Creating a Container for Vocal Ministry
By Christopher Sammond
June 1, 2022
“Between 2014 and 2017, New York Yearly Meeting’s Spiritual Nurture Working Group offered to come to a meeting and facilitate any of 12 different workshops. More requests came to us for the workshop on vocal ministry than all of the other 11 combined. We heard that meetings had found vocal ministry to be too frequent and shallow; were troubled by disruptive messages; or, in some cases, that vocal ministry was mostly absent. Some meetings said that they hoped a Friend with gifts in vocal ministry would come join their meeting, and the new arrival would add to their worship the life that was lacking. In all of these cases, the meetings identified vocal ministry as the place where they needed help. And yet, as we worked with the leadership of those meetings, we found that what they needed to attend to first was the level of trust and community that undergirded their meeting, and therefore their meetings for worship. From every book of Quaker faith and practice has either a query or an advice urging Friends to come to meeting “with hearts and minds prepared.” We each do this preparation differently, but two things seem to be essential. First, we need to do what is necessary to nurture our spirits during the week, through daily, or at least steady, spiritual practice. If we each do that essential work, worship becomes the harvest of our week’s spiritual fruits, a feast to which we all bring something. Second, we each need to have worked through the top layer of issues on our minds and hearts in our own space and time, in our own spiritual practice, so that we have within us a spaciousness in which the Divine may have room to be present and, perhaps, to speak through us…”