by Bill Taber
Printed originally in What Canst Thou Say? (February 1998) and reprinted inDiscovering God as Companion, edited by Mariellen Gilpin.
Although I had occasionally spoken in Friends meetings since I was seventeen, I was not recorded as a minister by my unprogrammed meeting at Barnesville, Ohio, until I was about thirty-nine. The recording process followed the usual pattern. First, Ministry and Oversight Committee discussed my possible recording without my knowledge and then asked me if I were willing to be recorded, assuming that the monthly meeting agreed to it.
At first I was not sure I should accept, since I was in the process of becoming a released Friend for Ohio Yearly Meeting and did not want it to seem as if I were becoming a paid minister. However my wife and I agreed to feel out (an old Quaker term meaning discernment) the question in a time of silent waiting. To my surprise, both of us sensed that I should accept—not for my sake but because it was important to allow the meeting to recognize the work of God in its midst.
When I said an inward “yes” it was as if a hand were laid on the back of my neck. In my letter allowing the meeting of ministry and oversight to lay this proposal before the monthly meeting, I wrote that if the meeting did see fit to record me, I recognized that I would be accountable to the meeting in the right exercise of my gift.
Having read a number of Quaker journals, I took this matter of being accountable to the meeting quite seriously, although I assumed that being recorded would make little difference other than that I would now attend the meetings of Ministry and Oversight and that I would often be asked to sit on the facing bench.
For whatever reason, the gift increased after I was recorded and I often spoke in my home meeting and the many meetings I visited, as well as in meetings at Olney Friends School. It was not uncommon for one or more people to tell me—often with tears in their eyes—that I had spoken to their condition or that I had answered a question in their mind. Sometimes I worried about how easy it had become for me to speak to people’s conditions—I no longer felt the familiar shaking and quaking but had become attuned to the delicate but clear presence of the inward motion out of which living ministry flows.
After several years this ease came to an end, and I found that it became harder and harder to speak in meeting. I often had a strong sense of the message which a given meeting needed to hear—but I found that if I rose to speak, an invisible wall went up between me and the hearers. I knew my words were doing no good at all.
Eventually I remembered reading about this phenomenon in the journal of Ann Branson. She wrote that even if a minister had a true sense of the state of the meeting, it will only add to the minister’s confusion to speak without a very clear leading from the Holy Spirit. So I accepted the fact that I was going through a period when—even though I might have an accurate sense of the state of the meeting—I was not to minister with outward words.
Gradually I learned that it was possible to sink much deeper into worship and that when I did sense the need for a message, I could silently pray that the message be spoken by someone else or that it become manifest in the lives of the people present without my words.
Gradually I learned that the most powerful ministry is a wordless radiation of the Love of God. As I began to experience this secret, undramatic, invisible ministry flowing out from me, I realized that my sometimes dramatic gifts in the ministry had depended all along on the secret, silent ministry of a woman here or a man there who never spoke in meeting. With humility I came to understand how their ministry of being deeply present to God and then radiating the Love of Jesus Christ is the most important ministry of all, for it helps everyone in meeting come into a state of living communion and transformation. Words are important, of course—they can be a matter of life and death—but they are only words. What really counts is the powerful transformation of human character which can occur in a meeting deeply gathered into the body of Christ.
Before these insights I had had an intellectual and poetic understanding that the vocal minister is merely an extension of the meeting, of the body of Christ. Now I had experienced how this is so, and I had also experienced how each of us is called to the most powerful ministry—the ministry of secret, silent radiation. When I began to understand all this, I could once again speak in meeting.