Springing To Life
- windycooler
- Apr 23
- 20 min read
Friends, it has been a season. A full, overflowing, surprising, sometimes overwhelming season and here we are, sprouting from the mud.
We have been too busy making things to stop and tell you about all of them in the last two months. This post is our attempt to remedy that and to review some of our posts since the last time we posted a review post in the fall. In this blog entry you will find some resources, including a brand new policy from a liberal, unprogrammed meeting on how to recognize, support and hold public ministry accountable (!), and two other recordings of our vespers series on elder/minister pairs, what it means to be a released minister, and how to consider in your own unique context the relationship between a Quaker meeting and ministry. And an inspirational mix-tape of sorts. :) Oh! And a book project that we are determined to make as a beautiful gift to meetings and ministers. How could we forget!?
Pull up a chair. There is a lot to share.
Pendle Hill: What Happened When We Gathered
In April, we did something we had been dreaming about since the beginning: we gathered our cohort of fellow meetings, minister and elder pairs in person for the first time, spending a week in residence at Pendle Hill. Our First Fellows: That Moment We Have Been Working Toward
In December, we announced the first cohort of Friends Incubator Fellow meetings for 2026–28. We received more than ten times as many applicants as we had space for, which tells us something important about the hunger in our meetings for sustained, communal accompaniment of ministry. We are crossing our fingers about having the resources to expand our fellowship programming in the next two years and meet this need!
Our Fellow meetings come from five yearly meetings on the East Coast:
Friends Meeting of Washington (Baltimore Yearly Meeting)
DeLand Friends Meeting (Southeastern Yearly Meeting)
Providence Monthly Meeting (New England Yearly Meeting)
Green Street Friends Meeting (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting)
15th Street Meeting (New York Yearly Meeting).
Each meeting entered the fellowship as an active partner — not a peripheral supporter, but a Fellow itself, engaging intentionally in discernment, eldership, and care alongside the minister it accompanies.
We are beaming. The fellowship is supported by a grant from the Shoemaker Fund and by individual donations.
This April, following pre-retreats at their home meetings, and led by our incredibly talented, capacious teachers, nova sturrup and Ann Jerome, our fellows formed into what we began to describe as a "family," including the scholars and spring term students in residence at Pendle Hill already.
Our retreat went from public, to semi-private, to public again, weaving in and out of sacred interiority and shared space with a wider world.
We hope to be forming four new cohorts of public ministry fellows in the next two years, pending funding. It would make us ecstatic to see you apply for this with your worshipping community.
What sets this fellowship with the Incubator apart is the centrality of the community in any ministry call. The Incubator insists that we aren't just brave prophetic voices, though many public ministers are, or healers, though many public ministers are, or pains in the ass, which many public ministers are, but we are an inter-related web of Friends, mutually reliant, and yes, we are ALL ministers. Our call is to make this statement of faith, that "we are ALL ministers" real, and to demonstrate that our meetings are trustworthy, serious places, and Friends are trustworthy, serious people.
There's no sleep till Brooklyn, Friends...
Sweet Miche: Faith and the Frame — Quakerism in the Influencer Era
We were extraordinarily fortunate to share that week with Pendle Hill’s First Monday Lecture, celebrating in our hearts the center’s 95th anniversary. The lecture was co-sponsored by the Friends Incubator, and the speaker was Sweet Miche — podcaster, Quaker activist, member of Brooklyn Monthly Meeting, and someone who has been carrying a very live question about visibility and public witness right into the heart of the digital age.
Sweet Miche was eldered for this presentation by fellow public minister ross brubeck, whose quiet, grounding presence was felt throughout the evening. ross, and his ministry, as you may recall, has been featured on this very blog.
Sweet Miche’s lecture: Let Your Life Stream: Public Ministry in the Age of Algorithms, opened with what may have been an unexpected comparison to our Quaker context: the Mormon Church. Sweet Miche described how, beginning in 2007, a Latter-day Saints (LDS) leader urged students at Brigham Young University to get online and share their faith, eventually rewriting the church’s handbook to encourage members to “flood the earth with gospel messages.” What followed was a generation of Mormon influencers whose genius strategy, as Sweet Miche put it, was simply to live their values publicly and let viewers see “what a life shaped by...values looks like.”
