One of the criticisms that Evangelical Friends level at quietist Meetings like ours is that we are short on teaching. “Silent worship, for those who are well-instructed in divine truth, has real benefits,” they write, before cautioning: “upon those who have neither read the Bible nor hear it expounded the effect may be very different.” The passage I quote continues: “As a result, the Friends Church became victim to a group of erroneous teachers, among whom Elias Hicks was most prominent.” The section also points to some very deep misunderstandings among Friends, including Job Scott’s decision to remain silent in sessions called on his behalf during his traveling ministry; he sensed too many people had come with “itchy ears” primed for novelty rather than an open heart.

Ideally, vocal ministry arises as a prophetic voice, as William Taber describes in his Pendle Hill pamphlet, The Prophetic Stream. From this perspective, pastoral sermons can be criticized as arising too much as a matter of teaching and too little as an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Walter Wangerin Jr.’s novel, Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, also addresses this, though from a different perspective. There, the young Lutheran pastor realizes that in greeting parishioners after the service, he cannot tell whether one woman is telling him he offered good teaching or good preaching on any given morning. One Sunday, however, it becomes quite clear she has been making a distinction: “’Pastor?’ All at once, Miz Lillian Leander. She took my hand and we exchanged a handshake, and I let go, but she did not. … Her voice was both soft and civil. It was the sweetness that pierced me. I think its tones reached me alone, so that it produced a casement of silence around us … there was Miz Lil, gazing up at me. There was her shrewd eye, soft and sorry.

“’You preached today,’ she said, and I thought of our past conversation. ‘God was in this place,’ she said, keeping my hand in hers. I almost smiled for pride at the compliment. But Miz Lil said, ‘He was not smiling.’ Neither was she. Nor would she let me go. … The old woman spoke in velvet and severity, and I began to be afraid.” Then she gently rebukes her pastor for unintentional consequences, after he has prided himself for being frugal by cutting off the water to an outdoor faucet.

“’God was in your preaching,’ she whispered. “Did you hear him, Pastor? It was powerful. Powerful. You preach a mightier stroke than you know. Oh, God was bending his black brow down on our little church today, and yesterday, and many a day before. Watching. ‘Cause brother Jesus – he was in that child Marie, begging a drink of water from my pastor.”

I love the way that passage illustrates how the prophetic voice flowing through an individual can be larger than its vessel. “Did you hear him, Pastor?” I love, too, the way it illustrates an elder laboring with a minister: “Miz Lillian Leander fell silent then. But she did not smile. And she would not let me go. For a lifetime, for a Sunday and a season the woman remained immovable. She held my hand in a steadfast grip, and she did not let it go.”