Tom Hamm and the Public Ministers: David B. Updegraff and the Evangelical Remaking of Quakerism

Tom Hamm’s Thanksgiving Series on Public Ministers, Part Four of Four… well, let’s just say we are getting there in our own good time.

If Monday’s post left you both grateful and slightly overwhelmed by the 19th-century Quaker world...

Today Tom introduces us to David B. Updegraff (1830–1894), the man who helped turn one of the new branches of American Quakerism inside out again. Updegraff’s story is fiery, dramatic, and almost unbelievable to Friends formed in the quiet rhythm of waiting worship. Yet the Quaker landscape he helped shape is still with us today, especially in pastoral meetings across the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

This week, we joked that we are publishing the “other half” of our Thanksgiving series, a week after Thanksgiving. Ministry happens in its own season. Updegraff would have approved. His own spiritual life came in two dramatic waves and he spent the rest of his life insisting that the same should be true for everyone else.

A Pedigree of Ministers and an Unexpected Turn

Updegraff was born into the heart of Orthodox, Gurneyite Quakerism in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. His mother and grandmother were both recorded ministers. His grandfather had been clerk of Ohio Yearly Meeting during the great Hicksite separation. David even attended Haverford for a time. This was Quaker establishment through and through.

But in 1860, Updegraff experienced conversion at a Methodist revival meeting. Nine years later, he underwent what he called a second work of grace, an experience of instantaneous sanctification. He described it in blazing detail. “Every vile affection was nailed to the cross,” he wrote. “Instantly, I felt the melting and refining fire of God permeate my whole being.” That moment would define everything that followed.

For the rest of his life, Updegraff taught that all Christians must experience these two events. First conversion. Then sanctification. Both instantaneous. Both unmistakable. And preferably accompanied by tears, prayers, shouting, and a good deal of singing.

Bringing Revivalism into the Meetinghouse

Updegraff and the holiness ministers who gathered around him saw themselves as part of the larger world of evangelical Protestantism. They intentionally worked to erase old Quaker distinctives that made Friends “peculiar” in the eyes of their neighbors. Plainness was dismissed as salvation by works. Pacifism was no longer a settled truth. Even the rejection of sacraments softened. Updegraff himself was baptized by a Baptist minister in 1884.

Most startlingly, in 1878, Ohio Yearly Meeting formally repudiated the doctrine of the Inner Light. They believed it dangerously implied that something divine existed in people before conversion.

With these shifts came a new way of worship. Revival meetings swept through Gurneyite communities. At one series in Spiceland, Indiana, more than 700 Friends were converted or sanctified. Eyewitnesses described simultaneous exhortation, singing, crying, and crowds at the mourner’s bench. Children wept. Adults shouted. It was a far cry from the hush of traditional Quaker waiting.

And it changed Quakerism forever. By the 1880s, most Gurneyite meetings expected preaching every First Day. From that expectation grew what we now know as the pastoral system.

A New Vision of Mission and Community

Updegraff also guided many Friends toward the emerging fundamentalist movement. With a strong premillennial view, they believed the world could not be redeemed until Christ returned. Their mission was therefore simple. “Our business is to get as many sinners into the lifeboats and save their souls before the second coming,” wrote one advocate.

This approach redefined community itself. Where earlier Friends understood themselves as a people set apart, Updegraff’s followers saw themselves as part of a larger evangelical Protestant family. The goal was not to preserve Quaker peculiarities but to win souls, whatever methods that required.

Why This Matters for Public Ministry Today

Updegraff’s story, like the previous three in the Thanksgiving series, is a reminder that public ministry reshapes communities in profound ways. His life shows us how charismatic ministers can move entire yearly meetings, sometimes toward renewal and sometimes toward rupture. He also forces us to ask what happens when the structures of accountability and communal discernment fray under the pressure of powerful personalities and fast-moving spiritual currents.

For those of us seeking to nurture public ministry today, the lesson is not to imitate Updegraff’s methods. The lesson is to notice how deeply ministry and theology intertwine, how changes in worship and practice ripple outward into creative new forms of mission, governance, and identity. We also see the cost when community life becomes defined by urgency rather than listening, by certainty rather than continuing revelation.

Updegraff helped create a form of Quakerism that still gives life to many Friends. Others question whether it remains Quaker at all. And we argue, to the extent we communicate across difference at all. This too is part of our inheritance. Public ministry can build, and it can tear. It can carry tradition forward, or burn it down in the name of faithfulness.

For us, in this season of fire, reflection and repair, it is one more invitation to ask what kind of community our ministries are shaping, and whether the fire we tend is refining or simply consuming. And with that, we conclude this Thanksgiving series with Tom on the 19th-century public ministers of the great separation. You can, however, expect more Tom for some time to come. And again, we are grateful.

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Tom is giving us a LIVE public appearance in December! Who would want to miss that? You can register here.

Tom is Emeritus Professor of History and Quaker Scholar in Residence at Earlham College. He is the presenter in an ongoing series of short lectures for Friends Incubator on his personal favorite public ministers in Quaker history.

If you enjoyed this and other lectures and want to support the series and our new work to support public ministry in the Religious Society of Friends, please consider a gift: here.

Audio for this series edited by Martin Oliver (Baltimore Yearly Meeting and Northern Yearly Meeting).