The contrast with how Quakers typically show up online was pointed. Sweet Miche described Quaker media as frequently stuck in what they called a “defensive crouch” — spending our energy proving that Quakers aren’t extinct, aren’t Amish, and aren’t the Quaker Oats guy.
“We’re spending so much energy of our witness just saying we exist, and we’re letting other people define the terms of that conversation."
What Quakerism actually offers — simplicity, silence, non-transactional community, lives organized around moral choices rather than consumption — is exactly what many people are hungry for right now. But Quakers are often held back, Sweet Miche argued, by a “fear of the gap between who we say we are and who we actually are.”
To challenge that fear, Sweet Miche turned to history. Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey was deliberate political theater — a counter-procession to Rome’s military parade. The Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay plunged a sword into a hollowed-out Bible filled with red pokeberry juice, splattering fake “blood” on slave-owning Friends to force them to feel the horror of what they were participating in.
And Sweet Miche themselves spent a summer being arrested six times outside Citibank in New York, protesting the bank’s fossil fuel funding — funding they connected directly to the deaths of 1,300 Hajj pilgrims who had no access to water or shelter in deadly heat.
One of those arrests went viral with some 700,000 views. Sweet Miche was willing to accept the trade.
“Public ministry is older than the internet and will outlast it."
Being a public Friend doesn’t require a podcast or a TikTok. It means being willing to be “legible as someone whose life is organized around something other than what the culture around us tells us it should be.” The lecture closed with a challenge that has stayed with us:
“What is burning inside of you, what is actually alive in your faith, your community, and your witness, and what would it mean to stop hiding it?"
The Incubator was created, in part, because of the exact failure Sweet Miche named: meetings have somewhat recently, but in our living experience, largely stopped supporting public and traveling ministers. As Sweet Miche put it: “The Incubator was created because of that — if these meetings were supporting public ministry already, the Incubator wouldn’t exist.” We are glad to be part of changing that.
The Vespers Series: Three Evenings, One Thread
The week at Pendle Hill was not only a semi-private retreat with one (amazing) lecture from Sweet Miche. Each evening, we gathered for vespers (evening prayers and closing thoughts for the day) — and the three conversations that unfolded across those evenings are also now available to watch on our YouTube channel. They blow us away.
Taken together, they form something like a complete picture of what it means to support public ministry in practice: the institutional structures meetings need, the financial and relational realities of doing this work full-time, and the intimate spiritual partnership between a minister and the person who travels beside them. Each conversation stands on its own. Together, they make an argument.
Vespers One: On Being a Released Quaker Public Minister
The initial vespers conversation featured Ron and Pam Ferguson, co-pastors in a Friends meeting, on what it means to be “released” into ministry — freed, as they define it, from secular employment to give your full self to a Spirit-led calling. A released minister is not hired to complete a checklist. They are freed to obey the Lord’s leading in shared discernment with the congregation.
My favorite quotes:
“God and the meeting essentially own our time, and we are accountable to both the Lord and to the meeting for how we use that time."
“Today’s world needs people who do not despair, who do not give up, who are the hands and feet of God at this time and place to make a difference in our world.
“We are here to work with you, not for you... We are here to strengthen this meeting’s ministries to this community."
Vespers Two: How an Urban Liberal Meeting Builds a Working Group on Public Ministry
The second vespers conversation featured Friends Meeting of Washington describing what it actually took to build formal structures for recognizing and supporting public ministry. Their starting point was honest: without structure, ministers are “left out there dry on their own.” Without spiritual nurture, as they quoted from Margaret Benefiel:
“The tender shoots of newly emerging gifts of ministry, of new calls to ministry, of vocation dry up and wither away. Without spiritual nurture, established ministers burn out and give up.”
So the meeting built something, despite decades of not knowing how: a multi-phase process including defining what public ministry is, writing a letter of discernment, forming a clearness committee, completing background checks where appropriate, and receiving formal approval as a minister from the monthly meeting. What comes through most powerfully is the insistence that the ministry belongs to the whole community. My favorite quotes:
“The ministry is not just one person — it’s the whole community... it’s the whole community that’s engaged in the ministry.”
