7 Years as a Traveling Quaker

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1. Reflecting on the story of Comfort Hoag’s unfinished voyage, Emily suggests that what feels like a test from God might actually just be preparation or a “trial run”. Have you ever experienced a leading or a plan that didn’t work out, but later proved to be essential preparation for something else?
2. In compiling her book, Emily found that different global Quaker groups held unique “puzzle pieces” of wisdom, such as East African Friends’ precise definition of communal sin. What unique piece of wisdom, focus, or testimony do you think your specific local meeting or community holds?
3. Emily’s final piece of advice is to combat this global fear by doing the thing that is “a little bit scary,” rather than jumping straight to what is terrifying. What is one “little bit scary” step toward connection or community that you feel called to take this week?

Zack Jackson
Hey everyone, Zack here. Just a quick word before we get started. On November 24th at 7 PM Eastern Time, we’re hosting a special live Zoom event for podcast supporters. It will be hosted by Quaker lawyer, writer, and advocate Scott Holmes who was featured in last season’s episode, A Quaker Response to Christian Nationalism.

We are living in a time of frighteningly fast cultural and political shifts, but the Early Quaker did too. On November 24th, Scott is going to help us to see the parallels between these two time periods and how we can learn from the wisdom of the Early Quakers to hold power accountable and to protect human dignity today.

We’ll wrap up with a live Q&A, so bring your questions. Can’t make it? The audio and video recording will be available  for our podcast supporters. If you aren’t a supporter yet, you can become one for as little as $5. Just  visit quakerpodcast.com/support. It only takes a couple minutes, and we really appreciate it. 

Emily Provance  

And if I boil it down to why I believe this is of value, it’s because I did do everything I could to pull from all Friends around the world, not because the many differences we have do not matter, but because they do, because our differences do matter so much.

Zack Jackson  

Hey friends! I’m Zack Jackson, and welcome to season four of Thee Quaker podcast. I am so excited to be here with you at the beginning of another season, and I am even more excited to introduce my co-host for today, Emily Provance.

Emily Provance  

I’m excited too, and greetings from San Antonio, or possibly greetings from Australia, because by the time this episode comes out, I will be in Australia.

Zack Jackson  

and that’s not unusual for you, right? Like being in different cities and different continents throughout the year.

Emily Provance  

Absolutely, I am a Quaker traveling minister, so when I’m talking to Christians from other traditions who haven’t heard of that, I tell them imagine the body of Christ metaphor in First Corinthians 12, and the traveling ministers are meant to serve as the circulatory system.

Zack Jackson  

I love that metaphor so much. I’ve never heard it preached that way. Like, like you’re taking oxygen and nutrients from one part and whatnot, and like moving it around to other parts that need it?

Emily Provance  

Absolutely, ideas, inspiration, best practices, and then sometimes also networking people together.

Zack Jackson  

Emily and I actually met earlier this year at Ireland Yearly Meeting. It was nice to meet another American who was traveling and who was a little bit better at traveling than I was. And you know, before that chance meeting, I actually didn’t know that there were still traveling Quaker ministers out there. Like, I knew some of the early history because obviously we did an episode on Elizabeth Hooton, but I didn’t realize that it was still happening.

Emily Provance  

Yeah, the practice of traveling ministry is still a living tradition, but it has become more rare over the years. Most yearly meetings have some kind of reference to it in their Faith and Practice, and so there’s a way to do it. But I think it’s only just now sort of starting to reawaken and become a little bit more common.

Zack Jackson  

I think this is a really important time for that to be coming back, and we’ll get into that throughout the season because Emily has graciously agreed to share some stories from her travels during this season. She’s co-producing four episodes about some of those stories and the people that she’s met in her travels. But before we get to them, I want to take some time here at the beginning of this season to talk a little about Quaker traveling ministers, some of the subversive history behind it, the present challenges, and honestly, what would possess a person to give up their home and serve the world in this way? So, before we talk about the present moment and the challenges that are going on, Emily, can you ground us in history a little bit? Like, Quakers have been doing this since the beginning, right?

Emily Provance  

From the very beginning. Most people would say that George Fox was the first Quaker, and he was also the first traveling minister. Although I think Fox would not have said that because he was aware of reawakening the kind of primitive Christianity that he saw in the Book of Acts. So, if we’re looking for historical examples of traveling ministers, we might look at people like Lucretia Mott, George Fox, and John Woolman, but we could also be looking at Paul or Barnabas or Timothy. 

