The Quaker testimony on equality began in worship, and it began with the experience that women were called by the Spirit of God to speak in the ministry.
Music in this episode:
Writing You a Letter © 2014 Carrie Newcomer BMI
Available on iTunes, Amazon.com and www.carrienewcomer.com
Further Resources:
- Subscribe to QuakerSpeak
- Read Marcelle Martin’s Friends Journal article “Inspiration from Quaker Women of the Past”
- Find Quakers near you on QuakerFinder and Friends Journal’s meeting listings
- Quaker Voluntary Service has opportunities for social and personal transformation through service work and living in Quaker community
Discussion Questions:
- Michael Birkel says that the “Quaker testimony on equality began in worship, and it began with the experience that women were called by the Spirit of God to speak in the ministry.” What is your experience of women being called by the Spirit of God?
- “To see my body and spirit as one piece is a big deal for me and I think for a lot of women.” What does Ashley mean by this? How does Quaker practice encourage us to see women as whole selves?
- Carole Spencer says that early Quaker women had a separate business meeting from the men, which sounds sexist but actually empowered women. How do you think this worked? Have you experienced a productive separation of genders?
- “Women are equal in ministry in Friends but are not given a similar voice in our culture at large—and hear messages from the day that they’re born that they should be quiet, shouldn’t speak.” How can Friends do more to support women in finding their authentic voices? How might their ministries look different from what we experiences as “traditional” ministry?
Transcript:
Carole Spencer
Quaker women have a voice. They have a history, they have a voice, they have the support of all of Quaker tradition in promoting the equality of women and promoting the ministry of women.
Women in Ministry
Ashley Wilcox
If we look at Jesus’s message, he spoke to women. He had women speaking on his behalf. That is a very ancient Christian tradition. I think Quakerism has shown that God is calling women to ministry—vocal ministry and public ministry—in ways that are Spirit-filled, and this has been happening for centuries.
Marcelle Martin
In my life, I began to have really powerful spiritual experiences and I wanted to understand them better, and so I looked in the Bible and I looked in history books to find out about other people who’d had similar experiences, and most of the accounts that I found were of men.
Carole Spencer
I think that the Quaker message—particularly to the wider church (if you think about the whole Catholic church, they still don’t ordain women)—I think Quakers do have a larger role to play if they want to be a movement within the broader Christian movement.
Equality
Michael Birkel
The Quaker testimony on equality began in worship, and it began with the experience that women were called by the Spirit of God to speak in the ministry.
Marcelle Martin
In the middle of the 17th century—1650s—there was a whole community of people who understood that women were the spiritual equals of men and they could be equally empowered by the Spirit to give a prophetic message and to be ministers as men were.
Carole Spencer
It was a lay movement. It was a movement where both men and women, young and old, rich and poor—all, if they were led by the spirit, filled with the spirit, they could be preachers.
Marcelle Martin
It was not just a singular woman here, and it wasn’t just a woman who was sent into a convent. It was a whole community of women living in the world who were understood to be empowered by God with a message.
Carole Spencer
They loved to quote that verse in Acts that says that both your men and your women shall prophesy. Everyone will prophesy with the spirit. They loved to quote that. They were bringing in this new movement, this kingdom of God that was going to change things and women were a part of it.
Women’s Liberation Movement
Michael Birkel
Some people feel that this was perhaps the most threatening of early Quaker ideas to their contemporaries and the one that got Quakers most in trouble because once you open the door to women’s equality before the spirit of God in worship it opens other doors to women’s equality in other dimensions of life.
Carole Spencer
The early Quaker women had their own business meetings, separate meetings. It sounds kind of sexist, but actually it was really good for women because they could do their own thing and they could learn how to be leaders and how to organize and how to run committees and how to run meetings. So by the 19th century when there actually was a women’s movement of political change—Quakers didn’t change the political structure, but when there actually was this movement towards reform and women’s suffrage—Quakers were the backbone of that movement because they knew how to organize and lead and get things done.
So Quakerism opened a huge door for women and we can be really thankful that the male Quakers actually defended women’s doing of this. They actually defend them publicly in their speaking and in their writings.
