I want to frame this with my concern for building the trustworthy church. And, to me a trustworthy church, in Quaker terms, is a church where the leadership, the visible leadership, knows or is reminded by the rebels that our single most important query that faces any business meeting is “what does God want to say or do through us in this time and place?” And if that spirit prevails, whether through custom or through conflict, then people need to also be aware that…the rawness of their leadings needs to be welcomed, people …people could operate from passion from ecstasy.

— Johan Maurer, Strong and Courageous: A Panel on Public Ministry

In this final essay for Friends General Conference’s series on public ministry in the liberal tradition, I want to begin with some of the results of the survey on public ministry that Rashid Darden sent out this summer, via the Vitality weekly newsletter and FGC’s social media.

Survey Results

The survey had 199 respondents. Of these, 71.6 percent believe a formal process is necessary to be considered a “public minister.” However, as we have noted throughout this series of essays, formal processes are not widely used as described in the respective Faith and Practice or other governance or management documents of yearly meetings.

I believe that this lack of use has resulted in 50.8% of respondents believing that their monthly meetings do not have a process for recording ministers. No one surveyed could definitively say that their yearly meeting had any such process; almost half thought not, and many were unsure.

Most Friends believe that traveling ministers and preachers (72.9%), hospital/hospice/healthcare chaplains (55.2%), and campus chaplains (52.6%) are public ministers. Many friends believe retreat facilitators (41.1%) and workshop facilitators (38%) are public ministers. There is less agreement about whether yearly meeting clerks, monthly meeting clerks, employees of Quaker organizations, and volunteers at Quaker organizations are public ministers. There were also notable “other” answers. Several noted that artists and authors as public ministers, while others insisted that all Friends are public ministers.

Given these survey results, I am hopeful about our community’s ability to support and hold accountable vibrant public ministry. The survey results also leave me with an important question for which there may be a complicated answer. Friends believe a formal process must be in place to consider someone a public minister. How, then, are we also saying that we can identify the public ministers among us (traveling ministers, chaplains, etc.) when we also believe that few of these formal recognition processes exist?

Embracing Ministry Gifts

Friends, the energy is here for us to embrace ministry gifts in our meetings. As we hear the survey results, we can figure out how to get there. That we can get there is probably news to the frustrated Friends interviewed for the second essay in this series. They reported feeling misused and impoverished in their home communities and often doubtful that they belong with us despite being asked to do so much by Spirit and these same communities.

In the third essay in this series, I noted that many of us are as easily made grateful in this environment as we are frustrated and alienated. It is as if we are waiting for any reason to stay. We are grateful, for instance, that after five years of intense labor with our meeting, we might have “at least” a travel minute, if not a committee, to accompany us. I said:

What would it mean to transform from where we are, Friends, in this grateful “at least” place to a place of abundance — and the vibrancy amid all the world’s concerns that we accept was the experience of the Valiant 60 in their public ministry? What would it mean to be something other than a tall poppy, or to be afraid of tall poppies, to, in The Message’s translation of Matthew: “walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers?” What would it mean, in other words, to be accompanied and to accompany ministry?

Let’s look at how to answer this query and peer into the future we want. To do that, let’s revisit the panel on public ministry co-sponsored by FGC and Powell House last spring in which fourteen Friends self-identifying as public ministers agreed to share testimony on their experiences with Friends and gifts of ministry. Much of the concern raised at this event was around the very concept of gifts, who can easily afford to be generous, and for whom generosity comes at a tremendous and unsustainable cost. This is because it is also very often the case that the most vulnerable Friends offer gifts of ministry, both throughout early Quaker history and increasingly in contemporary Quaker communities. It is the “speakers of color or younger people or people who are diverse in different ways” that so much is asked of, says Ashely Wilcox. She adds that Friends being unwilling to do more than pay for travel (if even that) makes it impossible to justly hear from public ministers who do not have adequate personal wealth or support systems within the Quaker community to sustain their work. This inequality of resources transcends the issue of public ministry, however. It is unequal from the start. That it impacts the quality of ministry is just one way it impacts Quakers and the world.

Wealth Inequality and Power

For this reason, the first and boldest step to embracing public ministry is to examine wealth inequality and power in our meetings. Power dynamics in our meetings often mirror those of the outside world. Wealth inequality afflicts the people of the world as a whole.

I am far from alone in this bold assertion that we prioritize the inspection of wealth inequality in our communities. I share this boldness in common with movements for reparations and other public ministries within the Religious Society of Friends. If we are all potential public ministers, as some in the survey suggest, how does wealth inequality serve that vision? How does even a far improved salary or gig-based compensation model for ministry service serve our radical mission as Friends who believe that ministry should be freely given? Freely given by those with access to wealth?

