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Friends United Meeting |
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June 2005
Where Is the Power of the Lord Now?
“‘The power of the Lord was over all.’ If George Fox’s personality is to be expressed in a single phrase, then this is it.”
—Geoffrey F. Nuttall
By Charles W. Heavilin
Reading the accounts of early Friends, one is struck by the frequent reference to the power of the Lord. George Fox frequently declares that his openings, or revelations, for example, come by this power; and Margaret Fell writes of being “seized upon” by the Lord’s power. It is this power that delivers Fox from an extended period of darkness and dread and on one occasion spares him from mob molestation and transforms many hearts and lives. It is this power that leaves a gathering of priests shaken after hearing Fox speak.
And God’s power is the cornerstone of Fell’s treatises prepared for her lobbying on behalf of Quakers before King, court and the political powers of her day. In “A True Testimony” she writes “He is working in this our day.” By this power, early Quakers turned their world on end — witnessing in Court and steeplehouses, on highways, byways and across seas, suffering in prisons and ministering to the privileged and the poor. Inspired by the Lord’s power, eventually Quaker influence would change the course of society and governments with their pleas for individual liberty, equality and justice for all alike.
In our postmodern, fragmented world, where now is the power of the Lord among Quakers? There is a vast divide between the accounts of early Friends and that of contemporary Friends. Most modern Quaker reporting is perfunctory — accounts with the spiritual quality of recipes in a cookbook. Conversations at Quaker gatherings now revolve around declining attendance or bleak assessments of the spiritual shallowness of society. Seldom, if ever, is there any mention of the power of the Lord.
Without consciousness of a definite shift, modern-day Friends have adopted the values of the surrounding culture. The methods of marketing have influenced the church growth movement and limited spiritual power. In spite of occasional positive results of trying to accommodate telephone marketing into church outreach, for example, stories can be related of local meetings who conscientiously performed all the required marketing procedures with no results. New meetings have been started using similar methods. Lacking spiritual depth, several have withered away since they lack the power of the Lord.
Another shift is the attempt to solve problems though psychology. While psychology is a legitimate tool to help people understand each other, it has limitations. Psychology is the study of people, not the study of people’s relationship to God. Just as the study of animals has limited relevance to people, psychology has limited application in our understanding of God’s relationship to us. Although personal experience may bring an awareness of God to psychology, such awareness is not inherent in the study or therapy itself. Where is the power of the Lord?
Democracy has put an unwelcome pressure on the Quaker understanding of the sense of the meeting. When Friends discuss controversial topics, an all-too-familiar corruption of the discerning process frequently occurs. After lengthy and heated consideration, even over several meetings, the discussion continues in an atmosphere of uncertainty and strain until someone suggests an option for approval. Subsequent meetings then reveal that the matter was not settled — the approved minute resulted from desperation, exhaustion and frustration, not from any leading from the Lord. Friends are reluctant to admit that our meetings lack the Lord’s power, that we feel pressured to do something rather than nothing, and that the resulting decisions are sometimes wrong. Does consent by a majority mean the same as “the Lord’s power is over all?”
There are other indications of a declining sense of God’s Spirit. The drive toward efficient organization led E. Stanley Jones to describe some church leaders as “fussy managers of other people’s business.” Over a hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed “you met with a politician where you expected to find a priest.” In our own time, N. T. Wright maintains that church leaders “find themselves spending countless hours…running the church as a business, raising money or working at dozens of other tasks.” He believes that if ministers spent “more time studying and teaching Jesus and the Gospels, a good many of the other things we worry about…would be seen in their proper light.”
The question is how to arrive at that place where we can see things in their proper light. Just reading early Friends accounts of the Lord’s power has not been enough to keep us under the same influence. Early Quaker descriptions of the power of God are usually brief, without details. What they meant by the power of the Lord is a challenge today. For early Friends, the Lord’s power was the power of Truth. Fox “declared the Truth to both priest and people and showed them…the power and spirit of God that they wanted.” Often these Friends wrote truth with a capital “T,” referring to Christ who said, “I am the Truth.” They knew Christ’s inner presence and endeavored carefully and conscientiously to live and speak the truth.
