Eldership and Ministry: A Spiritual Friendship

windycooler
13h
7 min read

I want to share something tender and important that has been unfolding in my life and in the life of the Incubator. It has to do with friendship, accompaniment, and the kind of spiritual companionship that changes how you move in the world. It has to do with my relationship with my friends and elders, like Deborah Shaw. Deborah's recent recorded conversation with me about the Gift of Eldership is the gift I want to share with you today. That and her book list. :)

Deborah and I first really met at the Quaker Institute that the Quaker Leadership Center and Pendle Hill held together this year. I had seen her name around but did not know her, not really. Just before I stood to give a presentation, she came toward me with such steadiness that it felt like she had simply followed a thread the Spirit had placed in her hands. She held my hand. She stayed close. She sat where she could see me and help me hold my center. When someone asked about eldership, I turned to her without thinking because the answer was already embodied in the room. That was the beginning.

Since then, our relationship has felt like something that simply belongs. I trust her. I feel seen by her. She feels familiar to me in the way certain people do when they arrive at exactly the moment you needed them, even when you did not know to name the need.

Sitting With What Elders Actually Do

During our conversation, Deborah described the work of eldership using a list gathered by elder Fran Taber. It is a long list, but hearing it in Deborah’s voice, it felt like one thing with many expressions:

Nurturing the spiritual lives of individuals
Paying attention to worship
Helping someone test or name a leading
Supporting ministry in all its forms
Listening in the way that asks nothing of the person speaking except their own truth
Teaching, when needed
Staying with someone who cannot speak for themselves
Safeguarding the integrity of the meeting

When she speaks about this work, it never sounds like a role. Everything she described felt rooted in deep care. The kind of care that keeps a community honest and awake. The kind of care that holds people together during hard moments. The kind of care that is willing to sit in the quiet with someone and let the truth rise when it is ready.

She said something that has stayed with me: that often the most needed thing is simple presence. Not guidance, not a perfect response, not expertise. Just the willingness to sit beside someone in their trembling or their clarity or their confusion. I have felt that from her.

How Our Relationship Lives in Me

One thing I appreciate about Deborah is that she refuses any elevation. She will make a joke about being “queen of the universe,” but she is sincere when she says she does not belong on any pedestal. She talks openly about the places where she has stumbled, and she does so without shame. It makes room for the rest of us to breathe.

It makes room for truth.

I also see in her the rare ability to be with conflict without becoming part of the tangle. She can hear two sides of a story that do not match and hold each one with love. She can stay with the person in front of her long enough that the deeper truth emerges on its own. I called her a “doula of healthy conflict,” and I meant it. She does not solve things. She helps things come forward.

The Soil That Formed Her

As we talked, I began to understand the long arc of the elders who shaped her. She told me about Jane Webster, who treated her as a full human being when she was still a teenager. She told me about her spiritual mentor, Carol Treadway, whose quiet, steady presence has guided her for fifty years. And about the elders she traveled with, worked with, taught with, and prayed with over the decades.

Listening to her, I could feel the lineage in her voice. The way she learned to trust the small nudges of the Spirit, even when they made no sense in the moment. She told a story about bringing an old journal to a gathering, not knowing why, and discovering that it held a forgotten truth that another Friend needed to hear — a truth that allowed her to reclaim her ministry after a wound. The Spirit uses whatever we will carry.

What I Carry Forward as a Minister

As a public minister, I am constantly learning how much this work depends on accompaniment. Fourteen years ago, my elder Joan named me a public minister and promised to stand with me in it. That promise became a kind of ground under my feet. Much of what I am doing now, including the Incubator, grew from that ground.

Deborah is part of that ground too. She shows me, by how she lives, what a mature elder looks like: attentive, curious, anchored, willing to be changed, willing to change others through love. She offers presence that steadies me, and others, without requiring anything preformed by her own judgement. That is a rare gift.

What I Hope Meetings Will Remember

Meetings need elders. Not in the sense of a position or a committee, but in the sense of human beings who practice careful attention and deep listening. People who can help the truth come to the surface without force. People who know the difference between acting from love and acting from fear. People who can help a meeting navigate the tender places without doing more harm.

Our communities hurt each other sometimes. It is unavoidable. But when elders are present in their gifts, repair becomes possible. Not quick repair. Not tidy repair. Real repair.

What Sits at the Center

Toward the end of our time together, Deborah spoke about her sense of call, and it landed in me with a kind of quiet clarity. She said that the shape of her life is an attempt to offer God’s unconditional love into the world, especially to people who have never received it from another human being.

That is eldering at its deepest. It is ministry. It is spiritual friendship. It is the soil from which new life grows.

I am grateful to be walking beside her. I am grateful for the ways Spirit keeps drawing us into work that neither of us could do alone.

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Deborah Shaw was born into a Quaker family. Her first six years were spent in Pennsylvania, attending an unprogrammed meeting weekly, remaining in worship from infancy after an hour of First Day School. This weekly time of expectant waiting worship within a faith community has continued throughout her life to be her refuge, solace, challenge, instruction, and joy. Her family’s moves created opportunities to worship with Friends in Arizona and California. Later, attending Olney Friends School in southeastern Ohio felt like a homecoming to her. Rooted in the Conservative flavor of Quakerism, it felt sweetly familiar, especially since her paternal grandfather had been a part of Iowa Conservative Friends. When she eventually settled in North Carolina, she was grateful to once again find her place among Conservative Friends.

Her years attending and later working at Guilford College, the only Quaker college in the South, had a profound impact on her. All branches of Friends are represented in that region, and seasoned Friends from around the world regularly visit and teach. A major turning point came when she was chosen as North Carolina Yearly Meeting’s representative to the 1985 World Gathering of Young Friends, held at Guilford. Gathering with more than 300 young Friends from around the world and across the Quaker spectrum challenged her to articulate what was particular to her own interior landscape, to authentically share with these dear Friends what was most precious to her: her faith and her journey with God.

As a decades-long member of Friendship Friends Meeting (North Carolina Yearly Meeting – Conservative), she has served as clerk and recording clerk at both the monthly and yearly meeting levels. She is currently co-clerk of Friendship Meeting and assistant clerk of the yearly meeting. For ten years, she served on the committee revising the yearly meeting’s Faith and Practice. Her service also includes time on the Pendle Hill board, including a period as clerk, and work on the Executive Committee of Friends Association for Higher Education.

Deborah retired in 2018 after spending the previous 25 years primarily accompanying young adult Friends (and fellow travelers) attending Guilford College. She has long felt called to accompany others into the Presence of God, to validate physical manifestations of “Spirit poured on flesh,” to listen in tongues, to be a compassionate and non-judgmental presence for countless seekers, and to help create safe spiritual space—all with the aid of the Holy Spirit. This way of being in the world has translated naturally into leading retreats in many places. In all these settings, she especially delights in entering into the Presence of God with others in the old Quaker practice of having an “opportunity.”

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Four whole days of thanks on the blog!

This Thanksgiving, the Friends Incubator blog is spending a week with four public ministers whose names still echo in the bones of our meetings: Elias Hicks, Joseph John Gurney, John Wilbur, and David Benjamin Updegraff. Their fiery convictions, ministry travels, and sometimes-colliding visions reshaped 19th-century Quakerism and fractured communities that had once imagined themselves as a single spiritual family. From quietist reform to evangelical zeal, from warnings about “cheap grace” to the rise of pastoral Friends, these ministers did not simply preach—they transformed the landscape of Quaker faithfulness. Join us all week as we explore their lives and legacies through Tom Hamm’s remarkable lectures, and consider what their choices invite us to notice in our own communities and conflicts today.