Event This Saturday: An Opportunity With Tom Hamm

Over the past several months, as we have walked with Tom Hamm on the blog through the long, uneven landscape of Quaker public ministry, something surprising has taken shape. Taken together, these ministers George Fox, Priscilla Hunt Cadwallader, John Woolman, Lucretia Mott, Joseph Hoag, Elias Hicks, Joseph John Gurney, John Wilbur, and David B Updegraff do not simply offer a string of biographies. They create a living field of tension and possibility, a kind of spiritual map for understanding the work we are doing now.

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Fox stands at one edge of this field, grounded and fierce, convinced that God is speaking still and that ordinary people can and must act on what they hear. Woolman moves quietly nearby, carrying his tender conscience into every corner of life, refusing the comforts that numb a people to injustice. Priscilla Hunt Cadwallader crosses meeting lines with an unmistakable clarity of Spirit, her life revealing both the power of women's ministry and the fragility of community support.

Joseph Hoag holds the doorway, steady and exacting, his lantern turned inward as much as outward, urging Friends not to drift into complacency. Lucretia Mott steps into the public square with a courage that startles even now, her ministry widening the world of Friends as much as it challenged the structures around her. Elias Hicks appears as the minister who believed he was merely disappearing into God, while others saw him as a force that could divide a room. Then Joseph John Gurney rises on the far side, warm, charismatic, eager to knit Quaker life into the wider evangelical world. John Wilbur follows like a counterweight, stubbornly faithful to what he believed early Friends had entrusted to him. And finally David B Updegraff arrives with a blaze of revivalist energy, sweeping whole communities into a new kind of experience entirely.

When held together, these stories form something like a long conversation, a continuing revelation, about what it means for the Spirit to move through human beings who never shed their humanity. The struggles between them echo questions still alive among us: How much change can a community tolerate before it begins to fray? What kind of ministry builds up the Body, and what kind overwhelms it? How do gifts grow in people who are not perfect, not finished, not easy?

Fox unsettled the hollow pieties of his age, but he also unsettled the people who tried to anchor the movement he helped birth. Woolman’s tenderness exposed the quiet habits of harm others preferred not to see. Mott’s clarity carried her beyond the borders of her meeting, and eventually brought her meeting along behind her. Hoag’s moral steadiness pressurized communities that had grown weary of inward discipline. Hicks and Gurney each believed they were safeguarding the essence of Quaker faith, yet their ministries pulled entire yearly meetings apart. Wilbur tried to keep the center from collapsing and in doing so created a new center entirely. Updegraff drew hundreds to their feet in tears and song, leaving Friends to wonder what still counted as Quaker worship.

It is rare to look across so many ministers and notice how each one stretches or reveals something the others cannot. One embodies courage, another tenderness, another reproof, another innovation, another caution. Public ministry becomes less a single gift and more a landscape where many gifts, temperaments, and temperaments in excess must find a way to coexist. And the communities around them must decide whether they will become containers large enough for these gifts or fracture under the strain.

This Saturday, Tom Hamm will gather these threads in one place. He will offer about thirty minutes of teaching as a way of opening the landscape once more, and then he will linger with those who gather for questions and conversation. It will be a time to sit with the fullness of these stories and to notice what they stir in us now.

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It is also simply a chance to show Tom some love. His generosity with this material, his years of careful scholarship, his deep affection for the tradition, and his willingness to walk with us through its more tangled passages have been gifts to the Incubator and to all who have been listening.

If something in these stories has caught your attention a question, a restlessness, a moment of recognition you are warmly invited to join us. Bring your curiosity, your gratitude, your wondering. Come listen with others. Come help us thank Tom for helping us see our tradition with wider eyes and steadier hearts.

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If you are looking for more content on historic and modern public ministry, join us in the day and hours before Tom's event at Quaker Theological Discussion Group's annual conference. Eight great panelists from all over the world talking about Quaker public ministry? Yes!