What is spoken ministry for?

Quaker worship is not sitting in silence.

Many Quaker meetings are completely silent almost every week. In a meeting like this, where no-one speaks for weeks or months on end, people come on a Sunday ‘to enjoy the silence’. This is not Quaker worship. It is a symptom.

The early Quaker theologian Robert Barclay explained why the first Quakers did not worship in complete silence:

“for as our worship consisteth not in words, so neither in silence; but in an holy dependence of the mind upon God: from which dependence silence necessarily follows in the first place, until words can be brought forth, which are from God’s Spirit.”

(Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 1676)

In other words, silence is a way of preparing the mind, so that we can speak from the inspiration of the Spirit. 

Silence is a powerful means for stilling the mind and opening the heart to divine guidance. It can also become a convenient defence, when we use it to hide from each other and to withdraw into our private thoughts. We can retreat into silence to cover up a lack of intimacy and avoid the fear of criticism.

Authentic spoken ministry makes us vulnerable. It is often raw, unpolished and emotional. It is sometimes drawn from painful personal experience. This is almost impossible in a group where people don’t know and trust each other. We worry that our words will be misunderstood or someone will take offence at the language we use. We don’t want to expose the intimate reality of our spiritual experience to people we only ever talk to briefly after meeting, and have never got to know well enough to trust.

In a Quaker community, we are all ministers. This means we are all called to minister to each other. This is the purpose of spoken ministry in worship.

Words that come from a place of spiritual intimacy have the power to speak to our hearts. The actual message is often less important than the condition of the speaker that communicates itself to the whole meeting. Ministry like this can help us to break through the repetitive circling of our solitary thoughts, and open us to wider possibilities of vision and connection. In George Fox’s words:

“the intent of all speaking is to bring into the life, and to walk in, and to possess the same, and to live in and enjoy it, and to feel God's presence”

(Something further concerning silent meetings, 1657)

How many of us have had the joy of hearing living ministry like this, or come to meeting in the expectation of receiving or offering it?

If we want to experience the full potential of Quaker worship, we need to know each other well enough to risk being vulnerable. A group of people who only meet once a week to sit in silence for an hour is not a community. We grow into trust by sharing our lives, our joys and sadness, by coming close enough to care for each other. And when we join with our friends in worship, instead of hiding behind a comfortable private silence, we have to be brave enough to share what we have found.

Have you experienced the power of living spoken ministry? How do speech and silence nourish you?