How to Clerk a Meeting for Healing What Breaks Our Hearts

This guide accompanies the author’s “From Lament and Anger to Love and Hope” in the February 2026 issue of Friends Journal.

1. Ensure ahead of time that Friends with spiritual weight or groundedness will be present to anchor the meeting. These Friends might be different from the ones that usually come to mind when thinking about “weighty” Friends. They can also be given the task of sitting near and/or holding in the Light any members of the gathering who may be vulnerable to overwhelm.
2. The meeting is likely to take more than an hour, but should probably be limited to less than one and a half hours, due to the level of focus required. Use your judgment.
3. Introduce Friends to the meeting for healing what breaks our hearts. Consider sharing the assumptions from the article. Explain that Friends will be invited to share, out of the silence, a social condition or issue that is breaking their hearts. They will be asked to name the situation very succinctly, but with enough specificity to create a clear picture of the suffering. Explain that you will take brief notes about the concerns raised. After four to six specific issues have been identified, you will enter into silent worship together. You, the clerk, will discern the order of the situations to be prayed over and will name them, one issue at a time, into the silence. Friends will be invited to minister, as they are led by the Spirit. As in meeting for worship, any Spirit-led ministry is welcome: song, Bible verses, poems, lamentations, expressions of emotion, visions, words of encouragement, quotes from spiritual people, insights, rebukes, personal experiences, praise, thanksgiving, etc. Explain that you will sit together with whatever comes forward, and that you will end the meeting by inviting Friends to imagine the world healed.
4. Settle into quiet worship. When you discern that the time is right, refer to your notes and speak one of the situations into the quiet, asking Friends to pray over it or to hold it in the Light. Trust the Spirit of the Living God to guide you. Be ready to slow down the process, if needed, just as you would in a meeting for business, by asking Friends to pause and leave space between their ministries. If it is very quiet, again, allow it. Trust that the Spirit is at work in the silence.
5. When you discern that the meeting has finished with this situation, close it by saying something like, “Let us leave (the named situation) in the Light of God’s love, and now place our attention on (the next situation as you discern it).” Repeat the process until you have addressed all of the concerns.
6. If you find that you are short on time, you may find it necessary to combine some of the concerns, based on similarities they may share. But it is best if Friends can give each concern their full and undivided attention.
7. When you are ready to draw the meeting to a close, ask Friends to speak, again succinctly and out of the silence, snapshots of a healed world. You might start, as a way of providing an example.
8. Provide a time for debriefing the experience if you are able to do so.