Challenge and encouragement

Samuel Bownas growing into Quakerism

Photo by Shane Guymon from Unsplash

On our spiritual journey we need encouragement but sometimes we also need a challenge, to be shaken out of our assumptions. What we are taught will not become real until we feel it inwardly and go on to act on it.

Someone for whom this was particularly true was Samuel Bownas. He was born into a Quaker family at Great Strickland, Westmorland in January 1677 but his father Anthony died a month later. Money was short and Samuel and his brother could only be given a basic education, enabling them to write and to read in English. Samuel had to earn money by working at a variety of jobs, including keeping sheep - which put him off the animals for life. At thirteen he was apprenticed to his uncle, a blacksmith, who mistreated him but later Samuel transferred to a new master, Samuel Parat, a member of Brigflatts Quaker meeting in Yorkshire, who treated him well.

Samuel's mother made sure that he was educated as a Quaker, and told him stories of his father’s faithfulness which were intended to inspire him. However, although Samuel followed the traditional forms of dress, speech and worship they meant little to him. Going with his mother to visit Friends in prison he noticed that they wept during worship and did not understand why. All his mother could tell him was that perhaps as he grew he would understand.

When he was an apprentice Samuel went to Quaker meeting regularly but gained little benefit from it except that it kept him out of bad company. In his journal he confessed that ‘the greater part of my time, I slept’. However one day when Samuel was about twenty he was shaken from his lethargy by a visiting travelling minister, Anne Wilson. She pointed her finger at him and addressed him directly, a very unusual kind of ministry. She rebuked him as ‘a traditional Quaker’, one who followed the outward forms of his faith but who came to and went from meeting untouched and unchanged.

From this moment on Samuel was both touched and changed. His tears flowed and he understood what his mother and other Friends had been trying to teach him, but this time 'experimentally' - through his own experience. He saw, as he said, ‘wherein my shortness had been, in being contented and easy with a form of truth and religion, which I had only by education, being brought up in plainness of both habit and speech, but all this, though very good in its place, did not make me a true Christian’.

In just a few weeks Samuel began to feel that he might have a call to teach others and be a minister himself, although he was very unsure at first. His local meeting recognised his gift and encouraged him to speak when he was moved to do so. While he was still bound as an apprentice Samuel did not venture far afield but when he was free after three years he began to travel widely, sometimes with a companion and sometimes alone. He drew on the experience of fellow-ministers such as his contemporaries Isaac Alexander and James Wilson and the older James Dickinson. Samuel called these men ‘nursing fathers’ and although they encouraged him they also let him know if he was becoming too pleased with his ministry and urged him to be careful not to speak more than he was given to say. Another Friend, Joseph Baines, warned him against the snares of popularity saying, ‘Sammy, thou hast needs take care, Friends admire thee so much, thou dost not grow proud’.

Travelling in the ministry became Samuel's main focus but in order to do this he felt it important that he should remain financially independent. He worked in the fields during the hay-harvest and at blacksmithing when he had the opportunity so that he could save money for his keep. He also bought his own horse so that he would not be a burden upon the resources of the Friends he travelled among.

On a visit to Sherborne in Dorset around 1701 Samuel met Joan Slade his future wife. He told her that he felt called to travel to America so although they had an informal understanding the couple decided to defer their marriage until he returned. He travelled by way of Scotland and set sail for Maryland in 1702.

While in America Samuel was particularly engaged to challenge the preaching of the renegade Quaker George Keith, who had taken Anglican orders. Keith had Samuel prosecuted for preaching and thrown into gaol on Long Island, where he was held for nearly a year. Samuel learned to make shoes in order to earn a living and received visits from, among others, someone who he refers to as an 'Indian King'

After his release in 1703 Samuel continued his travels in America before returning home at the end of 1706. Early the next year he and Joan were married and settled in Lymington in Hampshire. Samuel continued to combine work and travel in the ministry while Joan stayed at home. She died in 1719 and in 1722 Samuel married again, this time a widow named Nichols, and went to live with her in Bridport in Dorset. The partnership lasted until she died in 1746 and Samuel used his wife's capital to set up in business, becoming a prosperous merchant.

Samuel was aware of his lack of education and remedied this by reading widely in English. His contemporaries described him as ‘of a grave deportment, and of a tall comely and manly aspect’ having a strong clear voice.

As he had been encouraged by other ministers in his youth, Samuel came to feel that he had relevant experience to pass on to succeeding generations, so he wrote, and in 1750 published, A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister. These qualifications were not to do with academic learning but sprang from experience, faithfulness and living a good life. Samuel did not change his view that just following the form, without an experience of inward power, was not enough but knew the value of education and hoped that his instruction might be a starting point for others. The book was well received, has been reprinted many times, most recently in 1989, and although in an unfamiliar idiom is still worth reading.

Towards the end of his life, as happens to many of us, Samuel felt disillusioned with the Society of Friends as he saw it. He wrote to his old friend and fellow-minister James Wilson, ‘The Church seems very barren of young ministers to what it was in our youth, nor is there but very little convincement to what was then’. Samuel saw convincing people of the truth of Quakerism as the main point of his ministry and was disappointed by his reception. He complains to James ‘ “The man spoke well” say they, and that is all I get for my labours.’

Samuel became increasingly infirm, with shaking hands and failing eyesight, but he continued to attend meetings locally until the end of his life. He died at Bridport on April 2nd 1753 aged seventy six. After his death his journal An account of the life, travels and Christian experiences in the work of the ministry of Samuel Bownas was published, which is also well worth reading today.

When Ann Wilson pointed Samuel Bownas out as 'a traditional Quaker' she was challenging his unthinking acceptance of the traditions in which he had been brought up. He had the form of a Quaker without any of the power within that would make him a true one. He was changed by his experience in the same way as we can be changed now. Words from the past can help us today, but not if repeated unthinkingly, without true understanding. They must be offered, as Samuel puts it, as 'old matter opened in new life'. Without Anne Wilson’s challenge Samuel would have stayed asleep but once he was woken he needed encouragement and instruction to carry on in the right way and to offer his experience in turn to others.