Windy Cool­er is back with the sec­ond of a mul­ti­part series based on inter­views with pub­lic Friends, this install­ment called “The Con­cerns of Pub­lic Min­istry” (see my take on part one). This one is about the pow­er dynam­ics that pub­lic min­is­ters face in insti­tu­tion­al Quak­erism. Here’s one quote:

Resent­ment about pow­er imbal­ances and the sup­pres­sion of acknowl­edg­ing pow­er imbal­ances is at the heart of many pub­lic min­is­ters’ call to right rela­tion­ship, in fact: “What I thought was wrong with me was that I have lead­er­ship poten­tial. Being wrong, it turned out, was just lead­er­ship abil­i­ties. Noth­ing was wrong with me. “

This is a brave top­ic to cov­er and I’m glad Windy’s doing it.

Notably absent is much talk about faith in this. Where’s this call to lead­er­ship com­ing? What is it in ser­vice to? I sus­pect that if you asked this ques­tion of ris­ing lead­ers in Lib­er­al Friends you’d get all sorts of answers. That’s not ter­ri­bly sur­pris­ing. In the­o­log­i­cal­ly diverse meet­ings sec­u­lar­ized lan­guage is the lin­gua fran­ca. The Hick­site Quak­er move­ment was born in large part as a cri­tique of pow­er and this remains an easy con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion to turn to. I myself often look at Quak­er his­to­ry and cur­rent dynam­ics in a soci­o­log­i­cal way; it’s not a wrong frame­work, just incom­plete if left unmoored.

Per­son­al­ly I don’t think I could have made it through Friends this long with­out trust­ing in the inward Christ and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly deep­en­ing my life in tra­di­tion­al Quak­er the­ol­o­gy. It’s help­ful con­text to read the jour­nals of old min­is­ters. The chal­lenges they faced aren’t always so very dif­fer­ent from those of the present day. George Fox was seri­al­ly dis­ap­point­ed and betrayed by the min­is­ters of his time until he had a vision and real­ized that this dis­ap­point­ment was lit­er­al­ly the les­son he was being taught. From one of the most famous pas­sages in his Jour­nal:

I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my con­di­tion. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had noth­ing out­ward­ly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy con­di­tion,” and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord did let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my con­di­tion, name­ly, that I might give him all the glo­ry; for all are con­clud­ed under sin, and shut up in unbe­lief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence who enlight­ens, and gives grace, and faith, and pow­er. Thus, when God doth work who shall let [i.e. hin­der] it? And this I knew experimentally.

Of course we should­n’t roman­ti­cize grief and dis­ap­point­ment. Some­times a soul-crushing dis­ap­point­ment is a les­son but some­times its just peo­ple doing shit­ty things. The old adage “what does­n’t kill you makes you stronger” over­looks the peo­ple left as road­kill in the first place. I talked about the “Lost Quak­er Gen­er­a­tion” a lot twen­ty years ago; it remains an open ques­tion if some of the ones who left were the smarter ones.¹

Also in my news feed is a post from Bri­an Dray­ton, “New wine, new wine­skins.” Bri­an uses very Chris­t­ian lan­guage and is talk­ing about cur­rent wars in the world, but it’s pos­si­ble to read much of this as a take on pub­lic ministry:

Thus, our response in our liv­ing and think­ing to the con­di­tions of today, leav­ened with His life with­in us, must be put in ves­sels that not only con­tain the new life, but enable it to keep work­ing and gain­ing in virtue, in active pow­er. These are ves­sels of thought, of col­lab­o­ra­tion, of pri­or­i­ties or val­u­a­tion, of hope and inten­tion, of method and of celebration.

1. Speak­ing of the ones who have left, one of the most pop­u­lar search terms bring­ing peo­ple to the Friends Jour­nal web­site every month is “Why I left Quak­ers.” They find a 2002 arti­cle from Jack Pow­el­son and the still-poignant Quak­erism Left Me from the ever-awesome Bet­sy Blake in 2013. We’ve gen­er­al­ly shied away from “I’m leav­ing” man­i­festos but maybe we should enter­tain some. Check our sub­mis­sions page or drop me an email if you feel an arti­cle like this welling up.