“At the end of the day the buck does stop with me — the public minister — and then the support committee, and then the meeting as a whole.”
The conversation also touched on finances with unusual, for Friends, candor. That kind of catching — practical, relational, unglamorous — is exactly what formal structures make possible.
Friends Meeting of Washington: A Policy for Public Ministry
It is worth pausing to say more about what Friends Meeting of Washington has built: a formal policy for recognizing and supporting public ministry, developed through careful discernment and now available as a resource for the wider Quaker community to take what is good in their context and build from it.
This is the kind of institutional infrastructure our tradition has needed — a meeting taking seriously its role as an active companion to ministers, not just a community that benefits from their labor. We are heartened to see the fruits of this decentralized, highly contextual labor from which we can all benefit. You can see a copy of their policy: here.
Vespers Three: The Elder and Minister Pair — A Kind of Love Story
The third vespers conversation was perhaps the most intimate. Ann Jerome and Steve Chase described the relationship between a traveling minister and their elder — not as a formal structure, but as a spiritual friendship that makes the work possible and keeps it honest. Steve travels and educates Quakers about the realities of Israel and Palestine. Ann travels with him, and the deeper work she does is harder to describe. My favorite quotes:
“Just being centered in the Holy Spirit and holding that — and in my knowing that the spirit is here with us, somehow I can convey that to Steve and calm him down... what I do is create a channel so that the spirit is there.”
This is what Ann and Steve called “spiritual ballast” — the elder’s quiet grounding that keeps the minister from slipping into the role of secular expert:
Steve asked: Who do you trust to tell you when you’re full of it — to love you enough to do that?”
Ann added: “The work is what we’re serving. It’s me recognizing that there is important work coming through this spiritual friend of mine and committing to be part of supporting that work.”
What the Three Vespers Say Together
Each of these conversations addressed something different — institutional process, vocational commitment, intimate spiritual companionship. But running through all three was the same insistence: public ministry is not a solo act, and the community that fails to recognize and support it is not only failing its ministers. It is failing itself. Meetings need all three of these things. The structures. The release. The companionship. None of them is optional if we are serious about public ministry that is sustainable, accountable, and truly rooted in worship. If we are trustworthy in who we say we are.
The Kickstarter with Joey Hartmann-Dow — And We Need You This Week
This week, at the writing of this blog piece, is Joey Hartmann-Dow’s birthday. You might already know that they are the artist who does all of our visual art, from the logo, to, now that we can afford it, our posters. We can think of no better gift to give them than helping them reach their goal of illustrating a book for us. :) What follows is a little love note to them, but also a love note to our work together at the Incubator.
Joey is an artist and a Quaker, a member of Lehigh Valley Friends in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, now living in New Orleans, and someone whose work you may already know from FCNL, FGC, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Beacon Hill Friends House, and, of course, the Friends Incubator itself. They have launched a Kickstarter to fund the illustrations for Constellation of Witness: Quaker Stories in Public Ministry: a new book from the Friends Incubator featuring first-hand accounts from public ministers: stories of grief, sacrifice, joy, risk, endurance, and the daily labor of following a call. The book will include both contemporary voices — Friends you've already read about on our blog like Angela Hopkins, ross brubeck, Kody Hersh, and Melinda Wenner Bradley — and witnesses from our 400-year history, including Lucretia Mott, John Woolman, and Elias Hicks. It will be, as I wrote in the introduction, a constellation: “Different lights, different contexts, different temperaments, yet a shared commitment to faithfulness beyond the meetinghouse walls.”
Joey’s art is what will bring it to life on the page. And right now, she needs your help.
Here is where we stand: As of today, at this second, the campaign has raised $7,000 from 52 backers, with 7 days left (as of this writing) to reach the goal of $10,000. That means we need about $3,000 more — and the math is very doable. The average contribution so far has been about $130 per backer. At that rate, we need just 23 more backers — less than 4 new backers a day over the next seven days. That is not a crowd. That is a (small, tiny even) meeting. That is one well-placed email to your Friends list.