Ministry Today
Ashley Wilcox
I feel like part of my ministry has been embodied as a young woman and I give messages about that sometimes—about how difficult it has been for me to see my body as a whole because in our culture women’s bodies are dissected and you only see little bits of it and so to see my body and spirit as one piece is a big deal for me and I think for a lot of women.
“More Work to Do
Ashley Wilcox
Women are equal in ministry in Friends but are not given a similar voice in our culture at large—and hear messages from the day that they’re born that they should be quiet, shouldn’t speak. I feel like Friends need to do more to encourage women to find their voices, find their authentic voices and share their ministry even if it looks different from what we’ve seen as traditional ministry.
Is it possible to have these videos translated into Spanish? I was thinking maybe having just the words at the bottom in Spanish. I know of a woman pastor in Bolivia that would really enjoy and use this video in her ministry.
thank you for printing the transcript-sometimes I do not feel leisurely enough to watch a video!!
Kristen,
If you want a spanish translation to the transcript you can get one in about a minute by visiting this website: http://www.spanishdict.com/translation
and pasting the english transcript from the website. You could then email the link with the spanish transcript to your friend.
Amazing what is possible in this electronic age.
In faith and friendship,
Walter
Women as ministers was a revolutionary idea because it placed women in leadership roles. Beginning with Margaret Fell, continuing with Mary Dyer who was hung largely because of her sex in Boston and her Quaker ministry, I think this is what made the Quaker faith different in the mid-1600’s. These women did meet Quaker resistence, but it failed. It paved the way for Quaker women, like Lucretia Mott, who gained experience in chairing the women’s meeting for business and later as a national figure for the abolition of slaves. Thank you for the wonderful video.
Thanks so much, Jon and Friends Journal and your guests and all working with you, for bringing this series. Each week is a delightful new surprise, and I can feel you working hard and faithfully. The video production is great, the editing is tight and well-focussed, the themes are important and contemporary. Am I excited? You bet!
I particularly value that you are showing that this particular social testimony-to-the-world is based on something other than Enlightenment doctrines about “the Rights of Man [sic!]” and democratic theory. I feel disappointed when our attempts to explain our views and experience do NOT start with the transformative, underlying, religious experience on which all else is premised and from which our Testimonies flow, as “fruits” and not “roots.” God—the Spirit of the Living Christ, the work of the Divine Light in our souls —must always be our starting place if we’re not to come across as yet another Good Cause or point on the political landscapte.
I’m as interested in “Rights” as the next Quaker or political activist, and have amassed a number of credits on that score which it would be unseemly to try to list here. Standing with and standing up for those who have been denied their Human Rights based on any number of arbitrary factors is important work, and can indeed flow from our religious commitments. The problems I’ve had in Quaker circles (particularly in my own self-styled “Liberal” branch) is when we convey only a secularized version, or basically a left-wing political program with a “spiritual”-sounding gloss.
These videos, however, I want to repeat have in my view hit the right note and will go a long ways toward our continuing to be “Publishers of Truth.”
Gratefully, —DHF
Loved this video! Thanks for doing this subject, I loved it! Maggie Moon
I, too, am very grateful for the hard work and faithfulness that is so evident in these video recordings. And I appreciated the contributions made by each woman who was interviewed in this one. This discussion on the little known historic role of women in Quaker ministry and its connection with the women’s suffrage movement is very important today! And to know that those 17th c. men vehemently defended women as being equally able to speak truth in the Spirit! A quotation by Fox in this regard so excited me the first time I read it, that I chose it as one I had to put to song. A couple of years ago, a local Catholic lay leader who’d heard the recording of it, asked me to sing it throughout the day at their retreat, the culminating event of a year of study to do with women in Christianity. As someone who left my Catholic roots in large part because of the policy on women, I was thrilled to share these words: “And may not the Spirit of Christ speak in the female, as well as in the male? Who is it that dare limit the holy one of Israel? For the light is the same in the male and in the female, and it cometh from Christ… And who is it that dare stop Christ’s mouth?” — George Fox, 1656
Kristen & Walter,
While it is quite helpful to be able to take an English transcript and have it nearly instantly rendered in Spanish, I can see how having Spanish or other languages translated as phrase-by-phrase text on the screen would help to connect the speaker on the screen to the words they are speaking. It could be a more powerful experience for the viewer. My intent here is to share in what I suspect was Kristen’s intent in her request.