US Quaker Emily Provance to deliver 2025 Swarthmore Lecture

New York Quaker Emily Provance will give next year's Swarthmore Lecture, focusing on the meaning of Quaker community and the challenges of cooperation.

The Swarthmore Lecture is part of the work of the international Quaker learning and research organisation Woodbrooke.

A full-time travelling Friend (Quaker), Provance works with Quakers around the world and across the theological spectrum, with a focus on helping people with differences to work together.

In 2023 and 2024, she held workshops and conversations with Quakers and others about election violence prevention in the United States.

Her Swarthmore lecture will address how people can live and cooperate in community, especially when those communities are not ones that they have chosen.

Provance is a recorded minister and a member of Good News Associates, a Christian nonprofit organisation supporting those called to non-institutional ministry.

A member of Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York Yearly Meeting, Provance has coordinated or contributed to projects on:

  • intergenerational communities
  • support for parents
  • training for trustees
  • the life cycle of Quaker meetings
  • outreach
  • hybrid and online faith communities
  • fundraising
  • adapting cross-cultural institutions to shifting global dynamics.

Clerk of the Swarthmore Lecture Committee, Sarah Donaldson, said: “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.

“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 hopes to provide a “sense of the meeting," using the collective wisdom of Quakerism to suggest how people can survive and thrive as diverse humankind.

Taking place during Britain Yearly Meeting, 23-26 May 2025, it will be live streamed on the Woodbrooke YouTube Channel.

Emily Provance’s writing and other resources can be found here