Wilcox began the discussion with a question of whether or not the Guilford community should seek out prophets and prophecies. Wilcox sought to relate this question to the Quaker tradition.

“This talk is about prophets and prophecy,” Wilcox said. “So the first question is, ‘What does it mean to be a prophet?’ I don’t think Jeremiah would recommend it.”

https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.guilfordian.com/news/2019/04/12/wilcox-talks-quakerism-and-the-prophetic-tradition/&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjk1NzUwOWM3NjZmNTA4MzU6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNGr3hjx9Dxd8r_5amP0l6AQfRXDcg

Even worse, when we routinely marginalize certain gifts, we begin to see their exercise as dysfunctional and their absence as normative, rather than the reverse. When the prophet challenges us with uncomfortable truths, rather than using our discomfort as an opportunity for reflection and discernment, we tell her to tone it down, complain that she is “unwelcoming” and, if she doesn’t get the message, we run her off.

Welcoming the Gifts God Sends Us

In order to remain healthy and faithful, we must nurture all spiritual gifts, not just the ones that…

In the Shadow of Babylon

As we keep sowing, we divide the labor according to our gifts. For every radical prophet who risks everything to speak the truth, we hope some conservative is doing a good job of guarding the money that will pay the prophet’s bail. We make space for the pastor who cherishes our community, and we make space for the outward-facing evangelist, who understands when the moment is ripe to intervene in our culture.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/06/sowing-in-tears.html

As we keep sowing, we divide the labor according to our gifts. For every radical prophet who risks everything to speak the truth, we hope some conservative is doing a good job of guarding the money that will pay the prophet’s bail. We make space for the pastor who cherishes our community, and we make space for the outward-facing evangelist, who understands when the moment is ripe to intervene in our culture.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/06/sowing-in-tears.html

As we keep sowing, we divide the labor according to our gifts. For every radical prophet who risks everything to speak the truth, we hope some conservative is doing a good job of guarding the money that will pay the prophet’s bail. We make space for the pastor who cherishes our community, and we make space for the outward-facing evangelist, who understands when the moment is ripe to intervene in our culture.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2018/06/sowing-in-tears.html

About 12 years ago, the Abington meetinghouse caretaker, Dave Wermeling, found an old sketch of Lay in a box. A short biography on worn brown paper was glued to back of the drawing. “I thought, ‘Who is this, and how can you not be talking about him?’” Wermeling recalled.

I’ve long admired the story of Benjamin Lay. I’m not sure that the general public reading these articles is quite realizing that Quaker disownment wasn’t a full shunning. As far as I know he continued to be influential with Quakers, for his passion if not his strategy. Lay went far, far ahead of the Quakers of the time. His stunts were awesome, but drenching yearly meeting attenders with pig blood and publishing books without permission was going to get you uninvited from formal decision making meetings.

I would very much hope that if any of us moderns were transported back to that era, we would find the conditions of human bondage so outrageous that we would all go full Benjamin Lay: disrupt meetings, shatter norms, get disowned by our religious bodies. If you read the history of eighteen-century Quaker activism in the Philadelphia area you’ll see there were many tracts starting in the earliest years of the Quaker colonies. There were lots of Quakers who felt slavery was morally wrong. But few felt the empowerment to break from social conventions the way Lay did. But that’s kind of the nature of prophecy. I would be suspicious of any candidate for prophet that is liked by the administrative bodies of their time. What kind of complacency are we demonstrating by our inactions today?

https://www.philly.com/philly/news/quakers-benjamin-lay-dwarf-abolitionist-slavery-abington-friends-meeting-20180419.html?mobi=true

How many of your political positions and social attitudes could be accurately guessed by a savvy demographer who knew your date of birth,  postal code,  education and family income? I’d guess each of us are far more predictable than we’d like to think.If true,  then what role does our religious life actually play?

Religious beliefs are also a demographic category,  granted, but if they only confirm positions that could be just as actually predicted by non-spiritual data, then doesn’t that imply that we’ve simply found (or remained in) a religious community that confirms our pre-existing biases? Have we created a faith in our own image? And if true, is it really fair to justify ourselves based on appeals to Quaker values?

The “political” Quaker writings I’m finding most interesting (because they’re least predictable) are the ones that stop to ask how Quaker discernment fits into the debate. Discernment: one could easily argue that Quaker openings and tools around it are one of our greatest gifts to human spirituality.  When we build a worship community based on strict adherence to the immediate prompting of the Holy Spirit, the first question becomes figuring out what is of-God and what is not.  Is James Nayler, riding Jesus-like into Bristol, a prophet or a nut?

When we go deep into the questions,  we may find that the answers are less important than the care we take to reach them.  Waiting for one another,  holding one another’s hand in love despite differences of opinion, can be more important than being the right-answer early adopter. How do you step back from easy answers to the thorny questions? How do you poll yourself and that-of-God in yourself to open your eyes and ears for the potential of surprise?