If we want to make something happen in the next three days — a birthday surge for Joey — the numbers look like this: about 10 new backers a day for three days would bring us home. If everyone reading this post told two Friends about the campaign today, and each of them backed it, we would be there. Pledging in smaller amounts adds up too!
There are real rewards for backing: postcards, prints, greeting cards, and of course the book itself. Larger contributions can get you a virtual visit from Joey or a member of the Incubator team, and a sponsor thank-you in the book.
As Joey says: “This book will be a resource, an exploration, a celebration of courage, an invitation, and a collection of art all in one. If you’re curious to see what that looks like, so am I."
So are we, Joey. Happy birthday. Let’s get this funded.
And whether or not you can contribute right now, please share. Share with your meeting. Share with Friends who care about public ministry, Quaker history, or beautiful art made with intention.
Every share matters — Kickstarter campaigns live and die by word of mouth in the final week. We cannot make this book happen without you. We want to contribute something truly beautiful for you, with you.
Also in April: Two More Conversations Worth Your Time
Melinda Wenner Bradley: An Emergent Quaker Theology of Childhood
Melinda Wenner Bradley came to us in April with a presentation that has been doing its work with us.
The diagnosis: most Quaker communities relate to children through a mixture of ambivalence and admiration. Ambivalence treats children as interruptions. Admiration is subtler — it looks like warmth, but it is conditional. Neither posture constitutes genuine inclusion.
“How a faith community talks about children is not neutral — it reveals what we believe about God as well as about authority and tradition and whose voice counts."
What Melinda offered was a framework of accompaniment rooted in the conviction that children already possess a “profound intuitive knowing” of the divine. They do not need adults to give them a spiritual life. They need adults to walk alongside them toward the threshold:
“We can take children to the threshold, but we can’t cross it with them. Our work is to walk next to them... their knowing of God is their own."
This means taking play seriously as a spiritual practice.
“We need to take a generous, trusting attitude to what may constitute prayerful activity for children. It may look as if a child is just doodling or idly rolling balls of Play-Doh or gazing blankly out the window, but in these moments God and the child may be in deep communion."
“Centering children is not the magic bullet. It is the way forward."
Kody Hersh on Youth Ministry as Public Ministry
In February, longtime conversation partner Kody Hersh returned to the blog for a third interview, this time on youth ministry and the dynamics of power. Much like Melinda's recorded testimony, Kody argued that the way Quaker communities undervalue youth ministry is connected to ageism and sexism: this work is often done by women and non-binary people, often invisible, often treated as preparatory rather than substantial.
What Kody described is actually some of the most demanding discernment work in our tradition, because children and teenagers are exquisitely attuned to inauthenticity. You cannot fake presence with them. You can only create conditions for the Spirit to move and then get out of the way — which, Kody noted, is pretty good training for all public ministry.
Kody is also currently carrying a ministry of pastoral care to transgender youth and their families — relationally, under the weight of a real leading in a genuinely hostile political climate. We are glad to hold him in
the Light.
Paul Anderson: Modernizing Margaret Fell — Reclaiming the Ministry of Women
Earlier, in March, Paul Anderson — biblical scholar, professor, and translator — joined me for a conversation about his modern English translation of Margaret Fell’s 1666 pamphlet, Women’s Speaking Justified. It was a conversation about a 17th-century text, but it was not a historical conversation. It was an urgent one for our times. Myogeny, like the poor, seems to always be with us, even in the sacred work of ministry.
Fell’s original pamphlet made a thoroughly scriptural argument for women’s right to preach. Paul’s translation makes that argument accessible at a moment when it is badly needed:
“We are in a cultural time where there is so much animosity — almost misogyny — towards women in lots of ways, especially in the church. I think right now is the most hateful time I’ve seen in all the time of my life with Christ since 1979.”
“The issue there is not you’re the wrong gender — but you haven’t been to the Bible study. Literally. That is the correct literal interpretation of what Paul is saying within the context.”
