Modeling Faithfulness

At a gathering of "women in ministry" during Pendle Hill and Quaker Leadership Center's joint conference for Friends across the spectrum, Publishers of the Truth. Pictured (from left to right) are public ministers Marcelle Martin, Marian Baker, Lilia Fick, Windy Cooler, Robin Mohr and Deborah Shaw.

This is a guest post by Adria DiCapua.

Public ministry is all about faithfulness. But it isn’t just about the faithfulness of the public minister. It’s about the faithfulness of the Friends who facilitate the ministry and care for the Friend who carries it.

I still remember the first time I encountered public ministry among Friends. 

I was 21 years old, a newly minted math teacher in the Midwest. I had been attending St. Louis Friends Meeting for nearly a year and loving every bit of it - reading works by George Fox and Robert Foster from our meeting library, attending Quakerism 101, the generosity and fellowship of Friends who picked me up for meeting events, the peace and power of the Spirit rolling over and through me in worship.

But that day, in the golden light of the worship room, I encountered a new dimension of Quaker spirituality when a redheaded young man stood up to introduce himself at the rise of meeting and said that he was traveling in ministry.

Traveling in ministry? Like George Fox and the Valiant Sixty? I was shocked and excited that a practice I thought about in historical terms - leaving one’s home to share spiritual truth - was real and alive and right in front of me. 

I was too awestruck and bewildered to speak with the young minister. If I had, I might have asked him what it was like to hear God’s call and to answer. I might have asked him whether it was neat or scary or boring to spend so much time traveling from place to place, to have to talk with new people every week, to stay in the home’s of strangers. I might have asked him what he had learned from his time traveling so widely among Friends. Instead I said nothing.

But I had a new sense of possibility. 

If God could call this young man to leave his home to encourage Friends to greater faithfulness, what else might God do? Who else might he call? Someone in my meeting? Me? And if this Friend, only a few years older than myself, could uproot his life to follow God’s will, could I trust that I would be given strength to take whatever risk God might call me to undertake, to carry whatever cross he might call me to bear?

Public ministry is all about faithfulness. But it isn’t just about the faithfulness of the public minister. It’s about the faithfulness of the Friends who facilitate the ministry and care for the Friend who carries it. It’s about whetting a hunger for deeper faithfulness in others as they see what is possible in the power of God. It’s about modeling obedience and embracing vulnerability as living proof that the Spirit is still speaking and that Friends still have faith to listen and to follow.

The author, Adria DiCapua.

Adria DiCapua is a wife, mother, dog owner and convinced Friend (Quaker). She is also a public minister, "a worker," in the Friends of Jesus Fellowship, a network of communities and ministries gathered around a common experience of the living presence of Jesus in our midst. She blogs at shadowofbabylon.com. Her recent Pendle Hill pamphlet on Spiritual Gifts will be of interest to all Friends who are called to support ministry in their meeting or church.