Margery KempeMargery Kempe
The witness
She insists that lived experience is its own authority, even when it makes you ridiculous, and she brings the one voice here that answers to no institution at all.
MentorMinds← The Pilgrims’ WayMargery Kempe 
William Bradford
Jonathan Edwards
Mother Teresa
The table, compared
What the road costs, and who it's for
This table is for anyone whose conviction has outgrown the life built to hold it. It gathers four people who left safety for a road they could not fully justify in advance, and asks what discipline, what community, and what cost that road actually requires.
Who's seated
4 at this table
What each one brings that the others can't.
Margery KempeWilliam BradfordWilliam Bradford
The builder
He knows what conviction costs when it has to survive a winter, a harvest, and thirty years of governing people who no longer share it, and he brings the discipline of covenant over feeling.
Jonathan EdwardsJonathan Edwards
The examiner
He brings the sharpest test in the room for whether a spiritual experience is real or theater, having spent his life auditing his own soul with the same rigor he applied to Northampton's revival.
Mother TeresaMother Teresa
The practitioner
She translates the whole conversation into the smallest unit of action — the person in front of you — and refuses to let any of it stay theoretical.
Opposite poles
4 seats · 3 axes
75 of 100 — how far apart the table sits, averaged across every axis. This table spans the full range on nearly every axis — the widest counsel you can convene.
Common ground
What they'd all agree on
Rarer with this many voices — which is what makes it worth naming.
The comfortable life was the wrong one
Each of them left a settled, sanctioned position — Kempe her household, Bradford his Yorkshire farm expectations, Edwards a secure Northampton pulpit, Teresa a convent classroom — because staying felt like a betrayal of something realer. The table would agree that comfort is not evidence of rightness, and that walking away is sometimes the only honest response to a call.
Suspicion follows sincerity
Kempe was tried for heresy, Edwards was pushed from his own pulpit by his own congregation, Teresa was argued over for decades, and Bradford watched his community fracture even as he governed it faithfully. None of them found that genuine conviction bought them safety or approval, and all would agree that it shouldn't be expected to.
Where the table spreads
The questions they'd split on
Each is a spectrum with every seat placed on it. The further apart they sit, the more they'd argue.
01Authority
Spread 70/100Institutional discernmentPersonal experience
William Bradford
Jonathan Edwards
Mother Teresa
Margery Kempe
- William Bradford
- Legitimacy comes from the compact, the covenant, the signatures on paper — a community's agreed order, not one person's private certainty.
- Jonathan Edwards
- He trusts inward experience deeply but only after it passes a rigorous, near-forensic test for authenticity; feeling alone proves nothing.
- Mother Teresa
- Her 'call within a call' was intensely personal, but she spent two years securing Rome's permission before acting on it.
- Margery Kempe
- Her weeping and visions are their own proof; she submits to examination but never lets the verdict of clergy overrule what she has felt.
Why it matters
It determines whether the reader trusts a private conviction on its own terms or insists it be tested and ratified by others before they act on it.
02Where the work is done
Spread 80/100Building an institutionAttending to the one person in front of…
William Bradford
Jonathan Edwards
Margery Kempe
Mother Teresa
- William Bradford
- Thirty years of governance, land policy, and diplomacy — his legacy is a functioning colony, not a single encounter.
- Jonathan Edwards
- He writes treatises and leads a congregation and later a college, but his deepest labor is the private, solitary audit of one soul: his own.
- Margery Kempe
- She travels alone or in small company, her devotion expressed almost entirely through her own body and voice, not through any organization she builds.
- Mother Teresa
- She built a global order, but her stated measure of the work was always the single dying person washed and attended to, one at a time.
Why it matters
It shapes what the reader measures their own life by — durable structures left behind, or the quality of attention given in the smallest encounter.
03Relationship to suffering
Spread 75/100Suffering endured and administered arou…Suffering sought out and entered
William Bradford
Jonathan Edwards
Margery Kempe
Mother Teresa
- William Bradford
- Starvation, plague, and loss arrive uninvited; his task is to steer the colony through them, not to court them.
- Jonathan Edwards
- His frontier posting at Stockbridge reads as a demotion absorbed rather than sought, though he uses the isolation productively.
- Margery Kempe
- Her weeping is voluntary and public, closer to a chosen spiritual discipline than a burden simply survived.
- Mother Teresa
- She walks directly into the slums and the homes for the dying by deliberate choice, treating proximity to suffering as the whole point of the vocation.
Why it matters
It asks the reader whether their calling requires them to seek out hardship directly or to hold steady through hardship that simply arrives.
The fault line
Where this table actually splits
The real split is between Kempe, whose authority is her own uncorroborated experience, and Bradford, whose authority is the signed compact of a whole community — Edwards and Teresa each try to hold both, but lean toward Bradford's side by insisting private conviction be tested before it is trusted. Edwards would call Kempe's weeping exactly the kind of unexamined 'affection' his own Religious Affections warned against, even as his own revivalist instincts were not so different. Teresa's private call was total and personal, closer to Kempe than Edwards would like, but she disciplined it through two years of institutional patience that Kempe never sought and Bradford would recognize as prudent. None of this makes Kempe wrong — the record shows she was never convicted of heresy, only ever suspected — but it does mean the table splits over whether the individual or the covenant gets the final word.
Put it to the table.
Pick a question to open with — or convene and ask your own. Whichever you choose loads into the composer, so you can edit it before you send.