More broadly, Paul argued that the true biblical qualifications for public ministry are spiritual giftedness and proper theological formation — not gender. He read the Gospel of John as an “apostolic corrective” to the male-dominated institutionalism hardening in the early church around 100 AD, promoting a model of church leadership that is:
“Egalitarian, Spirit-led, familial, and including women in leadership."
Not Rock Stars: Mary Crauderueff on Archives, Truth, and Boundaries
In January, the blog hosted a conversation with Mary Crauderueff, Curator of Quaker Collections at Haverford College. It was about archives and ministry, but really it was about truth: who gets to say hard things, what it costs, and how public people protect themselves from the projections that accumulate when you do visible work.
Mary’s ministry happens in the willingness to tell Quakers things they would sometimes rather not hear — about Friends as enslavers, about the limitations of their own origin stories, about the difference between what the Germantown Petition of 1688 actually argues and what we tend to quote from it.
The conversation surfaced a phrase we keep returning to: we are not rock stars. Not because the work is small, but because ministry is not a performance. It is a labor. Labors require rest, limits, and the freedom to be a full and fallible human being. This lands differently after hearing Sweet Miche describe going viral — and receiving threats — in the same season. Visibility is a gift and a cost. Both things are true.
The Tom Hamm Series: From Uncomfortable Prophets to Quaker Civil War
Are you tired yet? Since our last post roundup we've produced over eight hours of video content and at least 90 minutes of reading material in addition to everything else.
We're not tired yet! (Maybe a little, send snacks).
We originally kicked off this season with historian Tom Hamm’s ongoing series on the great public ministers of Quaker history, and we have been humming along with the 19th century ever since — not always comfortably, which is maybe right.
We began with Joseph Hoag, the stern, prophetic Vermont Friend who traveled the ministry into his eighties, corrected slaveholders in North Carolina, and — in 1803 — had a vision of national division and the end of slavery that he kept quiet for decades before publishing it on the eve of the Civil War. He stands in the doorway with a lantern and tells you what you cannot bring inside. We need ministers who open doors, and ministers who check the foundation. Joseph Hoag is firmly in the second category.
Then, in a glorious four-day Thanksgiving deep-dive subtitled “Thank God I’m Not a 19th-Century Quaker Public Minister,” Tom walked us through four figures who cracked American Quakerism open along the seams it still shows today:
Elias Hicks — the Long Island farmer-preacher whose ministry eventually became a fault line, splitting Friends into Hicksite and Orthodox branches.
Joseph John Gurney — the polished, wealthy English Friend who brought evangelical Protestant theology into Quaker life with considerable charm and considerable consequences.
John Wilbur — the principled Rhode Island Friend who stood for quietist Quakerism at great personal cost. Conservative Friends today carry his spiritual DNA.
David B. Updegraff — the Ohio evangelical Friend who brought revivalism and eventually the ordinances of baptism and communion into Quaker life, and continues to provoke strong feelings everywhere.
Tom’s lectures were rich, specific, and alive. All four are available on our blog. The links to blog pieces and recordings of Tom's lectures are in the text, above.
Marcelle Martin on Faithfulness Groups: The Ministry of Monthly Presence
In October, guest blogger Marcelle Martin gave us one of the most practically useful pieces the blog has published: a tender, detailed description of what faithfulness groups are and how they work. Unlike clearness committees — which help a person discern a particular leading — a faithfulness group offers ongoing companionship for a Spirit-led life. Marcelle’s own group has met monthly for seventeen years. That kind of sustained, prayerful attention is how we learn to stay close to a calling over time, how trust grows deep enough to speak the truth of the heart.
This piece was a preview of Marcelle’s January workshop, Listening Together: The Role of Discernment in Ministry. The recording is on YouTube.
Jay Marshall: Spice, Simplicity, and the Freedom of an Uncluttered Life
In late October, we celebrated Jay Marshall’s book Spice Up Your Life: Reflections on the Testimonies with a book talk in partnership with Barclay Press. Jay is the former dean of Earlham School of Religion and one of the wittiest people in the Religious Society of Friends. His humor is kindness in disguise.