Zack Jackson 

You mention people in the first century like Paul and Timothy, and I think of them more like evangelists, bringing the message of Jesus to people who had not heard it. But that wasn’t true for Quaker traveling ministers, right? I’m thinking of… like, you mentioned Lucretia Mott who spent a lot of time traveling around the US advocating for abolition, women’s rights, and universal suffrage, and we have a whole episode coming up this season about her, but she was a Christian talking to Christians. How did Quakers see this role? Were they evangelizing, teaching, prophesying, or what? 

Emily Provance

 Early Friends didn’t really make much of a division between different kinds of functions of a traveling minister, and I find that really interesting. So evangelism might have been part of it. It’s not that they were sharing the story of Christ, but that they were sharing the concept that every person has this interior access to the inner light or the inner Christ, that even people who have never heard of the historical Jesus still have the ability to connect with that inward light in their hearts.

That was a message that early Friends were sharing. So in that way, they absolutely were evangelists, and they were also provocateurs because that was not a very popular concept at the time. But also sometimes they were reformers, so the early traveling ministers or within the first couple of hundred years were doing things like women’s suffrage and abolition and working on class divides and other issues in that area.

But the boundaries were all blended together in the beginning in this concept of the traveling minister who would go out and do what was faithful, whatever that happened to be.

Zack Jackson  

So, can you tell me about your call? Like what you felt specifically called to do?

Emily Provance  

It’s complicated. The initial calling that I experienced was pretty specific. I had the experience of feeling called to travel in Britain Yearly Meeting, and that was all the way back in 2013. And well, first of all, there was an elder of the meeting who actually asked me in the context of a phone call. He said, “Is there something you’re not telling me?” Because I did not know how to… I was still a relatively new Friend. 

I had no idea how to say, “I’m experiencing this spiritual calling that I don’t know how to articulate.” And when I told him, he said, “Okay, so the next thing we do is we establish a clearness committee.” And my clearness committee, after a couple of meetings, said, “We think this is real. This feels real to us.” And then, after we went through the whole process of writing a travel minute and getting that approved, also by the yearly meeting, and then sending that to Britain Yearly Meeting, and then Britain Yearly Meeting had to figure out what to do with it… eventually, my visa was denied. And the reason they told me my visa was denied was because they said, “There is no logical reason for this travel.” 

And I gotta tell you, that’s hard to argue with. There was no logical reason for this travel, absolutely no logical reason. But there’s a story about a woman called Comfort Hoag. I’m not really sure, and Comfort, I think in the 1800s, she was living in North America, and she experienced a call to travel in the ministry somewhere in Europe. And when she got on the wooden sailing ship, and she and her companion were partway across the ocean—they were a day or two out—she turned to her companion and she said, “God did not actually want me to go on this trip. He only wanted to know that I would. And now that we have left, He will provide a way for us to return.” And very shortly after that, the ship they were on started to leak, and it turned around and went back to North America. What I think now is not so much that this was a test. I don’t think God really tests people. That doesn’t feel very God-like to me, but I think it was a preparation. I think it was a trial run. And after that, eventually, as I started to travel more and more, that happened much less dramatically, much more slowly. But we had the pieces in place, and we knew how to do it.

Zack Jackson  

So, I have heard stories of Quaker traveling ministers from the early days who would go on seasons of travel and then would come home to a more stable life to take care of the family and the farm and all of that. Were there ministers that were just doing this all year round for years and years on end?

Emily Provance  

You know, that’s a really good question, and I can’t say no because I can’t say that I haven’t that I’ve studied like every possible source, but not to my knowledge. There is a very important part of the going home again, and even for me, I do go to New York City, which is where my home meeting is, twice a year, and I do physically show up for meeting for worship, and I offer a report to my meeting about what have I been doing. And I also meet on Zoom once a month with a support committee that’s under the care of my meeting, so that they are keeping track of me. Because the concept of Quaker ministry is that it’s never about being a lone wolf that we’re always checking back in with the discernment of the home community. 

But physically going back to an actual house or apartment, like a place where I have stuff and people and a dog or whatever, in my case, that’s not how it works. I gave up having a home in January of 2019, and interestingly, when that happened, initially it was a financial issue. I was really at a point where I could no longer do the work that I was doing among Friends, and also pay for the room that I was renting in someone’s apartment in New York, and I remember going into a meeting for worship and saying, “God, one of two things is going to have to happen: either you have to come up with more money, or I have to give up the ministry. And during that meeting for worship, it became clear that there actually was a third option: I could give up having a home, and that is what I ultimately felt called to do, and so I did. So I’ve been on the road for seven and a half years, and even though this began as a financial motivation, what I have learned is that it has taught me all kinds of things that have nothing at all to do with that, that are about community and receiving hospitality and understanding, you know, the degree to which it’s important to have boundaries around yourself so that you’re taking care of your own needs in addition to serving the people that you’re with. So it’s been this extraordinary learning experience for me, but it started with a question of how do I make ends meet.

