 March/April 2000 (XXXVIII 2) |
s Friends from around the Yearly Meeting gather at Arch Street Meeting House in March for our annual sessions, we will be coming with many common hopes and aspirations. We wish to experience renewed vitality and growth in our Meetings. We desire to be more faithful in our work and witness, to be renewed by the Spirit in our individual and corporate lives. We wish to bring our children to an awareness of the Spirit moving in them and others. We seek to experience peace and love among ourselves, while serving as agents for peace and love in the world. Our time together is precious; we want it to be well spent.
"We hope this time of extended worship will provide an opportunity to offer heart-felt prayer about our Yearly Meeting and the concerns that we collectively share." When members of the PYM Meeting on Worship and Ministry gathered to plan for the opening session of our Yearly Meeting, Thursday evening, March 23, most of us expected that we would discern together whom we would ask to speak, and on what topic. As we shared the fruit of our reflections and prayers about our annual sessions, certain themes emerged again and again: the need for deep listening; our shared hunger and search for unity; the certainty that only the Living God can bring us into unity and Truth. We sensed the connections between these concerns and, at the heart of each of them, the Spirit beckoning us to listen deeply and to hear.
In our planning session the PYM Meeting on Worship and Ministry came back to a fundamental conviction of our faith: we are able to hear God speaking to us directly. The divine Spirit will speak to our hearts, and perhaps to our ears, if we wait together in expectant worship. We discerned that we were not to invite a speaker for our opening session of Yearly Meeting this year, but to create an opening for whomever among us God may appoint to speak out of worship. We were united in understanding that what is needed to begin our Yearly Meeting is an opportunity for an extended period of worship, a time when we can be gathered in the Divine Presence to receive the teaching and grace that are waiting for us.
We hope this time of extended worship will provide an opportunity to offer heart-felt prayer about our Yearly Meeting and the concerns that we collectively share. We hope that Friends will come in great numbers to participate. We trust that during this worship Friends will speak if they feel truly moved by the Spirit, while others may find that seeds of ministry are nourished that will only become fully ripe for speaking during a future session of our gathering. Still others will be refreshed in the silence and ministered through the vocal ministry of those who speak. Before offering vocal ministry we ask that you wait until you feel certain that the Spirit wants to speak through you for the gathered body at that moment — and until you are divinely empowered to do so.
We seek to hear God's will and guidance for us as a Yearly Meeting. What particular works or witness does God intend for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting? What transformations would God like to work within us individually, in our meetings, and in our corporate body? We seek to receive God's transforming touch within our hearts. We hope you will join us in this adventure.
PYM Meeting on Worship and Ministry
There is that near you which will guide you; O! wait for it, and be sure ye keep to it; that being innocent and faithful, in following the Lord in the leadings of his power, his power may plead your cause in the hearts of all his tender people hereabouts; and they may see and acknowledge, that your meetings are of God, — that ye are guided by him into that way of service ... in which he himself is with you, and by the movings of his Holy Spirit in your hearts, hath engaged you. Be not hasty either in conceiving any thing in your minds, or in speaking it forth, or in any thing ye are to do; but feel him by his Spirit and life going along with you, and leading you into what he would have any of you, or every one of you do. If ye be in the true feeling sense of what the Lord your God would have done, and join with what is of God, as it riseth in any, or against any thing that is not of God, as it is made manifest among you, ye are all in your places and proper services, obeying the blessed will and doing the blessed work of the Lord your God.
— Isaac Penington
17th Century Friend
Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:18 AM