Eldering Stories
By Kenneth Sutton

 have found that when I think about my experience as an elder, it is images that come to me rather than a narrative.

Awakening
I awoke as a spiritual person in January 1978. I was a freshman at college and was facing a decision that seemed major at the time. Fretting over my choice, I walked one night along an asphalt pathway between parking lots and through a small grove of trees. I looked up into the clear night sky and had a profound sense that the universe has order and meaning and that everything is fine. It was (and is) comforting and sustaining, it made me feel connected as an individual, and yet it was thoroughly impersonal.

Conduit
In July 1987, Jan Hoffman gave a plenary address to the FGC Gathering. For reasons that we can't remember (and perhaps never knew), Jan asked me to sit with another Friend, Peter, behind her on the stage as she spoke. I remember that we three met before the plenary and sat outside on some steps, talking about how Jan was approaching the speech and what she needed from us. The notable thing about my experience was the feeling of being a conduit for Jan's message. Yes, Jan was given the message and was delivering it. But I, too, felt I was part of the passage of the message from the Infinite to the particular. After the talk, I couldn't remember a lot of what Jan said. I realized I hadn't been listening; I was literally and metaphorically sitting in a place behind the spoken words.

Not a co-leader
The first occasion I was called an elder was a weekend workshop that Jan led at Powell House, in Old Chatham, New York. When she was working out the agreement with Powell House about the weekend, she asked for the resources to bring an elder-room, board, travel money. So when I went, Jan and I were both naming what I was doing "eldering." One piece of what that meant became clear during the preparation time on Friday. As we talked about the structure of the weekend, the rhythm and content, Jan described a clerking exercise that she intended to lead, asking that I act as recording clerk. I had misgivings about the exercise, and we struggled with its place in the weekend until we realized that I had been acting like a co-leader rather than an elder. As an elder, it was clear that Jan was clear to use the exercise.

A rock
At that same Powell House weekend, I verbalized for the first time what has been an important image for me of what I was doing: it felt like being a rock. My role in meeting for worship or while Jan was leading a session was like being a large, smooth stone, just emerging from the ground, soaking up the sunlight and radiating heat, big enough to lie on, level enough to stand on comfortably, passive but not unseen.

An adolescent
In Samuel Bownas' A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister, he characterizes growth in ministry as a progression from infancy to adulthood. In this sense of growing into my gifts, I experienced an extended weekend at Pendle Hill in September 1999, "A Gathering of Quaker Ministers and Elders," as an adolescent elder. My experience of this weekend, from the first meeting for worship, was of vocal ministers run amok. A cohort of those I think of as "adolescent elders" rose to this need. If ministers are those who have laid upon them messages for or service to the meeting or the world, then elders are those who nurture and draw forth the ministry, giving attention to both the minister and the meeting. And while many Friends have inappropriately and negatively narrowed the word "eldering," sometimes elders do nurture the ministry by cautioning the ministers. The end of all ministry and all eldering is to direct attention towards the Inward Teacher, who ultimately inspires, corrects, and empowers.

On the Saturday morning of the gathering, a Friend (another adolescent elder) approached me in distress about her emotions during the morning worship. I ran around (literally, in two cases) gathering together six Friends to meet with her. After 3/4 hour of worshiping and consideration of how the weekend was going, we decided to do several things: move from the perimeter of the room, where most of us had been sitting, to the center benches; to begin worshiping 1/2 hour before the scheduled time; and to pull the leaders' bench out from the benches behind it and to sit there. It was tremendously affirming when one of the leaders expressed his gratitude that there were Friends behind the leaders supporting them. It was no less affirming but unsettling as well to have him say he was glad that we had "assumed our station." There are two ways I can think of to interpret "station": social position or status; and post or assigned place. I heard it in the functional mode: here was a task we could undertake, and we did. I fear others might hear that in a hierarchical mode: here is an elevated place we assumed.

I left the weekend with a sense of two obligations: to assume the responsibilities of my gifts; and to learn how to initiate a one-on-one conversation with a stranger (or even a friend!) about their ministry. "The first question one may ask a vocal minister, regardless of personal reaction positive or negative, is: 'How did this message feel to you?' This shifts the focus from judging the messenger to examining together the Source of the message, which is the true concern."

Sometime immediately before the gathering, I had a sense of things falling into place for me around accepting "elder" as a functional name for a good chunk of my gifts. (Not to the exclusion of other gifts, or a rejection of "ministry" as something I do, or an insistence or surety about that particular word, but a certain amount of clarity.) On Sunday afternoon, Jan Hoffman, Bob Schmitt, and I did some planning for our travels in October. As I shared my growing clarity about being an elder, there was another sense of things falling into place as we recognized that Jan could be described with some accuracy as a minister with a concern for eldering. This awareness helped us to relax into our native ways of preparing for the trip, and for me strengthened the sense of being co-leaders.

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