A People Who Dwell in the Living Stream

Returning to Extended Worship

For many years, my small meeting in Pennsylvania had meetings for worship that dwelled deep in the living stream. If you’ve ever entered an unprogrammed Friends meeting and felt yourself easily and gently pulled down to a deeper place, you know what I mean. There is a pregnancy in the worship, and a person knows that one is listening in the room, not just within oneself. Words are not needed to be part of this experience, and yet God sometimes pushes someone to stand and be like a trumpet addressing the Inward Teacher’s flock.

On one First-day morning as I worshiped with my meeting, I felt us settle so deep that I asked the Living Presence, “In this deep place, what are you wanting us to do?” I immediately heard the words, “Dwell here.” I knew right away that the Living Presence was asking us to be a faithful body of listening Friends. The Living Presence was reminding me that when we center our corporate worship in the living stream, we will be fed, changed, and guided by the One True Head of the Church, no matter what name you choose for that reality. I was clear that we were being called to be a people who dwell in the living stream.

There is a qualitative difference between meetings for worship that are led by God and those that are led by ourselves. Experienced Friends know the feel of a settled meeting, and they contribute to it by expecting a living silence as soon as they enter the worship space. They are clear that the divine mystery is waiting for us, just as much as we are waiting upon it. First-time visitors can also experience this dwelling deep, and it is not uncommon for some of them to say that the experience felt like coming home.

Dwelling deep as corporate bodies in the living stream isn’t as strong today as it once was among Friends. For several years now, I have been responding to a call to find ways to nurture these corporate experiences of being grounded in the Living God. We need this profound corporate faithfulness as much as our individual faithfulness in order to be prophetic witnesses in the challenging world in which we live. How can we again learn to be gathered bodies who yield to the Living Presence? How can we strengthen our call to be a people who dwell in the living stream?

An Extended Worship Experiment in New England Yearly Meeting

Although my membership is still in my Pennsylvania meeting, my wife and I recently moved to Vermont. Soon after our arrival, I began to live into a call to strengthen our corporate practices of being faithful bodies of Friends. Bennington (Vt.) Meeting, where I am sojourning, helped me to form a clearness committee to see if this call might bear some fruit. Since I had been involved in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s (PYM) extended worship gatherings, I knew how those opportunities can help Friends to remember what it means to be gathered corporately: to yield in a deeper way to the movements of the Spirit among us. Out of the clearness committee came the decision to experiment with organizing extended meetings for worship in New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM).

For the past several years, Jean Rosenberg, a member of Middlebury (Vt.) Meeting, and I have been convening extended worship opportunities around NEYM. We convene all-day extended meetings every two or three months in various meetinghouses throughout NEYM. We have now held 17 of these Saturday meetings in all the states that the yearly meeting covers: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. We start with three hours of unprogrammed worship in the morning, take an hour break for lunch, and reconvene afterwards for an hour of worship sharing about the experiences that Friends had during the morning worship.

The reflections are often especially meaningful. We hear deep appreciation for the longer time: comments that the regular one-hour meetings for worship have only just begun to settle near the end of the hour and how much deeper the longer worship enables Friends to go. We hear about personal transformation and recognition that “letting go and letting God” is the gift that a person is taking home.

Other comments during the reflection time have included the following: “I never had that deep of an experience of prayer.” “Wow, was that really three hours? It went by so fast.” “Being here today has shown me that I need to return to our in-person worship and to let go of convening the Zoom worship that I’ve been doing for the past several years.” “I came into today’s worship under the weight of a deep personal concern. In this longer worship, I was covered and healed by grace.”

The deeper silence of the longer worship reaches Friends in so many ways, and often it is only in the reflections that we hear details of the Spirit’s work. Sometimes, however, there is palpable vocal ministry that affects Friends in powerful ways, too. In one such meeting, nearing the end of the three-hour worship, a Friend rose to remind us: “We are not simply seeking transformative experiences in meeting for worship. We are being invited into a whole way of being, into a transformed life.” In a different extended worship, a Friend rose to say, “Here’s the deal, God wants so much more from us. We have barely touched the hem of the Living Presence that visits us.” Then in the afternoon reflection time a Friend asked, “If we’ve barely touched the hem, I wonder what it would be like to see the whole cloak?”

In the fliers announcing these extended meetings, we state: 

In earlier times Friends would often worship for hours fully expectant and deeply patient for the Living Presence to do its work in the gathered body of Friends. These gathered experiences were core to Quaker convincement, personal transformation, and prophetic challenges to the cultural behaviors in the places where Quakers lived.

It is our prayer that these extended meetings are giving Friends a taste of the gift of being gathered corporately and of opportunities to learn how necessary it is to hold together the corporate and individual experiences of being led by the Living God who beckons us. We pray that these experiences will lead us to becoming again a people who dwell in the living stream.