Zack Jackson  

So practically speaking, what does your work look like now? Like you are wrapping up a time in Texas, you’re going to Australia. What have you been doing, and what are you doing next?

Emily Provance  

 That’s always such a big question. Um, in San Antonio, I have been doing a series of workshops on preventing political violence, and it’s worth noting that a lot of the material that I put into political violence related workshops is learned from friends in Kenya who are leaders in prevention of elect- election related violence ever since 2007. Friends in Kenya have been doing that work.

This is not work I started out doing but the more I started doing the group to group kind of weaving together, the more I understood that I was gaining an insight that many people haven’t had the experiences to have. I will go from San Antonio, Texas to Australia.

I will be moving every three to seven days and I haven’t even counted the number of different places I will eventually be. I think it’s like 25. And all of those gatherings will be different because they are responses to what the local group of people is asking for.

So it’s, it’s again, it’s about responding to what does the local people– what are they hungering for? What are they looking for? And just being present for those opportunities.

Zack Jackson  

That core, essential humanity—is exactly what Emily has been studying up close for the last seven and a half years, and she recently decided to take all those observations and distill them into a massive new project—a book that tries to capture the sense of the meeting of all humanity. We’re going to dive into how she did it and what wisdom she found after a short break. Stay tuned. 

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Zack Jackson 

One of my absolute favorite things about making this podcast is when I get to hear your stories. So recently, I hopped on a call with Dawn, and she told me that when she moved to Philadelphia from Maryland a few years ago, she kept running into a word that she wasn’t very familiar with.

Dawn Mercurio

You know the word kept popping up everywhere. Quakers, Quakers. You know I’m seeing landmarks for it,  and I finally had the opportunity to investigate it, going to a Friend’s school, and I was really impressed.

Zack Jackson 

That first impression blossomed into a real passion. Today, Dawn is a Quaker educator, and she gets to regularly facilitate a unique kind of meeting for worship… with first graders

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Dawn Mercurio

Just the wonder of having a first grader learn the ability of regulating their bodies, their little bodies that are so excited in a space, you know, where they think and they reflect and they ask these questions that they have lots of things to say. I believe that a meeting for worship is the the greatest privilege that we have in education right now. Honestly, what a Quaker education offers is the privilege of unprogrammed time to reflect on whatever that is, is just priceless.

Zack Jackson 

Dawn initially came across our podcast while looking for educational resources to better understand her newfound faith, but while exploring the show, she told me she discovered something just as valuable – a community.

Dawn Mercurio

And I checked out the Discord, and I thought this is also interesting. What a way for other Quakers to interact! I loved also joining the extra Zoom meeting about. I think it was like a reflection on you know history, and I really enjoyed that. You know, I’m privileged to be in several Quaker communities right now, and I like the idea of being able to be connected to an even wider environment, and I feel like this is it. This is the way to do it.

Zack Jackson 

That desire for an extended interactive Quaker community is also why Dawn decided to take the leap from being a weekly listener to becoming a monthly supporter,

Dawn Mercurio

I wanted to make sure that like that it sticks around. I think it it feels like this is a really worthwhile resource, but I also feel like it’s actually also a way to connect for action and and think of ways while we are finding it like useful for ourselves, we could take this shared identities and and turn it into something else, and that seems really like amazing to me. Like, what can we do with that?

Zack Jackson 

Hearing Dawn talk about connection for action gets to the heart of why we make this show. We want to help foster spiritual growth, to find stillness, and cultivate genuine community right where you are. To keep building this project together, we rely on listeners like you. So, if this show has been a companion in your spiritual life, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You’ll have access to exclusive supporter content, live events, and special gifts in the mail from time to time. You can go to quakerpodcast.com/support. That’s quakerpodcast.com/support. Thank you again to Dawn and to all of our supporters. You make this work possible. And now, back to the show.

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Zack Jackson

Welcome back. Before the break, we talked about Emily’s incredible seven and a half year journey living out of a backpack as a Quaker traveling minister. All of that travel, all of those small conversations in kitchens and backyards, inspired her to take on an enormous project that has implications for Quakers and non-Quakers alike. So, a week after she landed in Australia, she graciously braved the 14-hour time zone difference to tell me about this project. So, Emily, you have a new book coming out in a few days. Can you tell us a little about it?

