09/19/2026
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Religious education has always been public ministry. After Pentecost, Jesus’s disciples became apostles; those who had been his students became teachers and the early church’s foremost religious educators. Seventeenth-century Friends traveled in the ministry, sharing an emergent faith and developing practices. The nineteenth-century invention of First-day school moved formation outside the home, where family worship was experiential learning, and placed religious education in the public community of the meeting. Friends who step outside the meetingroom while the adult community is in worship in order to attend to the younger generations’ spiritual formation are public ministers.
Our children and youth are not works in progress to help us get to some other place in the future that is better. Their presence in the present creates an opportunity for formation that can shape the future, and this reality should be part of our witness today.
Citation: Melinda Wenner Bradley, 2026
Quaker religious educator
