On the Wood­brooke web­site, a new piece on vocal min­istry from British Friend Mark Russ. I like the warn­ing that what might look obvi­ous to a new­com­er might not be what they think:

From a non-Quaker per­spec­tive, a group of peo­ple sit­ting in a cir­cle in silence, with any­one able to stand and speak, might look very much like a ther­a­py group. We might then inter­pret the words spo­ken in this group as being main­ly per­son­al and to a large extend pri­vate. We might see the per­son speak­ing as unbur­den­ing them­selves, shar­ing some­thing they’ve per­haps nev­er shared before, and find­ing heal­ing through this shar­ing. These words are treat­ed as some­thing pre­cious, belong­ing to the indi­vid­ual who speaks, and are treat­ed with con­fi­den­tial­i­ty by oth­ers in the group.

For those want­i­ng more, the cur­rent issue of Friends Jour­nal is all about vocal ministry.