Tom Hamm and The Public Ministers: Elias Hicks and the First Great Quaker Split

windycooler
4 days ago
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Day One of Our Thanksgiving (Thank God I'm Not a 19th-Century Public Minister) Four-Day Dive into 19th-Century Public Ministers

Welcome to day one of our four-day journey into the dramatic, inspiring, and sometimes exasperating world of 19th-century Quaker public ministers. This week we are walking alongside historian Tom Hamm to explore the people whose ministries shaped the major splits in American Quakerism. These are the ministers whose sermons, travels, personalities, and convictions helped carve the Quaker map we still recognize today.

And there is no better place to start than the minister whose name became a dividing line for two whole branches of Friends: Elias Hicks.

If you’ve ever wondered how one person’s ministry could transform a whole faith community, for good and for heartbreak, Tom believes that Hicks gives us plenty to think about.

Who Was Elias Hicks?

Elias Hicks was born in 1748 and lived most of his long life in Jericho, Long Island. He married Jemima Seaman, inherited her family farm, and never had financial worries, which meant he had the freedom to go wherever he felt God was leading. And he went. Hicks traveled to most major centers of Quaker life in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, preaching from his twenties up until the last year of his life.

He belonged squarely to the quietist tradition. His deepest spiritual aspiration was to become so empty of self that only God’s action remained. He wrote that the goal of the spiritual life was to “do nothing, think nothing, be nothing,” and he meant it.

But while Hicks believed he was simply a vessel, others experienced him as anything but invisible. Walt Whitman remembered him as “engaging and grim and stern.” Friends often found him intense, commanding, and absolutely convinced. He could be gentle in his devotion and fierce in his certainty, sometimes in the same sermon.

And, as we know from experience today, that combination can electrify or divide a room.

What Was He Preaching?

Hicks’s central message was that Quakerism needed a reformation. Not a reinvention, but a return to what he believed early Friends lived and taught. Three themes showed up again and again in his ministry.

God’s direct revelation is primary.

For Hicks, the Spirit speaking today mattered far more than the Bible. Scripture was useful, yes, but it was human and imperfect. He said the Bible contained errors and even claimed it had caused “four-fold more harm than good” in Christendom, because of how often people used it to justify cruelty and division. It was a bold thing to preach from a meetinghouse bench.

Jesus became the Christ through perfect obedience.

Hicks did not believe the virgin birth was essential. He rejected the idea of atonement as a blood sacrifice. He taught that Jesus became the Christ because he lived in perfect obedience to the Inward Light. This placed salvation not in doctrine, but in faithful listening and following.

Quaker discipline needed to be restored.

Hicks wanted Friends to return to stricter plainness, stronger discipline, and greater separation from “worldly” influences. He was particularly upset about wealthy Friends joining reform societies with non-Quakers, even for good causes. To him, it looked like spiritual drift.

All of this made him beloved in some meetings and alarming in others. And as often happens when a minister preaches with clarity and conviction, the responses began to polarize.

The Split

By 1827, things in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting reached a breaking point. Two thirds of Friends sided with Hicks and formed what they called a “reformed” body. The Orthodox Friends who opposed Hicks called them “Hicksites,” and the name stuck.

Every yearly meeting in North America had to choose which body to recognize. New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore became Hicksite strongholds. Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and New England leaned Orthodox. In total, about one third of the world’s Quakers identified with Hicks.

The split was painful and personal. Families divided. Old friendships ended. Some Friends were disowned by the communities that had shaped their entire lives. And it is worth acknowledging that the split wasn’t just theological. It was also relational. Some Friends simply found Hicks hard to be in community with. His bluntness, his certainty, and his forceful presence intensified already-heated disagreements.

It’s a reminder that doctrine rarely travels alone. It usually comes attached to a human being.

Why Hicks Matters for Public Ministry Today

Since we’re looking at these ministers through the lens of public ministry, Hicks offers us a surprisingly contemporary set of questions.

Public ministry is always relational.

Hicks thought he was disappearing into the Spirit, but many Friends experienced him as overwhelming. What we offer in ministry and how others receive it are always filtered through relationship. This is as true today as it was in 1827.

Ministry shapes whole communities.

Hicks’s ideas didn’t stay on the bench. They reshaped yearly meetings, worship styles, and theological culture for generations. Public ministry has that kind of reach.

Presence matters more than rumor.

Where Hicks traveled, he gained support. Where Friends only heard secondhand reports, suspicion grew. Embodied ministry still matters. Presence is its own kind of truth-telling.

Conflict is not a failure itself.

The Hicksite–Orthodox split was traumatic, but it was also often sincere. Friends were trying their best to be faithful. When we disagree deeply, to the point of dysfunction and rupture, today, that does not always mean someone is bad. It means the stakes feel important and we might not have the skills for repair.

Ministers need structures of support.

Hicks had no eldering circle or accountability process strong enough to help the community hold his gift. His opponents had no system for addressing their fears constructively. This is exactly why the Friends Incubator exists.

Looking Ahead: Three More Ministers This Week

This is just day one of our four-day series with Tom Hamm. Over the next few days, we will explore:

Joseph John Gurney: The English evangelical whose theology moved most Orthodox Friends in a new direction.

John Wilbur: The determined defender of traditional Quakerism who helped create the Conservative branch when he could no longer tolerate what he saw as innovation.

David B. Updegraff: The fiery holiness evangelist whose revivalism reshaped Quaker worship and led directly to the pastoral system.

Each of these ministers teaches us something different about faithfulness, conflict, innovation, and what it means to carry a public calling in community.

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.