A very special guest gave ministry to Cropwell Meeting in Marlton, N.J. this Sunday. It was Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, looking good despite having recently celebrated his 300th birthday.
The part was really played by Charles Bruder, of the John Woolman Memorial, who dressed in period garb to share ministry taken from the Journal of John Woolman. Originally published two years after his death in 1774, it has remained in print for the past 250 years. The Journal is included in The Harvard Classics along with William Penn’s Fruits of Solitude and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Woolman lived in nearby Mt. Holly, N.J., and frequently traveled in the ministry with Joshua Evans, a member of Cropwell Meeting’s Evans’s family.
Clockwise from left: Bruder talks with a visitor after the talk; about sixteen people were there for the presentation, including eight first-time visitors to Cropwell; Friends assembling for the talk.
Before beginning the presentation, Bruder explained that John Woolman was a spiritual person and interest in the spiritual well-being of his Quaker meeting. He asked everyone to imagine that it was the year 1770 and were sitting together in a Quaker meeting for worship. “John Woolman has just gotten up to speak” he told us as he went into the eighteenth-century minister’s persona.
“I believe God wants me to walk [on his religious travels] so I can understand the condition of the poor and oppressed and enslaved and be an example of humility and lowliness. Walking in obedience to God is agreeable to my state of mind because I know it is God’s will. I am uplifted by the sight of birds in the bushes and the sheep and the cows in the field because I know they are also being obedient to the will of God.
“When people are practicing and participating in the corrupted spirit of this world they are trading for God’s Light. Seeing this has cause me in many occasions to suffer from an inward spiritual poverty. You know the part in the Bible about loving God with all your heart and all your soul? Well, God really meant it. And you know when you’re supposed to live your neighbor as yourself? God really meant that too.”
In persona, Bruder told the audience that one of Woolman’s favorite books was William Penn’s No Cross No Crown and shared some insight from it. His Woolman character left us with a prayer “that your children and your children’s children will inherit a world free of war and crime and racism.” Releasing himself from the Woolman character, Bruder asked us now, in 2024, “to look around this world” and tell him “how that prayer worked out.”
Afterwards Friends gathered for a particularly bountiful Cropwell potluck lunch.
Further Reading:
- John Woolman Memorial Association
- Journal of John Woolman from the Christian Classics Etherial Library
- “Learning from John Woolman” by Helene Pollock in the Dec. 2018 issue of Friends Journal.