The book takes the SPICES testimonies and gives them back to us in stories we can touch. His reflection on simplicity had a particular bite for those of us in ministry: instead of asking “what is easiest,” simplicity asks “what is most important.” That question saves tired ministers and overstretched meetings alike.
Lynette Davis: Grief Is the Ground Where Ministry Grows
In November, Lynette Davis joined us for a conversation on Grief and Creativity in Public Ministry, and it was one of the most honest evenings we have hosted. People arrived with their own tender stories.
Lynette described grief not as an obstacle to ministry but as its soil. Her creative practices — writing letters to her late grandmother that became poetry, writing Bible fan-fiction until she could finally see herself in the women of scripture — are models of how grief becomes generative. She reminded us that grief is not linear, because we are not linear people, and that creative engagement with sorrow is a form of prophetic imagination.
Deborah Shaw: Eldership as a Spiritual Friendship
November also brought us Deborah Shaw, a Conservative Friend from North Carolina, in a conversation about The Gift of Eldership. What emerged was not a job description but a love story, much like that Steve and Ann gave us in our vespers series — a meditation on what it means to sit beside someone in their trembling or their clarity, to help truth rise without forcing it, to offer presence that steadies without controlling.
Future News...
We are delighted to tell you that in the June/July issue of Friends Journal on the topic of "supporting ministries" interviews are coming with two members of our board who have been central to the shaping of this work from the beginning: nova sturrup and Della Stanley-Green. Check in with Friends Journal come June 1st to share in our excitement!
A Quaker Voluntary Service Fellow Is Coming in August...
We another piece of news that fills us with joy: this August, the Friends Incubator will welcome a Quaker Voluntary Service fellow. We are deeply grateful for this partnership and this investment in our work. More details to come...
And you can find us at Friends General Conference Gathering this summer! This summer, convener Windy Cooler and advisory board member Layla Cuthrell will offer a week-long workshop at the 2026 Friends General Conference Gathering titled The Way Opens: Stories of Call and Community. Layla will also offer optional video testimony recording for participants through her work with QuakerSpeak at Friends Journal.
A Word About Where We Are — and Where We Are Trying to Go
Everything you have read about in this post — the fellows and their meetings, the vespers series, the lectures and conversations, the Kickstarter, the QVS fellow arriving in August — all of it is made possible by a community of Friends who have decided, in a very practical way, that this work matters.
Right now, more than 150 people are giving to the Friends Incubator on a recurring basis, contributing together roughly $1,000 every month. That steady, reliable foundation is what allows us to plan, to say yes to new opportunities, and to move at the pace of discernment rather than the pace of crisis. It is, in the most literal sense, what keeps the lights on.
This spring, we have a goal: we would like to grow our community of recurring donors from 150 to 200. Fifty new recurring donors — at any amount — would make a real and immediate difference. Here is what that would mean in practice:
• More free programming. Our workshops, vespers conversations, and public events are offered at no cost to participants. Growing our recurring base means we can sustain that commitment — and add more events — without scrambling.
• Stronger support for our fellows and their meetings. Two years of discernment, formation, and communal accompaniment takes sustained resources. More recurring donors means we can fully show up for our cohort, especially when something unexpected happens.
• The capacity to expand. We had more than ten times as many qualified applicants as we had space for in our first cohort. A stronger recurring base helps us begin planning for what comes next: more cohorts, more regional gatherings, more of the theological grounding and elder formation our tradition needs.
• Stability for the people doing this work. Including our incoming QVS fellow, the volunteers who sustain our programming, and the staff who hold this community week by week.
We are not asking for a large gift. We are asking for a recurring one. A monthly commitment of five, ten, or twenty-five dollars is what makes long-term planning possible. It is what allows us to be present with our fellows when something unexpected arises. It is what lets this work keep growing.
If you have been reading this blog, attending our events, watching our recordings, or simply holding this work in the Light — this is an invitation to go one step further. Becoming a recurring donor is a way of saying: I believe public ministry needs community support, and I am part of that community.
Give at friendsincubator.org/donate — and thank you.
More is coming. We are so glad you are here.
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