Grief and Creativity in Public Ministry: Why This Recent Public Conversation Mattered

We do many public events at the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry. When I recently gathered with a group of seekers for the conversation with my dear friend and fellow public minister Lynette Davis, Grief and Creativity in Public Ministry, I could sense immediately that people were arriving with their own tender stories. We were a room full of people who knew something about sorrow and about longing. And as soon as Lynette and I began talking, it became clear that what we were exploring together was not an abstract theme. It was something everyone in that room understood in their bodies.

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The evening was not polished or dramatic. It was honest. It felt like the kind of spiritual companionship that happens in the best corners of our tradition, where Friends gather because truth is stirring and needs attending to. What we talked about matters profoundly for anyone living a public ministry among Friends.

Grief as the Soil of Calling

Early in the conversation, I reflected on how much of Lynette’s ministry has been shaped by grief. She nodded. Her earliest days among Friends were marked by befriending an elderly Friend who was dying. She stayed with him until hospice, witnessing the end of life not from a distance but from the bedside. That experience shaped her understanding of what it means to accompany someone. It shaped her calling.

And looking around that evening, I realized that this is true for many of us. Many Friends who enter public ministry arrive carrying spiritual wounds. They come seeking chosen family and a community where their broken places do not make them unwelcome. Our grief becomes part of our spiritual autobiography, the place where the Spirit first meets us with clarity.

Grief does not stand outside ministry. Grief reveals ministry.

Lynette’s Creative Practices: Grief Becoming Generativity

One of the most powerful parts of the evening was hearing Lynette describe the creative practices that helped her live through grief and transform it. Her examples were vivid and deeply rooted in theopoetics, the imaginative expression of faith through art and embodied practice.

Her grandmother’s death

When her grandmother died at Thanksgiving, Lynette began writing letters to her. Those letters turned into journal entries, capturing the small details of what she missed and the many ways her grandmother had enlivened her. Over time, poetry emerged. She wrote about her grandmother as bold, fabulous, passionate. Soon she was generating new metaphors, images and even fiction.

She said she could take all of that content and those memories and create something new with them, creating possibility and potentiality. This was grief turning into generativity.

Lynette cites Afrofuturism as a creative response to the grief of systemic injustice. Image Credit: Kaylan F. Michael, under the moniker of Lost In The Island. Michael is a Canadian-based artist and graphic designer.

Her spiritual grief about scripture

Lynette also spoke about grieving the Bible as a Black feminist and womanist. She had never seen herself in the biblical women whose stories were often reduced or dismissed. Her response was to write Bible fanfic. She reimagined these women’s lives and fleshed out their stories until she could finally recognize herself reflected in them. What had been a spiritual wound became a place of creative reclamation.

For Friends in public ministry, these are not simply touching stories. They are models of how grief becomes a spiritual resource.

Why This Matters for Quaker Public Ministers

Everything Lynette shared speaks directly to the work Friends in public ministry are called to do.

1. Grief shapes calling

Most public ministers do not come to ministry because life has been easy. We come because something broke open in us. Loss, disorientation and longing often reveal our callings. Naming this truth helps others understand that their wounds can also be places of revelation.

2. Imagination is essential to ministry

During the event, I said that the minister’s work involves taking all of the mess and not pretending it is not there. If we hope to help a meeting believe that tomorrow could be better, we must begin with imagination. This is not fantasy. It is theopoetic imagination, grounded in Spirit, that helps us see what could be possible in community.

Creativity offsets the heaviness of grief. It gives us hope and opens space for transformation.

3. Creative grief is prophetic grief

Public ministers often carry a prophetic responsibility. We name what is broken and also what could be restored. That clarity comes when our grief has been engaged, not ignored. Lynette’s examples showed how creative engagement with grief becomes generative. It becomes the force that helps us prophetically engage the world.

4. We model lifegiving communal practices

Quaker memorial meetings were a touchstone in the conversation. Lynette described how Friends speak truthfully about how much someone mattered and how they were loved. This is ministry. For public ministers, helping meetings practice this kind of truth-telling is essential. We help Friends grieve together in ways that strengthen community rather than isolate individuals.

We remind people that when they peer out of the darkness of grief, the light of the community is still there.

Grief as Creative Ground for Ministry

The conversation that night reminded me that grief does not impede ministry. Grief is the ground where ministry grows. It is the soil where imagination germinates. When Lynette said grief is not linear because we are not linear people, I felt the truth of it rise in the room. When she described grief as a garden, I knew that image belonged to us as ministers. We must tend our own gardens if we hope to help nurture the gardens of our communities.

For Friends in public ministry, our grief shapes our authority. Our creativity shapes our hope. Our willingness to engage grief honestly and creatively shapes the future we help meetings imagine.

This is why Grief and Creativity in Public Ministry mattered. This is why it will stay with me. And this is why I believe Friends in public ministry must learn to engage their grief creatively, so that what breaks our hearts can open our hearts even wider.

That is where the ministry is.

Lynette Davis, SFCC (she/her) is a writer, spiritual director, retreat leader, and mental health advocate. She believes stories can change the world and create meaning in life and enjoys holding sacred space for healing and spiritual deepening that integrates expressive arts. Lynette writes at the intersection of mental health, faith, and a Spirit-led creative life on Substack at http://lynettedavis.substack.com. She is the author of Success To Die For: Breaking Down Assumptions About Anxiety, Depression, & Suicide and Their Impact on Business Women and a contributing writer of Illuminate, a Quaker Bible study series by Barclay Press. She has been a convinced Friend since 2016, and is a member of the Ujima Friends Meeting, and a vowed member of The Sisters for Christian Community, an ecumenical community of religious sisters. 

Next week, on November 18th, join Deborah Shaw (North Carolina Conservative Yearly Meeting) in conversation with me on The Gift of Eldership!

Deborah is a member of Friendship Friends Meeting of Greensboro, North Carolina and is a recorded minister.  She has led retreats in the US and the UK, and for FWCC regional gathering.

She is the former director of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program at Guilford College.

Deborah feels called to accompany others on their spiritual journeys, to validate physical manifestations of “Spirit poured on flesh,” to listen in tongues, and to be a listening, compassionate, and non-judgmental heart for others.