Emily Provance  

I do have a book that’s about to come out, and it’s called A Testimony of Community, which is kind of a weird Quakerese thing. But I always tell people in Quaker jargon, testimony is a word that means a collective understanding, something we’ve come to together over a long period of time. And the book A Testimony of Community is drawn from the Swarthmore Lecture that I did in the year 2025, and it was a lecture on the experience of traveling in ministry for a period of quite a number of years, and then talking about what that had taught me about community.

Zack Jackson  

That’s interesting to me because it seems almost like traveling and being this itinerant is the opposite of community. You’re not staying in a place long enough to build lasting community, right?

Emily Provance  

I think it’s definitely true that when you’re on the road and you’re in these really short-term situations, you’re often having a different sort of community relationship with the people around you. But a couple of the things that I’ve discovered: one is I’ve come to understand or to believe that community is involuntary, meaning when we are with a group of people, we are a community whether we like it or not, and we can choose to act like a community, or we can choose to ignore one another. But we are in a situation with a group of people and have a certain number of responsibilities toward one another for things like mutual nurture and care and working together to meet everybody’s needs.

Zack Jackson

So, I just want to give our listeners a sense of the scope of this book. In an attempt to gather up the collective wisdom about what it means to live as a global human family, you read 38 Quaker books of discipline, 15 historical works, and the entire Bible, combining that with the sort of collective wisdom you’ve gathered over the past decade of travel and drafted 92 minutes, like minutes from a meeting for business, about what it means to be in community with other humans. Drafting that alone, is a herculean task, but since this is a work about community, how do you go about discerning whether or not you’ve accurately distilled all that wisdom? How did it go from a draft to its final form? 

Emily Provance  

 It’s one of those things about life where you start and you can’t actually really exactly have a plan because you have to wait to see how things are gonna unfold as you go.

Once I had the 92 minutes drafted, I was trying to imagine myself being kind of like a clerk in a meeting for business that included every Quaker who ever lived. But because I could not gather an international gathering and also, like, wake the dead, I went to North Carolina, because North Carolina is where there is the most diversity of living Friends theologically in one geographic area.

And there was a little group of Friends who gathered together on a Saturday and spent hours going through all these minutes and nothing went through that they were not willing to collectively affirm. And then when I took the minutes and put them together, there was this sort of discovery that this is relevant for people beyond Quakerism.

And if I boil it down to why I believe this is of value, it’s because I did do everything I could to pull from all Friends around the world, not because the many differences we have do not matter, but because they do, because our differences do matter so much.

So what we are able to say together is that much more powerful.

Zack Jackson  

When you’re looking at the language and the theology of all of these different groups and all of their diversity, are you finding similarities between systems that are surprising to you?

Emily Provance  

There are things in our different practices around the world as Quakers that are complementary in ways that really surprised me. Not necessarily the same, but they go together like puzzle pieces. The only group of Friends around the world that I found that had an explanation for the source of oppression was the East Africans, and they said that oppression comes from communal sin, and then they very specifically defined what communal sin is: idolatry and the pursuit of power, vengeance, money, and pleasure, and also the practice of insulting one another. And the thing about this was that there are so many groups of us that address how to solve oppression. So many groups of Friends have written about this is what we need to do to solve the problem, but the East Africans were the only ones who were talking about the source of the problem, and I discovered very quickly that when I put those two together, they clicked. 

Central and Southern Africa Yearly Meeting has the most compelling, most deeply true writing about racism and also class. And if you go to North Pacific Yearly Meeting’s text, their book of discipline is the only one that has a section directly addressing fear. I run into fear as a spiritual stumbling block every day of my life in conversation with people, but the only group that actually has writing about this is North Pacific. 

And the other one I’ll name is there is one group of Quakers in the world that has included in their book of discipline the subject of abuse. We all have abuse in our communities, all of us. But the only ones who have written down what it is, how to recognize it, and what to do about it in the book of discipline, at least, are Evangelical Friends Southwest. Generally speaking, the theological language of Evangelical Friends Southwest would be very hard for many Friends in other places to resonate with, but they are the ones who have this puzzle piece. So if we say, “You are not a foot and therefore you are not part of the body,” if we’re saying that to Evangelical Friends Southwest, if we are saying, “You’re so different from the rest of us that we’re not going to connect,” then we are missing the wisdom that they have to bring to the table.

Zack Jackson  

So you have this massive project—these 92 minutes drawn from Friends all over the world—but how does this actually play out if you aren’t in a Quaker setting? Like, you’ve talked about this idea of finding the sense of the meeting, this collective spiritual truth, not just in a meeting but everywhere. Is this something that you think you can do in secular spaces as well?

