The Lamb's War

Northern Friends Peace Board

Minute from a gathering on "The Lamb's War" held at Woodbrooke, November 2000

Minute

Thirty-three Friends, gathered at Woodbrooke from 10th - 12th November 2000, have revisited ‘The Lamb’s War’ of the seventeenth century early Quaker movement and, in lectures, discussions, workshops and worship, considered its implications for today. The seventeenth century was a time of turbulence and change. The struggle for greater equality, the clash of religious and political ideas, and the despair of radical movements formed the background against which Friends developed. Using imagery from the Book of Revelation, they interpreted their situation as spiritual warfare against the ways of the world. Through worship they felt Christ transforming their lives and equipping them to challenge worldly power with the weapons of the Spirit, love, patience, nonviolence and truth.

We also live in times of complexity and change, when worldly powers infiltrate our lives and captivate our minds. We see the inequalities of our world and acknowledge our part in them. We see spirituality reduced to a privatised commodity. We also like our worship to be comfortable. The powers of the world seem beyond our control.

How can our meetings become communities of resistance and hope? Can we recover a prophetic witness of word and deed? Can we again become channels for the work of God? Can we discern what it means to be a people of God and live that out faithfully in the world? Are we prepared to let the Holy Spirit blow through our minds and hearts and turn our lives and our meetings upside-down?

Our first step is to return to the still centre where God can teach and transform us. As Friends we seek to live in relationship with the divine life and power all the time and not just during our Sunday worship. We are not alone in our life with God, and we each need to contribute to building the meeting community, in which we can nurture, strengthen and encourage each other, and to which we can be accountable. Together we can learn how to recognise our fears, build up our courage, and truly surrender everything, our will, our words, our actions, and our lives to God.

We are called to spiritual warfare, firstly in our own hearts, against everything that mars our commitment to God and our faith in the power of God to make all things new. We can rediscover our spiritual weapons and practise them as witness and testimony. We have other gifts to use, intelligence, knowledge, humour, and creativity. We can learn together how to accept conflict, to see and name what is wrong in ourselves and in the value systems of our world, to find ways to speak and act lovingly, and to seek for healing and growth.

We have to remember that God works with others as well as ourselves. We do not have the whole vision. In being faithful to the light that is given us we can become servants to a wider community in the processes of change. In taking action, we can experience how faith and life interact, our actions developing our faith and our faith feeding our actions. Our meeting houses are a resource which we can use more effectively.

Some of us are feeling led in this time to tear down the pillars of worldly institutions that create or perpetuate obscene inequalities of wealth and influence, others to work within existing structures to bring about change from within or to alleviate damage to people and the creation, still others to build alternatives and experiment with new forms of sustainable relationship between people and our planet. All are needed and our history of mediation as Friends means we can often be effective in encouraging dialogue between these different groups.

We must find the balance between the realistic and the seemingly impossible, recognising where we start from and who we work with in all our human failings, and yet knowing that nothing is impossible with God, who can work through all our gifts and abilities and our faults. God gives us all that we need for the struggle, leads us on the way, and calls us to share in the divine life and joy.

Signed in and on behalf of the gathering,

Janet Scott
Alex Wildwood acting as clerks