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Session 3 : Quaker Ministry a Brief History and Introduction

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Session 3 : Quaker Ministry a Brief History and Introduction Quakerism 101 – Session 3 : Quaker Ministry A Brief History and Introduction Steven Davison Background History—Ministry in Puritan England When Early Friends broke with their contemporaries in their understanding of the nature of ministry, they didn’t have this open-ended definition we’ve been using in our sharing. They understood ministry to be what we call vocal ministry—speaking in meeting for worship; well, preaching, really. This remained true until deep into the 19th century. It only got expanded to mean witness and other forms of service beginning, I think, with the the evangelical branch’s missionary callings in the late 1900s and then, even more broadly, in the 20th century, to include what we now think of as witness and service. Still, even today, vocal ministry remains the signature and quintessential form of Quaker ministry. It is in vocal ministry that we can practice discerning Spirit’s call to service, and in which the meeting can practice the support and oversight of ministry. And, as .O once pointed out to me, virtually any kind of ministry is also vocal ministry, because it inevitably involves communication; it may even consist primarily of communication. But back to how early Friends saw ministry. It’s hard to exaggerate how radical a break from their contemporaries Early Friends’ faith and practice of ministry was. Back then, ministry took three main forms, as defined by the Church of England, by the Puritans, and by the so-called nonconformists or Independents, which included Quakers. The Church of England Ministers in the Church of England were supported by the state in a system that I don’t really understand. You can get a little picture of how it worked from Jane Austin’s novels. And these ministers were priests, exclusively empowered to administer the sacraments, especially Holy Communion. Friends rejected this “hireling” ministry, believing that ministry should be freely given, not paid for, nor in any way beholden to the state. However, it was acceptable to provide whatever support would enable it to take place. The Puritans abolished the priesthood and its episcopal hierarchy and took away the focus on administering the sacraments and focused on preaching instead. But you still needed an education to be a preacher: Harvard was founded to educate Puritan ministers. Independent churches were the gathered churches, meaning you had to join and were not automatically going to your local parish church, whether Anglican or Presbyterian. And ministers often did not need formal education, but only a calling from the Holy Spirit. These nonconformists included the Baptists, the Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists, Seekers, and Quakers. Only the Baptists and the Quakers are with us today. 1 For both the Puritans and the Independents, preaching ministry meant gospel ministry and moral exhortation, that is, calls to salvation and threats and encouragement for the moral life. Ministry for Early Friends It’s hard to beat Robert Barclay’s definition of ministry in his Apology for a look at what ministry meant to early Friends: It is by the light or gift of God that all true knowledge of things spiritual is received and revealed. It is also by the strength and power of these, as they are made manifest and received in the heart, that every true minister of the gospel is ordained, prepared, and equipped for the work of the ministry. Every evangelist and every Christian pastor ought to be led and directed in his labor and in the work of the gospel by the leadings, motions, and drawings of God’s light. These should govern not only the place where, but the persons to whom he speaks, and the time when he should speak. Those who have this authority ought to preach the gospel even though they are without human commission or are illiterate. If they lack the authority of the divine gift, no matter how learned they may be, or what authoriZation they may have from men, or how well they may be commissioned by churches, they should be considered deceivers and not true ministers of the gospel. This who have received this holy and unspotted gift have received it without cost and should give it without charge (Matthew 10:8). They should certainly not use it as a trade to earn money. But, if God has called any of them from their regular employment, or the trade by which they earn their living, they should receive such worldly necessities as food and clothing. It is lawful for them to accept these as far as they feel allowed by the Lord, and as fars as they are freely and cordially given by those with whom they have shared their spiritual matters. In this, Quakers broke from their contemporaries in four ways: Calling. The first was the nature of the call. This wasn’t a career move or setup for a third son of some lord or whatever. It was a religious calling. No outward education or some special connections were required, but only the leading of the spirit of Christ. Ordination. Friends didn’t practice ordination or any other ritual that conferred ministerial authority, though, after a while, we did start recording ministers. This was a formal recognition of God’s call to service in someone as a way to set in motion a culture of eldership, a set of practices for the nurture and oversight of the ministry. It recognized Christ’s call. Women ministers. Friends recognized that Christ was calling women to be his ministers, in apparent violation of the Apostle Paul’s injunction against women speaking in meeting, and against the universal practice of the other churches. 2 The Lamb’s War. Finally, Friends were fighting the Lamb’s War. They aggressively challenged these other churches and their ministers, accusing them of false service and of corrupting the gospel. They accosted ministers in the streets and in their pulpits. The call to ministry Marty Grundy describes early Friends’ ministry in this way (Early Friends & Ministry, a pamphlet published by Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston): “The basis and impulse for Quaker ministry in the very beginning was sharing the good news that they had found the answer to their troubles and turmoil, that the answer was available within everyone, and anyone who would listen to it could be transformed by God’s grace.” (p 9) — Christ has come to teach his people himself, as Fox had said of himself. Grundy on their definition and purpose of ministry: p 12.3. Their ministry was prophetic, in that they were trying “to trigger in their audiences the same painful, upsetting process of self-scrutiny and inward repentance that they had found so beneficial” themselves. It’s goal was the direct experience of the light of Christ. Christ was also the sole source of ministry and he alone could confer authority to speak. Ordination Because the spirit of Christ, which had been promised in the gospel of John, was the only legitimate source of the call to ministry, the only role of the community was to recogniZe that someone had been called. At first, Friends had no set structure for this. Many were called and other Friends assumed the call was genuine, based on their direct experience of the ministry. It was only after some Friends seemed to go off the rails that Friends felt a need to be more structured in recogniZing which ministers were truly Spirit-led. There were a number of crises of this sort in the 1650s that gave rise to the concern. And then the persecutions that began in the early 1660s demanded a more proactive culture of eldership in order to protect the wider community from reprisal and condemnation because of the unruly among them Women ministers In 1Corinthians, the Apostle Paul had prohibited women from speaking in church, and all the churches but some of the Independents followed this rule. But Fox and the early Friends saw that, in fact, women were being called by Christ into service and they wrote to defend the practice. Margaret Fell, who later became Fox’s wife and is often called the mother of Quakerism because of the financial and administrative and pastoral support she and her first husband gave to the movement, wrote a landmark pamphlet in 1668 while in prison that laid out a compelling scriptural argument for their position titled Women’s Speaking Justified. The Lamb’s War Throughout the first decade of the movement in the 1650s, early Friends were quite militant in their opposition to their contemporaries’ approach to ministry, accosting ministers on the street and in their pulpits and calling them false ministers. With the restoration of the monarchy and the beginning of state persecution in the early 1660s, they gradually abandoned this militancy. Then, in 1688 the Toleration Act formally allowed the 3 nonconformists freedom of worship, though Friends still faced local outbreaks of persecution and continued to be fined for failing to pay church tithes until the middle of the 19th century. Friends abandoned the radical elements of the Lamb’s War and retreated into themselves, nurturing their movement as a remnant of the faithful, rather than as a cadre of revolutionaries on behalf of God’s word. The practice evolves As I said, the persecutions and internal conflicts forced Friends to begin formaliZing the conduct of ministry with structures and practices for oversight. Second-day Morning Meeting From 1673, ministers, and later, min and elders, from London and the nearby suburbs met Monday mornings to take care of ministers who were visiting, to endorse the travel of ministers, and to organize who would to go to which meetings the following week, to make sure each meeting had a minister.
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