Скачать или смотреть How Quaker Meetings Support Ministry

While Quakers believe that we all can be ministers, some are given leadings to commit themselves to ministries deeper and farther afield. How do meetings help discern and support these leadings?

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Filmed and edited by Jon Watts: http://jonwatts.com
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⇒⇒Transcript:

Viv Woodland: The expression “It takes a village to raise a child” can be applied to many endeavors. Rarely does one person actually go out by his or herself and change the world. Positive changes happen because communities work together to do good.

How Quaker Meetings Support Ministry
Benigno Sanchez-Eppler: Quakerism has ambitions about everyone being a minister. Another way of saying that, that I like a lot, is that there’s no laity here.

Callid Keefe-Perry: We’re all called to ministry. That’s true. It’s kind of the full embodiment of the priesthood of all believers. And, at times, we think God calls some of us, more than others, to greater service.

What is Quaker Ministry?
Callid Keefe-Perry: It’s a movement of love. It’s a realization that we couldn’t all lift up and go and live lives either in traveling ministry or in site-based ministry… whatever it is. It wouldn’t necessarily be viable, we might not able to pay rent or do things like this. So yes, base-level, all called to ministry. And at some times, some are called to a greater ministry for a season.

Ralph Greene: And within the context of the old Quaker concept of what ministry was all about, the old idea was that a recorded minister had the responsibility to speak to the wider world. So not just be confined to the meeting, but speak truth to power.

Viv Woodland: We have these beautiful examples of Friends who have traveled outside of this community in order to share their gifts with others, and yet have been grounded in this community while doing so.

Why Meetings Support Ministers

Doug Gwyn: As Tom Gates says in his Pendle Hill pamphlet on membership, you know, it’s the responsibility of the meeting to bring people to an expectation that they will have leadings. It enriches the life of the meeting, obviously, to have a good array of voices speaking the truth as it has come through them.

Viv Woodland: The experience of Friends for hundreds of years has been that a system of support from one’s religious community is incredibly useful as a check and balance on doing God’s work.

Jan Hoffman: For me in particular, I have had a hard time discerning voices in me. What is the message? What is not the message?

Ralph Greene: I’ve always felt a sense of affirmation by the fact that I was recorded. And I’ve worked with most of the pastoral meetings in New England—mostly in Maine—and there’s been an appreciation of that. It’s an access into the wider community.

Benigno Sanchez-Eppler: So in other denominations, you have a seminary, you have a particular course of preparation, you have missionary experience. And we have less of that, but most of all we have the possibility of supporting individuals to break out in freedom in a particular direction for their gifts, for their calling.

More: http://fdsj.nl/support-ministry
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The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.