Following meeting for worship, there will be an adult enrichment session on the topic Basic Quaker Practice. Three Key Quaker Roles: Ministers, Stewards, and Witnesses.
There are four short videos available: Three Key Quaker Roles, Minister, Steward, and Witness.
One approach that has helped us embody Quaker practice is to consider how to carry out these three key roles that we take on as Quakers: minister, steward, and witness. As everyone is a Child of God with direct access to the Divine, Quakers expect each of of us to be a minister and take responsibility for the spiritual work of the Religious Society of Friends. In that spiritual work, as ministers tend our inward lives; the stewards tend our outward lives; and the witnesses tend our public lives.
A Friend once blurted out, “But Meeting shouldn’t take over my entire life!” Then I saw the realization across her face as she said, “Oh,” acknowledging the reality that that is the intent. We give over our entire lives to the Spirit to become a pattern that bears witness to God manifest in all life and every relationship: changing, transforming, empowering us and our beloved community. It’s not something we dabble in, it’s a whole-body experience, a life-changing commitment.
As Quakers, we experience the Spirit in the direct relationships among people and with nature in the fabric of life, and so our spiritual lives grow in relationship with others and the natural world. The meeting is not just the people attending on a particular day. Every member has a unique experience of the Spirit, plays a unique part in forming who “we” are as a community, and may be the source of the insight we need. The quality of our growth in our primary roles grows in relationship to others, and determines the quality and maturity of the body of the Meeting as a whole.
I’ll speak separately on each role: minister, steward, and witness. But Quakers also recognize the role of elder, one who tends and nurtures the meeting community as ‘a whole body’. Elders offer attention and feedback that nurtures the individuals and the meeting as a whole. But one cannot take on the role of elder. It’s a role someone grows into when others turn to and rely on that particular person.
Quakerism is not an idea or notion we imagine being true. It’s a practice in ourselves and in a community that humbles and changes us, which takes time, patience, consistency, and openness even in the face of challenges. Our roles as a minister, steward, and witness change us. They temper, humble, and liberate us.
Being a Minister
As a minister, we tend to our inward lives. We tend the inward life in oneself, others, and the community both in the easy, glorious, all-is-well times and in the hard, broken times of inadequacy and failing. A minister opens to the Spirit, seeks revelation, celebrates life, offers gratitude, and heals to become whole, reintegrating the broken parts of us as people and as a community.
We invest in our own spiritual lives and experience through the gifts of solitude, stillness, and contemplative prayer that we carry with us into our everyday lives, experiencing our daily lives as praying without ceasing. Ministers study religious texts and “learn the language of the inner landscape,” in Bill Taber’s words. We engage in the tendering and tempering of spiritual companions, to grow in our own spiritual understanding and expression. And as we grow, we arrive to meeting for worship, fresh and prepared, expecting spiritual revelation in worship and offering vocal ministry.
As ministers, we also offer spiritual support, feedback, hospitality, counsel, and testimony to others, being present and allow others to see our example in the richness of our lives and in how we find the Spirit where we are broken and human. Ministers model and encourage spiritual life and companionship within the meeting community.
Being a Steward
As a steward, we tend to our outward lives. Quakers shape our outward lives to reflect the inward experience. As stewards, we live faithfully, both in that we trust direct, mystical experience of the divine, and in that seek integrity by yielding to spiritual guidance. We submit every element of our lives to spiritual scrutiny, especially in caring for the temporal needs of ourselves, our families, the meeting, our wider communities and society, and the natural world in which we live.
Stewards also develop our capacity for discernment, the ability to comprehend the inner nature and relationship of things, especially when obscure, that leads to keen insight and judgment. To do so, we learn to test discernment. The primary tests are: a sense of the Spirit; persistence in silence; simplicity; seemingly trivial or impossible, not willfulness or desired; integrity in honesty, authenticity, and consistency; documentation in texts of other spiritual communities; writing or expression; reflection and feedback from others; and fruits of the Spirit, such as joy, peace, strength, compassion, beauty, truth, equality, and liberty.
Note, the word steward replaces the historic term, overseer. In biblical times, overseers managed the outward forms such as ritual objects and the collection of alms for the poor, but the term became used for those controlling slaves, so we replaced the term with steward.
Being a Witness
As a witness, we tend to our public lives. Witness for Quakers takes several forms. We:
Let our life speak through the fruits of faithful living, we become examples of God manifest in human form that witness to the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, strength, compassion, beauty, truth, equality, and liberty.
Testify in our meeting community to the insight and directions of our spiritual experiment. We season our testimony with spiritual companions, before asking the monthly meeting for reflection and feedback. But this opens our experiment with spiritual life and guidance to others.
Others then call on us to ask us if something is loving, true, right, and just, because they see us test every element of our own lives, and so find us reliable, insightful witnesses.
Testify in the larger community and society to the Spirit in human affairs, to what is loving, true, and just that is essential for a religious society. Quaker practice is not an individual practice of individual enlightenment, but of beloved community and society.
Document in public record of how the Spirit is manifest in a religious society over generations. We seek a beloved society in which we order every relationship with others and the natural world in accord with the Spirit. So we enter our insights and practices into public record, through writing, art, song, curriculum, law, and court record.
Both the unearned sufferings and developmental advantages of Quaker practice carry obligations and opportunities to witness to the Spirit in our communities and larger society.