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Friends United Meeting |
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Quaker Life
November 2002
What is the Work that Friends
are Called to Finish?
Johnson Lecture
By Ben Richmond
Mahalah Jay, a dynamic woman and leader of Indiana Yearly Meeting, gave a paper in the first sessions of Friends United Meeting back in 1902 when FUM was called Five Years Meeting. The paper was titled the "Present Condition of the Foreign Missionary Work of American Friends."1...
Two reflections come sharply to mind from this survey. The first is this: God has moved Friends to make a mighty and enduring impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people through the mission work of Friends United Meeting. ...
The second...is this: The work of Friends mission always included schools, industrial development, and medical assistance. And everywhere Friends went, the center of the work was evangelism. ...Friends understood that salvation reaches to the whole person and that God is as much concerned to save people in the context of this life as to bring souls to heaven after we die. This does not diminish the importance of salvation in the spiritual sense, but it is simply to insist that eternal life begins in this life. ...
Holding on to this complete understanding of salvation has not been an easy thing for Friends. There is always a danger that we will come to look at service and evangelism as if the two were enemies of one another. Over the last 100 years, Friends in the United States have struggled over this. ...
We came to the low point in our unity in 1987, at the triennial sessions in Greensboro, North Carolina. Not for the first time, Friends in those sessions were unable to unite in reaffirming the 1887 Richmond Declaration of Faith — a document that had been central in the original uniform discipline and which is still part of the books of discipline of many our Yearly Meetings. The discord of the 1987 sessions continued over the next several years. Then, it seemed, God did something remarkable among us.
At the 1990 triennial sessions, God sent prophetic messengers to us. ...God was wrestling with Friends to restore us to the fire, and the purity, and the power of our calling. It seems to me that God believed in Friends and in our message more than we did, ourselves. In June 1992, God gave a Friend in Texas this word:
"I am sending revival to the Friends Church. This will not be called Pentecostal or Charismatic, but will be a Friends revival. This is a sovereign work. All will be included form the young to the old. The elders will be especially used, even those who felt their usefulness in the church was over. There will be open weeping and laughter. ...No man will be able to stop this."2
In this atmosphere, the General Board of Friends United Meeting held special retreats in 1992, and again in 1993. It was in those meetings that God gave us this purpose statement:
"Friends United Meeting commits itself to energize and equip Friends through the power of the Holy Spirit to gather people into fellowships where Jesus Christ is known, loved and obeyed as Teacher and Lord."
This statement tells us that, in the end, our work is to Listen to Christ. We finish the work when we bring other people into communities where they, too, can enjoy that kind of life. When we say that we are looking to Jesus Christ who is known as Teacher and Lord, we are proclaiming a specific message of salvation — one full of power and glory. It is a message that has the power to transform not only individuals but entire cultures. ...
Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant
On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus met in an upper room with his
disciples to celebrate the Passover feast. Jesus used that meal to explain
the meaning of his coming crucifixion:
..."This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood." (Luke 22:20; c.f., 1 Corinthians 11:24-25)
Jesus inaugurated the New Covenant on the cross. This is why, in the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus is called our High Priest and the mediator of the New Covenant. Jesus as mediator of the New Covenant was central to George Fox's preaching. ...[and] when they wrote the Richmond Declaration of Faith of 1887, Friends called Jesus, "the one Mediator of the new and everlasting covenant (1 Timothy 2:5, Hebrews 9:15). ..."
The New Covenant is the key to understanding the Gospel as Friends have proclaimed it, and Quaker practice as we have lived out our faith. The New Covenant...(Jeremiah 31:33-44 and...Hebrews 8:8-12)...has three parts. They are, first: God declares our sins to be forgiven; second: God promises to write his law inwardly on our hearts; and, third: everyone gets to know God directly without the need for anyone else to teach them. ...
The forgiveness of sin is the beginning of eternal life. "Here," William Penn said, "is God's meer Crace asserted."3 ...We can't buy God's love by our good deeds — or even by the correctness of our beliefs and doctrines. God has simply made the gracious decision to forgive. ...
The second promise of the new covenant is, "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts." This is great joy. We have only to look around to see that written rules and regulations have not been successful in bringing about the kind of lives that reflect the love of God. ...Paul cries out, "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ...Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:19, 24)
Praise be to God, the answer comes: "I will write my law within you." ...God has chosen to do inside of us, that which we cannot do for ourselves. This is why Quaker worship de-emphasizes outward ritual but, instead, emphasizes whatever helps us listen to the voice of God whispering in the secret places of our souls.
This listening spirituality touches every aspect of our lives. In 1648, George Fox had a vision of salvation that he referred to often throughout his ministry. He said:
...the Lord showed me that such as were faithful to him in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell.4
From the beginning of creation God intended for humanity a life of creativity, abundance, peace, community, equality, wholesome sexuality, and integrity. Salvation touches every aspect and corner of our lives. When Friends United Meeting says that our purpose is to gather people into fellowships where Jesus Christ is known, loved and obeyed as Teacher and Lord, we are saying that we are inviting people to enjoy this kind of life. Such communities are of immeasurable importance to the life of the world. They are a sign of hope that there is a better way to live, that there really is a God who loves at the center of the universe. Communities of salvation stand as counter-cultural witnesses against the evil and oppression of this world. They are outposts of the new heaven and the new earth that we will one day enjoy.
But we cannot create these communities by our own will or calculation. The source is a spirituality of listening to the living word of God within. ...The final promise of the New Covenant is..."No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. ..." (Jeremiah 31:34) All those things that Friends testify to: peace, equality, integrity, sexual purity, simplicity and community depend on God being present to us as our Teacher.
This is where we need Jesus so very much. ...This is why Friends often enjoy times of quiet waiting upon the Lord during our worship: we are listening inwardly to the Risen Jesus Christ, our Teacher, and making an open space in our midst out of which anyone can speak the living word God has given them. This, also, is why we do our business by waiting together for unity — because everything depends on listening to Christ who has promised that his word can come to us from anyone, from the least to the greatest.
...The promises of the New Covenant are unconditional. God has said, ..."Everyone will know me." There is no one whom we can encounter in whom God has not already placed his witness. They may be Muslim or Buddhist or have an animist spirituality or claim to have no spirituality, but we know that God is already available to them as Teacher and Lord. God said so. Our task, as ministers of the New Covenant, is to reach to that witness that God has already placed within them. ...This awakens a yearning within the other to know the fullness of Life that they can already spiritually sense. Then our task is simply to say, "Yes! That is God. Stop running from him. Listen to Christ, your Teacher and Lord. He is already within you, and he will bring you to eternal life." ...
1 Minutes and Proceedings of the Five Years
Meeting, 1902, pp. 155-168.
2 Ben Richmond, "Norval Hadley Gives Reasons for Hope," Quaker
Life, January/February Quaker Life, 1994, p. 15.
3 In Penn, "Sandy Foundation Shaken," (1668) ibid., p. 220-21.
4 George Fox, Journal, edited by John L. Nickalls, Religious Society
of Friends: London, 1975, p. 27 (for the year 1648).
This is a shortened version of the Johnson Lecture from this year's FUM Triennial Sessions. A full manuscript can be obtained by request from Quaker Life.
Copyright (c) 2002 Friends United Meeting
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