This issue of wealth and power inequality is also a chicken-and-egg problem. We need public ministers to help us have conversations that will lead us to discern meaningfully our relationship with personal wealth and power. As the survey suggests, facilitators of these conversations are public ministers, even though they often have no formal recording. Indeed, that bold work around reimagining the economy is what many of us do now. And because we, Quakers, are not ready to consider new economic models within our local communities, these ministers ironically cannot always materially support themselves. We become poorly paid consultants, always in demand, increasingly scattered in our ability to meet that demand unless we have personal wealth and power in the outside world. Public ministers are living examples of wealth inequality. It is a problem of institutions, which by their nature move slowly, and spiritual leadings, which move with urgency, not being in right relationship. Our institutions have vast wealth.

Discernment and Recording Processes

This leads me to my second recommendation. Even in the absence of wealth equality, we need to move toward discernment and recording processes for public ministry that we have discerned anew from the rediscovered traditions of the past. There is a purpose for slow-moving institutions that store wealth for our wise use as well as a purpose for the urgency of ministry. These two disparate speeds of movement might be in an embrace, not at opposite poles. The institutions of Quakerism are the communities of Quakerism. They are living, changing organisms. Public ministry must engage here, not as a destructive force, but as a swift-footed and flexible member of the same community. We have not found it easy to do so.

Rob Peagler suggests in the Strong and Courageous panel that “the polarity between spiritual leading and having an institution and caring and feeding for [the institution], has always been there.” I argue that this seeming polarity is because of a misguided desire in Quakerism to be liberated from the world and to believe ourselves to be liberated from the world, to be accountable to nothing but a personal still, small voice. That is not working for us.

This critique of personal liberation and personal goodness runs throughout my ministry around right relationship. Overwhelmingly present, too, in FGC’s survey is a concern about communal accountability. This is where our institutions are the careful partners of any prophetic work. More than 70 percent of us believe that public ministry requires a recording process, even though very few of us are aware that any exist in the liberal tradition. 

Without reaching into our institutions to reclaim our accountability and support traditions for ministry and breathing new life into them, what we know we are left with is not an absence of public ministry — we see we have it, as indicated in the survey — but we have left ourselves without any way of discerning what is an uncomfortable prophetic truth we must confront and what is itself a replication of the kinds of power dynamics outside of Quakerism dressed in a prophetic hat. This confusion is a dynamic based on force and anxiety, not communal discernment. What this dynamic leaves us with, Friends, is a way to anxiously ignore prophetic voices corporately and to fail to elder and nurture them while also being forced, bullied, and misused by false prophets. 

I have started a brave argument that I will continue. I think we are indeed misused by false and yet visible “prophets” because they have social power in the outside world and seek to reinforce that or because they are simply relentless. We should not mistake either force for ministry. We should also not mistake our anxiety about change for what is right. Without discernment, what else can we do though? Recording processes are the stage for this discernment.

Eldering

The third recommendation I would like to offer is eldering. On the FGC co-sponsored panel on public ministry, Mary Linda McKinney pointed out that a call isn’t always accompanied by skills, “only energy.” I would add that a call is not always accompanied by wisdom. But this makes a call no less a call. A call is an orientation toward transformation. Why would those called to testify and facilitate not also need to be transformed with the community of transformation? As we know, we are not set apart. Creating places of wisdom development, of spiritual gifts to be explored, is one of the most precious gifts that our local communities can offer. Indeed, this may be the end goal of all public ministry: to transform our meetings into places where wisdom can manifest.

As I re-read what I have been called to testify to in this series of four essays, I remember with love the conversations I had with twenty-one public ministers, the close study of faith and practice documents throughout FGC meetings, the panel FGC held with Powell House for fourteen public ministers, and the testimony of the almost two hundred Friends who responded to FGC’s survey on public ministry. This is enough to build some clarity. As one respondent to the survey said “Let’s keep talking about it! Let’s keep seeing how it’s done and how it can be done. Let’s lift up people who are doing powerful public ministry.”

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This concludes our essay series on public ministry in the liberal tradition. The author, Windy Cooler, is an embraced public minister and member of Sandy Spring Meeting (Baltimore Yearly). She is serving as the administrator and researcher for Public Friends, convener of an emerging project to incubate new public ministry at the local meeting level, and is leading a series of free skills workshops for Quaker Leadership Center and Powell House on the practice of public ministry this fall. You can watch FGC and Powell House’s panel on public ministry here.