Mission with Prophetic Power: The Journal of John Woolman (SRSC 12)

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Mission with Prophetic Power: The Journal of John Woolman

Discussion Questions

What was a big insight or “take away” from your experience of reading this portion of John Woolman’s Journal ?

In Quaker culture, one becomes a leader through a process by which both the aspiring leader and that person’s community affirm

the call of God on his or her life. It is a process of what I call “learning to speak.” What elements of that process can you identify in this chapter? How do people “learn to speak” in your own circles? How have you learned to speak?

Sometimes our mission with prophetic power is not through speaking, but through writing. Consider the prophet Isaiah, or the

Apostle Paul’s letters. One of the ways Woolman began to communicate to others was through writing. During this period, he wrote an essay titled “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes,” which expressed his sense of God’s heart regarding slavery. Have you ever put your own thoughts into writing? If you were going to share your ideas on a particular matter of godly interest, what would you write about, and why?

Learning to speak with power, particularly in the Quaker tradition, involves learning to recognize and respond to a “concern” or a

“weight” that God gives. Some of these burdens are short-lived: they are “openings”* that lead us to deliver a single message in a single setting. But others—as with