Swarthmore Lecture 2025 explores how Quakers are called to live in community
The call to live in community - faithfully, vulnerably, and across difference - was the central theme of the 2025 Swarthmore Lecture, delivered by Emily Provance on 24 May.
Speaking at the annual gathering of Quakers in Britain and drawing on her experience as a full-time, travelling minister, Provance offered reflections both personal and collective.
A member of Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York City, Provance has spent the last six years living without a permanent home, carrying a backpack and often receiving hospitality from Quakers and others.
Along the way, she found that presence, proximity, and shared humanity can foster community in even the most fleeting encounters.
A Testimony of Community
In her lecture, “A Testimony of Community", Provance shared insights drawn from years on the road and a major project she undertook in preparation for the lecture.
Seeking a global “sense of the meeting" on what it means to live in community, she read all 38 English-language Quaker books of discipline currently in use, as well as 16 historical Quaker texts and the Bible.
Provance hoped to use the diverse but collective wisdom of Quakers around the world to suggest how humanity could survive and thrive.
She treated each passage as ministry, imagining herself clerking a vast global Quaker meeting.
Ninety-two points of spiritual unity across Quaker traditions, on topics including forgiveness, oppression, and economic justice were refined with help from a theologically diverse group of Quakers in North Carolina.
The results, Provance emphasized, are not perfect, but reflect a real, Spirit-led attempt to articulate how God might be calling humanity to live together.
Through stories of encounters with strangers, moments of vulnerability, and unexpected grace, Emily described how living without a home has taught her that deep community is found in listening, mutual investment, and love.
"A person can be transformed when other people invest in them," she said, “when one person thrives, as a result, we all benefit; we are all responsible for each other."
The annual Swarthmore Lecture is organised and funded by Quaker learning and research organisation, Woodbrooke.
The video of the lecture will premiere on Woodbrooke's YouTube Channel at 19:00 (UK time) on Wednesday 28 May.
All 92 written minutes and an introduction can be accessed on the Woodbrooke website, here