I interview John Helding on the Quaker Talk podcast about “worship fluid” Quakerism.

The new issue of Friends Jour­nal is up. I wrote the Among Friends intro this month, wax­ing lyri­cal­ly on the “son­ic land­scape” of my meet­ing in August:

The sounds of our August silence are far from pure. Although the calls of red-shouldered hawks can be a bit harsh, hear­ing them reminds me that a fam­i­ly shares the trees of our bur­ial ground. The crunch of the grav­el in the dri­ve­way reas­sures me that one of our per­pet­u­al late-comers is about to join our fel­low­ship. Not all the sounds are nat­ur­al, of course. Once or twice in the hour some­one will red­line a motor­cy­cle on the street out­side, the whiny revs and gear changes drift­ing over to bounce inside our wor­ship space. I usu­al­ly try to tune out this sound, but some­times I smile instead, know­ing that some­one is hav­ing fun on a hot sum­mer day. I say a lit­tle prayer for their safe­ty and wish them well.

I’ve also record­ed a new episode of my author video pod­cast with John Held­ing, who wrote How Can I Keep from Singing? The Mar­velous Mys­tery of Worship-Fluid Meet­ings. He tells a great sto­ry of going from a very died-in-the wool unpro­grammed meet­ing to Lopez Island Wor­ship Group (now full Quak­er meet­ing) that sched­uled month­ly singing wor­ship and wor­ship shar­ing. I think I’m always going to pre­fer the mod­el of sit­ting down qui­et­ly and wait­ing for the Holy Spir­it but I do appre­ci­ate that it’s hard to build up a meet­ing cul­ture that invites min­istry. I’m hap­py that the wor­ship shar­ing at Lopez Island helped uncork nascent min­istry in the stan­dard, open worship. 

As I wrote a few years ago, I think min­istry should be an expect­ed mir­a­cle and not have quite so high a bar that peo­ple are intim­i­dat­ed from speak­ing. It takes prac­tice to know when min­istry is Spirit-led and maybe part of that prac­tice is not always get­ting it right. I know some meet­ings face the oppo­site prob­lem: min­istry that is per­haps too fre­quent and too head­strong and inap­pro­pri­ate. But a Friends Meet­ing is a bit like a choir in that it is always need­ing cre­ative rene­go­ti­a­tion to find the sweet har­mo­ny. We are a cho­sen fam­i­ly that just shows up every week, with peo­ple expe­ri­enced and new work­ing and learn­ing how to hold the body together.