Emily Provance  

Yeah, it is my experience that this is absolutely something you can do, even if you are the only person in the space who has an understanding of what sense of the meeting means, because every person does have that spark of God within them. And let’s imagine for a minute a situation where everybody is speaking in good faith. In that kind of situation, it’s relatively easy because people are speaking truthfully or nearly truthfully about where they are, and we can absolutely see that there is something that is resonating within the whole group. People are very often arguing over step two or step three or step six, and sometimes when you just sit back and listen to the disagreement, to the argument itself, you can say, “I hear a point of agreement or collective understanding on step one.” And if we can name that, sometimes we are successfully naming the common thing valued in a way that makes it possible for the conversation to go further, and the book has some examples of that. 

But even if not everybody is speaking in good faith, even if there are people there who are deliberately trying to manipulate the situation, even if somebody is lying or is threatening in some way, what I’ve learned over time is that still that person is communicating something true. They just may not be communicating it with their words. So if I know that someone is saying something that is inaccurate, or they are saying something that is deliberately a lie, I will try really hard to listen for what is this person communicating with this lie. And sometimes what they are saying is, “I am scared,” and sometimes they are saying, “This issue is so important to me that I will do anything it takes to get my need met in this situation.” But that all by itself is truth that is coming out through that person, and I can try to find a way to address what it is that they are telling me by their body language, their attitude, their emotions, even if they are not prepared to speak literal truth in that moment. 

It isn’t necessarily always the case that if you can find a sense of the meeting, everyone will then cheerfully accept it and move forward on that basis. Sometimes it works that way. Sometimes it’s like a little miracle just to name something like that out loud, but sometimes people don’t, because God doesn’t make us listen. The practice is useful anyway. The practice of listening for that sense of the meeting is useful, even if it’s just for me, because I learn something that way. Because, of course, as I said, none of us learn truth as an individual nearly so well as we can if we’re trying to listen in the context of a community.

Zack Jackson  

So, Emily, as we wrap up today and think about this global human family, is there a message that you think everyone needs to hear right now?

Emily Provance  

I spend time with all different kinds of Quakers and in all kinds of different places, and I also spend time with a lot of groups who are not Quaker and in conversation with a lot of people coming from other backgrounds. And if there is a singular message, it is that everybody is so scared. Everybody is scared, and not all scared of the same things. But everybody is scared, and we have this sort of natural fear response to lock down and be protective and hold close to us the people who are dearest, and shut everybody else out. And in the environment in which we are living today, that reaction, though very natural and understandable, is exactly the reaction that’s going to prevent us from being able to move forward as a world. Quakers say that when we do discernment of the will of God, we listen to many different voices, and it feels so incredibly important to me to actually practice that listening. And I do understand that it’s really scary, and I guess my central message and the thing I find myself saying more often than anything else is, do the thing that is a little bit scary. You do not have to do the thing that is terrifying. In fact, don’t step straight toward the thing that is terrifying because that’s something that’s too hard. Do the thing that is a little bit scary.

Zack Jackson  

Thank you for listening and thank you to our guest, Emily Provance. Emily is an associate of good news associates, an ecumenical organization that helps to support people like Emily who feel called to non-institutional ministries. Emily’s new book is available for purchase now and we will leave a link in the description where you can also find a transcript, discussion questions, and other resources. 

This episode was hosted and produced by me, Zack Jackson. Our executive producer is Jon Watts. With editorial support from our creative team, Maeve Sutherland and Adam Ginsberg—and a member of Thee Quaker board. All the music in this episode was composed and recorded by Jon Watts.

Thee Quaker Podcast is one of the three projects at Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform for the 21st Century.  If this work has been meaningful to you, please consider becoming a monthly supporter by going to quakerpodcast.com/support. Every little bit helps us to tell these stories and shine our light even brighter. 

And now. Our Daily Quaker Message as read by Rose Tobin…

Rose Tobin  

Carolyn Treadway, 2006. Slowing down frees time and space for spiritual connection, and reverence for life. We must act on what our deep hearts already know, all life is sacred. Everything is connected. From this space, we can create a world we are proud to leave to our children, and all future generations. Reverence for life empowers us to take responsibility for and to care for ourselves and each other.

Zack Jackson  

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, go to dailyquaker.com. That’s dailyquaker.com.

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Executive produced by Jon Watts

Editorial Support by Maeve Sutherland, Adam Ginsberg, and a member of Thee Quaker Board

Original music by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Joey Hartmann-Dow.

Season 4 is sponsored by The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)