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From the site description: “Jon Watts is a dedicated member of the Religious Society of Friends as well as a prolific songwriter and poet. He has spent the last two years touring extensively throughout North America and is now in the studio recording his 3rd full-length album.”

His site has videos, tour schedules and a ‘vlog’ from this Spring’s bike tour!

When I went to question her specifically on some holdings.. such as Dow Chemical and Walmarts and Coca Cola…with snippets from our Earth Testimony… she countered that Quakers did not have an…

Though we represent different backgrounds and branches of Quakerism, the lines between these seemed very thin and blurred. No one avoided talking about her home meeting or church, but our membership…

Queries have been used since the time of the early Quakers as a way of keeping track of personal and community progress. The Queries ask us to examine our lives, our spiritual activities, our…

If you share the traditional Quaker experiential knowledge of direct and transforming guidance from Christ/Light/Spirit, what good is theology? (the study of God and God’s relation to the world. What…

Some know that I am doing research on Quakers and community and reading journals of early Friends and the communities they established as they pushed out into the wilderness that was early America… So, keeping that in mind, please consider responding to a few simple queries: What was the meaning of forming the “Religious Society” of Friends? What is the meaning of belonging to a Religious Society of Friends for us today?

When, at age 19, as an already avowed Quaker, I finally learned that much of that information was outright false I felt deeply betrayed… Despite intensive Quaker experience at the monthly and yearly meeting levels as well as through Friends General Conference, I was failed by the Quaker adults in charge of my religious education.  The word “failed” here seems strong so I want  to qualify it.  I do not believe that these adults even knew that they were letting me down.

See also: Post & discussion on QuakerQuaker

So now what do I do if he comes to Meeting? And what do I do if I am in a situation where it is just he and I in Meeting? Do I assume that God has my back? How does one tread that line of Christian love and charity, finding that of God in others, and staying safe?

Irregardless of what we call it, listening to, learning, and living the truth are the central activities to the Quaker tradition of truth. These practices of the truth what we see in God’s own acts: when God speaks, God speaks truth, when God acts (as we see in the life of Jesus), God acts truthfully, and when we build communities based on the Holy Spirit these communities become learning communities of truth.

A useful vision statement is sort of like a star to steer by. In the absence of a clearly illuminated path or an easy-to-read road map, a brightly lit star can keep us heading in the right direction. In ministry, when so many options are available to us and so many needs crying for attention, we need some sort of direction to help us stay focused on the work God called us to do. When we live in harmony with our stated vision, we not only see good results—we wind up moving forward together.

I want to be a person of God. I want my faith community to aid me in becoming a person of God. I want, in my faith community, to be able to use the word “God” without someone immediately following up with a comment about how uncomfortable they are with that word. I do not like listing our testimonies as a way of defining ourselves. I don’t like the SPICE acronym. And I don’t like suggesting that what we strive for is personal integrity rather than Truth.

From the recent gathering in Wichita KS

At this conference, I was reminded that dead trees and living flesh share ideas quite differently. One advantage of this conference was the ability to dialog with people with different viewpoints and…

It causes me a dissonance in that I have always thought that we were led by the Spirit, not by our own notions and reasoning. But what, if not notions, abstract reasonings about things we can never…

If there is hope for a future for Friends marked by anything other than the same divisions and resentments we have nurtured in the past, we have to find a non-confrontational way of being with one…