Why Traveling Ministry Is Vital for Quakers in the 21st Century

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Discussion Questions:

• Noah Baker Merrill says, “No local community is going to have all of the gifts that are needed. This is a way of sharing that much more broadly and trusting that when we open ourselves to God’s abundance we really can be given everything we need.” Do you agree? How might your local Quaker community benefit from receiving a traveling minister?
• Who are the Friends outside of your local Meeting community who have had a major impact on your faith journey?

Transcript:

Noah Baker Merrill
The Quaker movement is sort of like an original edition of the network Church. From the beginning, it has been about this life-changing spiritual movement where people who are coming alive in these spiritual practices are transmitting that energy and that fire from each node in that network, from community to community to community.
Like the circulatory system in the body, helping the oxygen flow to all the places that it’s needed, the traveling ministers were, and are, this crucial means of maintaining the wholeness of the tradition and of helping the movement be aware of itself.

Why Traveling Ministry Is Vital for Quakers in the 21st Century

Kristin Olson-Kennedy
Traveling ministry amongst the religious society of Friends comes out of the concept that every person is a minister. As we travel in the ministry, what that means is that I’ve been called to take that of God within me to people outside of my home community, and sometimes that’s to another monthly meeting. Sometimes that’s to a different yearly meeting, and sometimes that’s across the globe.

Experiencing Quakerism Through Another Lens

Kristin Olson-Kennedy
I think it’s really important to be able to broaden our definition of Quaker, to be able to broaden who we are as a Quaker. We do that by interactions with people who are not like us.

Jim Anderson
In a world in which we typically have our own little kind of cardboard images of Quakers from other traditions, what we need to get beyond that is to have a person whose life is shaped by some other tradition come and engage with us.

Gloria Thompson
For example, I’m accustomed to programmed meeting. Send me to the unprogrammed. Send me to the evangelical over there in California or the Western part of the United States. Send me out so that you can bring something fresh to the people and I think that’s what they’re seeking after. Something to renew their minds and wake up.

The Cure for Isolation

Nancy Wallace
Meetings can become very isolated and sort of self focused, and having a minister come in is just a very opening experience. They provide a new viewpoint that is just really quite remarkable.

Kenya Casanova Sales
For Cubans, we were isolated for around 20 to 30 years. So the first time that we received traveling ministers after that isolation was a very big blessing for Cuba’s Yearly Meeting. To listen about Friends, about what are Friends doing in other countries, what are their experiences. And we felt that we were not alone in the world.

Renewing Our Faith

Kenya Casanova Sales
At first, it encourages your faith, and that’s a very important thing. We have learned to listen, we have learned to be open, to be open-minded to other approaches to the Spirit.

Jim Anderson
It’s just a healthy and enlarging opportunity for us to welcome guests into our home, our Quaker home, receive them with hospitality, even if in a certain sense they might be strangers, and learn from them, and give them our own experience to carry to the next place.

Strengthening Our Meetings

Kristin Olson-Kennedy
The Friends World Committee for Consultation is starting a traveling ministry corps. This particular group of people will be traveling between the branches of Quakerism to be able to enhance and increase the communication and understanding between the branches of Quakerism.

Noah Baker Merrill
Traditionally and still in many places today, the arrival of a traveling minister would be a reason to have a Meeting for Worship, because who knew what the Spirit was going to do in that moment? And often a Meeting that’s struggling with a particular issue hears something that they need to hear from that visitor who’s come in, or maybe there’s a gift that person has for pastoral care or to recognize someone else in that local community that’s just right on the edge of bursting into flame in terms of their spiritual life or their direction, their vocation in the world.

Kristin Olson-Kennedy
When we bring in another piece of the puzzle into that community, all of the sudden maybe we see things a little differently. Maybe we understand things in a new way. Maybe a brand new perspective has been given to us so that us as a community gets to grow also.

Jim Anderson
People from another Meeting, even in our own tradition, bring to it a kind of freshness, the kinds of questions that we normally wouldn’t ask one another.

Noah Baker Merrill
No local community is going to have all of the gifts that are needed. This is a way of sharing that much more broadly and trusting that when we open ourselves to God’s abundance we really can be given everything we need.

The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.