Today we carefully craft our conversations with subtle phrases to pointedly conceal our differences. Those who do speak the truth, however gently, are relativized with comments such as, “That may be true for you.” Such a dismissal invokes the modern heresy that there is no ultimate truth and that truth may be different for different people.
Early Friends would not be comfortable with this slippery definition of truth. As Geoffrey F. Nuttall observed, “In the writings of early Friends, who sometimes called themselves Friends in Truth, truth is a word which recurs constantly, and with a meaning which goes far beyond mere truthfulness.” Truth here centers around an unchangeable God and His Son, Jesus Christ. Friends experience with Christ required a deeper respect for Truth. Christ’s presence, the Lord’s power, opened Quakers to a more intense application of truth. For these Friends, to exist on a lower level was less than living the truth; it was without the power of the Lord.
Prayer was a source of the Lord’s power for early Friends. Impressed by Fox’s prayers, William Penn wrote, “Above all else he excelled in prayer…The most awful, living, reverent frame I have ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer.” Fox’s typical comment on prayer was “I was moved to pray in the mighty power of the Lord.”
Early Friends were known for gathering in worshipful silence. This silence was not an empty silence — it was a form of prayer. Fox upbraided people at Cleveland, describing them as “light and loose” and admonishing them to “come together again and wait to feel the Lord’s power and spirit.” Fox declared that God sent him “forth into the world…to bring people off…from all the world’s worships…which stood in forms without power.”
Meetings held during the week were once called prayer meetings. Even though few of these meetings displayed power from the Lord, nevertheless, dropping the name of prayer meeting indicates a change in attitude. Today we may mentally acknowledge the efficacy of prayer, but do not do much about it. Friends need to remember Fox’s exhortation to seekers to “wait to feel the Lord’s power and spirit.”
Early Friends attitude toward Scripture reveals another aspect of the Lord’s power. Their relationship to the Bible was so different that some alleged they slighted the Scriptures. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is every indication that Fox, Fell and other early Friends read their Bibles regularly and carefully. They became knowledgeable enough with the text that they could challenge those attempting to pass off opinion as Scripture. As Geoffrey Nutthall states, “No one knew his Bible better than Fox.”
This basic knowledge of the words of Scripture, however, was not enough. What was lacking, Fox declared, was for people to be “led by the Holy Ghost into the truth and substance of the Scriptures” — to internalize the Bible’s message. Fell, too, emphasized the need to live Scriptural teaching, “These scriptures bear testimony with us, and we to them, and so are in unity with the same Spirit which gave them forth.” Fox, stating that Scripture is not only to be read but to be lived, declared to Oliver Cromwell that “for now the state of this present age is, that the Lord is bringing his people into the life the Scriptures were given forth from.” To Justice Barton, he wrote, “Live the life of the Scriptures.”
For early Friends, the Scriptures are the story of God’s dealings with people; a right understanding of Scripture means that the story is not finished. We are a part of the same story, “It was now as in the days of the apostles.” The power of the Lord, then, translates into the power to live the Scriptures. The question that keeps coming back is, “Where is the power of the Lord among Friends today?” Honesty and modesty forces us to admit we have lost something early Friends had — that we have little basis for saying, “The power of the Lord is over all.”
We must find a way to recapture the spirit and power of early Friends. When this transformation occurs, present-day Quakers, too, may declare with confidence, “He is working in this His day.”
Charles Heavilin has pastored in Indiana and Western Yearly and served on various Yearly Meeting boards including Clerk of Ministry & Council in Indiana Yearly Meeting and Presiding Clerk of Western Yearly Meeting. He co-edited The Quaker Presence in America with his wife, Barbara.