Woodbrooke is delighted to announce that Emily Provance will give the 2025 Swarthmore Lecture. Emily’s lecture will focus on the meaning of Quaker community and how community is integral to Quaker theology and spiritual life.
Emily is a member of Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York Yearly Meeting. She is a recorded minister and also an associate of Good News Associates, a Christian, nonprofit, ministry organisation supporting individuals who are called to non-institutional ministries.
As a full-time traveling Friend, Emily works with Quakers around the world and across the full spectrum of theological diversity. She has coordinated or contributed to projects on intergenerational communities, support for parents, training for trustees, the life cycle of Quaker meetings, outreach, hybrid & online faith communities, fundraising, and adapting cross-cultural institutions to shifting global dynamics. In 2023 and 2024, she spent considerable time with both Friends and non-Friends holding workshops and conversations about election violence prevention in the United States. The common thread in Emily’s ministry is helping people with very real differences find ways to work together on what matters to them all.
Clerk of the Swarthmore Lecture Committee, Sarah Donaldson, said that: “Emily’s rich and varied ministry means that she is well placed to explore questions around our life as Quaker communities and the Quaker testimony to community. The Committee hopes that the lecture will encourage Friends to reflect on and acknowledge our differences and to find points of unity, in both a local and global context. The wide range of Quaker and other communities that Emily has worked with, together with her knowledge and experience of different Quaker traditions, mean that she is particularly able to help Friends to engage with this subject. She has a gift for harnessing the power of stories to communicate, as well as challenging people to think. We look forward to her sharing her ministry through the lecture.”
In her lecture Emily will engage with the challenge of how people can live and cooperate in community, especially when those communities are not ones that we have chosen. Emily hopes to present a Quaker testimony of community drawn from books of discipline used across Friends’ theological spectrum and in many parts of our global community. In her lecture Emily hopes to provide a “sense of the meeting,” using the collective wisdom of our immensely diverse Society to suggest how all people—Quaker and not—can survive and thrive as an immensely diverse humankind.
Emily’s lecture will take place as part of Britain Yearly Meeting 2025 which will be held from 23 to 26 May. The lecture will also be live streamed on the Woodbrooke YouTube Channel.
Further reading:
- The Swarthmore Lecture is funded and organised by Woodbrooke, an international Quaker learning and research organisation. You can find out more here at woodbrooke.org.uk/swarthmore
- Emily Provance’s writing and other resources can be found on her blog at https://quakeremily.wordpress.com
- Information about Yearly Meeting 2025 will be available on the Quakers in Britain website in due course at https://quaker.org.uk/ym
