Would That All the Lord’s People Were Prophets

So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered seventy of the elders of the people and placed them all around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders, and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.

Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, so they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” And Joshua son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, “My lord Moses, stop them!” But Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”
(Numbers 11:24-29, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

“The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or act,” Walter Brueggemann wrote in The Prophetic Imagination: 

“It may not be a new situation, but it is one that seems especially urgent and pressing at the present time. That enculturation is true not only of the institution of the church but also of us as persons. Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields and perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric.”

To put it more bluntly: We fell for the promises of capitalism, and we let it take over our churches, and it has sucked much of the life out of them.

Brueggemann comes from, and speaks to, a mainline Protestant culture, but some Quakers reading this may recognize their meeting in his words, or have heard Friends from other meetings lament their situation.

I was talking with a Friend from another state the other day, and when they described a faction in their monthly meeting as “money and property Quakers,” I immediately understood what they meant—the sort of Friends who prioritize growing the endowment and preserving the meetinghouse as their little fiefdoms, bulwarks against the scary outside world. 

Brueggemann calls it “the royal consciousness,” a desire for command and control that only intensifies over time. When you have wealth and privilege and power, after all, your future depends on convincing people they have no other choice but to live this way. New initiatives cannot be undertaken; we do not have enough resources to go around, and the security of the meeting must come first. They may never put it as starkly as “God won’t come to help us;” they won’t abandon the pretenses of religion that completely. Yet their messages have a clear undercurrent: “We need to look out for ourselves.” 

Against this mentality, Brueggemann offers the prophet, who challenges the royal stranglehold over the community by reminding the people that “the agency, will and purpose of God are effective and to be taken with utmost seriousness.” God doesn’t need to come to help us—if we could but see clearly, we could detect the presence of Spirit accompanying us right now. 

If you know your Quaker history, this should sound very familiar. 

George Fox and his earliest comrades embarked on just this kind of prophetic ministry across mid-17th-century England, challenging the priests they saw acting as professional custodians of a calcified church.

“The old deceiver has taught people to think they are saved by a mere belief in God at a distance, but these neither know Him nor worship him in Spirit and truth,” James Nayler warned in 1659. “A talk of God does not satisfy the soul of a good man, until he feels His presence and power.”

“It is not enough to hear of Christ, or read of Christ,” Isaac Penington confirmed just over a decade later. “But this is the thing—to feel him my root, my life, my foundation; and my soul ingrafted into him, by him who hath power to ingraft… and then to come out of the darkness, out of the sin, out of the pollutions of the spirit of this world, into the pure, holy fellowship of the living.”

I mention Nayler and Penington as well as Fox because the early Quaker community had an abundance of prophetic energy. History remembers them and their peers (who included both men and women among their ranks) as “the Valiant Sixty,” but back in the day the number seventy would frequently come up, specifically to invoke the story of Moses and the elders from the Book of Numbers.

Moses had no fear that Eldad and Medad would undermine his power.

He knew he had no power except what God had given him. And he understood that they, like him, used their voices to, in Brueggemann’s words, “return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God.” George Fox saw the Valiant Sixty in much the same way—in fact, we might say the principle of continued revelation practically calls for every Friend to embrace the prophetic imagination.

The dominant culture of this age, like that of every age, strives to seduce us with false promises of safety and comfort in a hostile, chaotic world. The testimony of an authentic Quaker life provides an opportunity to expose these lies and remind the world of a better way to live.