries, whatever they are, wither and perish without love and nourishment from brothers and sisters. A calling often requires financial hardship, lifestyle changes, extended education...It takes a leap of faith to devote oneself to this kind of life. One must have faith that one's community will welcome and sustain this work.
My reaction to this discussion as one reared by a professional clergyman and as one who has received a calling to ministry is that there is a difference between the ministry of all believers generally and the special calling that some receive which requires those individuals to immerse themselves, sometimes with great sacrifice, into a particular ministry (religious study and speaking ministry for example).
I don't mean to suggest that recognition of calling should lead to a hierarchy of ministry or a dismissal or diminishment of short-term concerns and ministries. The shared and diverse ministry of all believers is a critical component of a community's spiritual success. However,for some "a calling" is a visceral, hyper-real thing that takes over a life. It is a weight, an imperative, and a compulsion that must be honored.
Will,
Having a gift of ministry isn't the same thing as being under the weight of a concern. The fact that both these have come up in this discussion might lead people to think that they were the same. Being a recorded minister in a programmed Friends meeting is often means making it a regular full-time job for which the Meeting pays a salary. In the conservative tradition we record ministers but expect that, like Paul, they will continue supporting themselves by regular employment. Financial support is sometimes offered but it is typically only to pay such things as traveling expenses. So while being a recorded minister is no casual activity done in one's off hours, this generally doesn't mean quitting your day job. It may, however, as your example of Woolman indicates mean changing to a less time consuming job so that more time may be devoted to ministry. We can find lots of examples today of people consciously choosing lower paying jobs that still allow them to support themselves but which also allow them more time to do what they are being lead to do.
I very much agree that the situation is one in which many
Friends have only read about traditions of eldering and ministry. Here in North Carolina conservative those traditions have never died out but keeping them alive has been a challenge. We draw a lot of people (I'm one) who originated in a liberal meeting and had to learn these traditions from the people here who had grown up in families that had lived with them for generations. I hope that these traditions, which have been kept alive here, can gradually spread to the liberal unprogrammed meetings. The work that Lloyd Lee Wilson has done over the past ten years or so has gotten more people interested. It's time I think for those who have a sense of these traditions to pick up the ball and run with it. They should be very steady and persistent about nagging their meetings into taking concrete action.
Susanne,
Blessings, strength and clarity to you and your meeting as you strive to work out the relationship between you, your meeting and your ministry. I am glad that you included a link here in your request. I hope that people in your meeting find it useful.
Richard,
You are right that having a gift of ministry is not the same as being under the weight of a concern. When I attended Pittsburgh Meeting many years ago there was a Friend who always stood at the door and welcomed people to meeting but he never came into meeting himself. I asked him about this and his reply was that if came into meeting, he would speak. So rather than speak every week he chose to stay out of meeting. So here was a person who had a gift of ministry but was not holding a concern for ministry, at least in the sense I have been using it. On the other hand, Brian Drayton's recent book On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry explores that concern with the clear expectation that the concern is paired with some actual gifts and activity in the ministry. So while having a gift of ministry is not the same of being under the weight of a concern, it is also possible, and not uncommon, for a minister to also be under the weight of a concern for the ministry.
Hysterywitch,
Welcome here. I expect to get to the question of money and ministry in a later post.
Blessings to all,
Will T
A few years ago, I was asked to explain the ideas about ministers and ministry held by Friends United Meeting Quakers in a talk for Canadian Yearly Meeting Friends, who have been 100% unprogrammed for the last three generations or so, and for whom the word ministry had become problematic. The result was this essay. I can see that you and I pursued some similar thoughts. More recently, I tried to tackle the related question of recording, including the dilemma of waiting to be noticed vs putting oneself "forward."
Glad you're reflecting on this important concern, and that you're getting some very thoughtful comments.
Johan
Hi Will-
In Ohio Yearly Meeting --unprogrammed --we recognize Ministers, and we also appoint Elders and Overseers. And we have people who are fine electricians and other people who can play the violin. Everybody has different God-given talents, and while God can and does use anybody he wants to from time to time, some people are consistently able to hear the Voice and get it right more often than others.
The egalitarianism should appear in our equal respect for one another. One important part of that egalitarianism is recognizing that we are not identical clones.
Having said all this, sometimes we get it wrong out here, and sometimes Ministers outlive their gift. We've got good ones and bad ones. I don't think it's ever been any different, really.
In Christ,
Kevin
Perhaps I should add that much of the recognition is just to officially encourage someone to keep working on the gift. Everybody has the gift in some measure, but recognizing a Minister is supposed to help in the same way that you might encourage a promising sprinter to try out for the track team.
It doesn't mean that nobody else can run, or that nobody else might occasionally run faster than the rest of the field.
Kevin
Thanks for this discussion. My meeting (in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting)has issued minutes of religious service for a number of years, though there are still some who have tender feelings about them. This year there has been a fresh crop of requests, including mine, which was approved last business meeting. In my case, I only asked for the minute because it was encouraged by the FGC Traveling Ministries Program, which I feel led to serve, but the process has brought its own fruits. My first clearness committee (appointed by Worship and Ministry)helped me to define my ministry more broadly, so that it included my blogging and my work as Assistant Clerk. Seeing the connections between the different threads of my work has been helpful to me. For the meeting (which appoints a second clearness committee to look at its clearness, as well as that of the person making the requet), I think it has been helpful to see the common threads among several of the ministries we support and realize that our meeting is called to certain work through the support of these individuals. Although the approval of my minute still took ten months, it was not a painful process, which I think was helped by the fact that our meeting grappled with the question of ministers and ministries a few years ago, apart from any specific individual's case.
Johan,
Glad you stopped by and left your links. I am glad that there seems to be many more people than just you and me thinking and sharing about these issues. The only way change happens, especially in the Society of Friends, is from the steady percolation of ideas, first through the back benches and later more widely. I think this is happening now with the issues of ministry and eldering.
Kevin,
I think that the Conservative yearly meetings have done a great service to Friends by keeping alive the traditional forms of Friends ministry and eldership. Unprogrammed yearly meetings may not return to exactly those forms but it provides a valuable resource as Friends explore what structures and roles might better serve them today.
Eileen,
Thank you for sharing your experience. I look forward to having the opportunity to talk with you more at the TMP retreat in Pittsburgh this weekend.
Blessings to all,
Will T
Will,
What a fabulous post and what wonderful and rich comments! I unite with so many things that have been written here:
- The gratitude that some Friends and meetings have helped preserve a process/a practice that now allow others to draw on.
- The difference between treating Friends as identical and responding to Friends whose gifts (and therefore needs) are different.
- The subtle distinction between coming into a ministry and coming under the weight of a concern.
- The clarification that coming into ministry is about being a servant of God no matter where one finds oneself--within the meeting community, outside of it, or both. It is NOT about having a hobby or compartmentalizing it. And sometimes it very much IS about reordering one's life in order to have more time, energy, and attention to dedicate to the call.
- The corporate growth and depth that occurs when we come to know one another's spiritual concerns, trials, and yearnings to be faithful, which can't happen only when we come to worship an hour a week together.
In my own experience, I would say that the meeting is denied an opportunity to learn about the movement of the Spirit, by not receiving or considering these requests for travel minutes and minutes of religious service.
I have been moved to tears when I have heard a report from a Friend who reports to her care-and-accountability committee: the yearning to be faithful; the concern for the Earth, for the meeting, for the incarcerated individual; the openings and the exercises that bring the Friend closer to God...
I will be adding links to a few of my own posts that will direct readers here, Will. Have a fruitful time in Pittsburgh...
Blessings,
Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up
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