Recording Resources

A few weeks ago, a Friend wrote me asking if I knew of any resources about the Quaker process for recording ministers.  He said he was new to this, and it had been hard to find resources online.  I compiled a list of resources for him, and thought it might be useful for others as well.

My home meeting, Freedom Friends Church, has a page of resources on recorded ministry.

Here is a YouTube video of me talking about my recording process with Friends Journal:

I also posted quite a bit about the process of being recorded on my blog under the Recording label, as well as sharing stories from other women who have been recorded as ministers.

Steven Davidson wrote about some of the objections to recording in an article called Recording Gifts of Ministry in New York Yearly Meeting's Spark.  (See also Resources on Ministry.)

I highly recommend Brian Drayton's book On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry.  The whole book is excellent, but he talks specifically about his experience of being a recorded minister and reporting back to his meeting in Appendix 1 and 2.

Are there other resources you would recommend, Friends?

Workshop

Convergent Friends: Worship and Conversation 

FGC Gathering, June 30 - July 6, 2013

 University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO

2013 Theme: At the Growing Edges of our Faith

Workshop Number: 9 
Who may register?: Open to All (adult & high school) 
Worship/Worship-Sharing: 40% 
Lecture: 5% 
Discussion: 25% 
Experiential Activities: 30% 

“Convergent Friends” describes a movement of Quakers coming together across the branches of Friends to discover the best of our tradition. We will explore different kinds of worship and share how God is at work in our lives. Come prepared to be changed by the Spirit present among us. 

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah 43:19. 

Where is the life in the Religious Society of Friends? How does truth prosper among us? How can we engage one another across our differences? Each day, we will engage in different kinds of worship, including semi-programmed worship with singing and vocal prayer, extended open worship, and worship-sharing. We will spend time sharing the names we use to describe the Divine, and why those words are meaningful for us. We will also share stories about our experiences encountering different kinds of Friends, and how we saw the Spirit through them. One day, we will focus on different kinds of prayer, and walk through an interactive Stations of the Lord’s Prayer together. We will also explore Bible reading in the Conservative Friends tradition. Be ready to speak from your own experience and listen deeply. There will be time for sharing in small groups, art, music, and laughter. 

Everyone is welcome. 

Please Bring: 
A Bible (any translation) 
Any art supplies you would like to share 

Required Reading: 
Acts 2 
Eight Questions on Convergent Friends: An Interview with Robin Mohr 

Recommended Reading: 
A Testament of Devotion, by Thomas R. Kelly 
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, by Anne Lamott 
Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order, by Lloyd Lee Wilson 

About the leaders: 
Ashley W is a member of Freedom Friends Church in Salem, Oregon and a graduate of the School of the Spirit Ministry's program On Being a Spiritual Nurturer, class of 2011. Ashley served as clerk of Freedom Friends in 2011-12 and was co-clerk of the planning committee for the 2010 Pacific Northwest Quaker Women’s Theology Conference. She first developed parts of this workshop while traveling with other ministers to visit meetings, churches, and yearly meetings in the Pacific Northwest. She then presented it as a three-day thread group at the Sixth World Conference of Friends in Kenya. Ashley has traveled in the ministry as a minister and an elder and carries a concern for supporting ministers in the Religious Society of Friends. Her writing has been published in Western Friend, Friends Journal, various Quaker anthologies, and on her blog, www.questforadequacy.blogspot.com. 

Aimee M will be serving as an elder for Ashley during the workshop. Aimee grew up in Oregon attending Quaker churches in Northwest Yearly Meeting. She moved to Washington state, met her husband-to-be at FGC in Tacoma, and then moved to Minnesota where she attends two different Northern Yearly Meeting meetings. She has been involved with Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) for several years and was thrilled to attend the recent World Conference in Kenya, where she served on the Pastoral Care committee.

Click here to see the workshop description on the FGC website.
Registration opens on April 3.

Summer Reading

Summer is a great time for some light reading outside.  While some use that time to catch up on a mystery series or those classics they have been meaning to get to, I seem to be drawn to spiritual memoirs, particularly ones written by women.  Here are a few that I have enjoyed recently.

Jesus Loves Women: A Memoir of Body and Spirit, by Tricia Gates Brown.  This book was recommended to me by Cherice B, who wrote a review on her blog.  If it hadn't been for Cherice's recommendation, I know I would not have read it, the title would have been too off-putting, but I'm glad she did.  In the introduction, Brown wrote that she is drawn to "the complex interplay of body and spirit, of the sensual and the spiritual, and the sexual and the spiritual."  As I read that, a voice inside me said, Yes!  This is what we need!  I am grateful for Brown's honesty in telling her own story, and the connections she makes between spirituality and the body.  I do not know Brown personally, but she is a Quaker who lives in the Pacific Northwest, and it was fun to read a memoir with such a familiar setting. 

Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life, by Kate Braestrup.  I first got to know some of Kate Braestrup's story in her book Here If You Need Me, about her work as a chaplain to game wardens in Maine (if you have not read that book yet, go get it from your library immediately).  I grew up in a family and school where prayer was a given, so it surprises me how often I hear people say that they do not know how to pray.  For anyone looking for ways to pray, I recommend this book.  It is approachable and funny, filled with stories from Braestrup's life as well as a lot of great prayers.  Braestrup does a good job of showing the vast variety of kinds of prayers―she does not even get to prayers where you ask for things until p. 131!  There is also an appendix in the back with all of the prayers that are included throughout the book, many of which are by Braestrup.

Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor, by Jana Riess.  This is the lightest of the three books, and at times reads like blog posts instead of a book.  For one year, Riess set out to become more saintly by assigning herself a different spiritual practice each month, beginning with fasting.  Reading this book felt a little like School of the Spirit-lite.  There were a lot of familiar readings (The Desert Mothers and Fathers!  The Rule of Saint Benedict!), but she didn't go deep into any of them.  Riess states at various points that she feels like her spiritual practice is superficial, and I have to agree.  She also recognizes by the end that these practices are meant to be done in community and it is less meaningful to try to do them alone.  I think Riess is a little hard on herself when she says that she failed all of the spiritual practices―I think she had relative success with many of them, but she set herself up to fail with unreasonable expectations.  Still, it is a very funny book and an easy way to learn about a lot of different spiritual practices.

Have you read any good books lately?  What would you recommend?

Still

"Where is God when you're lost?  God is there, where am I?"

Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (31)

A few years ago, I read Girl Meets God, by Lauren Winner, and I was disappointed.  It wasn't Winner's fault―her writing is lovely.  The problem I had was that I felt like the book's title was misleading.  At the time, I felt like God had completely turned my life upside-down.  I was having shattering mystical experiences and I hoped that Winner's book would help me make sense of some of what I was going through.

Really, I think Winner's first memoir should have been called Girl Meets Religion.  Raised in a Reform Jewish home, Winner first converted to Orthodox Judaism, then became an Episcopalian.  Though she was clearly a spiritual seeker, it seemed to me at the time that she spoke much more about the rituals in each of the religions than about her experiences of encountering God.  But she was a bright and thoughtful writer, and I appreciated reading about the spiritual journey of a young woman close to my age, even if the book was not what I expected it to be (I later learned that Winner did not choose the title, her editor did).

Like many converts (and I include myself in that category), Winner became very passionate about her new faith and what it meant to call herself a Christian.  After her first book, she began focusing on chastity and declared that she wanted to change how Christians have sex. 


I was not interested.

After growing up in an evangelical culture where everyone I knew told me that sex was for marriage, period, and True Love Waits―I signed the paper, I had the ring―the last thing I wanted to read was one more person telling me about how Christians should be having sex.  So I stopped paying attention to Winner's writing for a while.

Then Winner got married, and her marriage was an unhappy one.  On top of that, three weeks before her wedding, her mother died.  Winner's new memoir, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, is about her relationship with God through those hard times.

I couldn't put it down.

Just as so many books and movies end with a wedding, many books about faith end with a conversion, as if, by accepting the tenets, a person has arrived.  But even though I have never been married, I know that the wedding is only the beginning and marriage can be hard work.  I believe that being in a relationship with God can be just as challenging and rewarding, and Winner's book talks frankly about what happens after the initial glow of conversion fades.

In many ways, Still is the book that I hoped Girl Meets God would be.  In short chapters, Winner describes how she experiences God's presence, often unexpectedly, and how that presence is fleeting.  In a chapter where she talks about her struggles with prayer, she writes,

"I do not know why things shift.  I've shown up for chapel at school, and there I stand, reciting a psalm.  I must admit I have never much liked the psalms, they have never prayed easy to me. . . .  [I]n fact I have found them dull for many years and mostly an occasion for woolgathering, and then in a moment I can only call mystery, I am standing there in chapel reciting Psalm 25, "Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted," and the words still me―there at Morning Prayer, those words are my words; they are the most straightforward expression of anything I might ever have to say to God, or to myself.  For the space of eighteen syllables, I have, it seems, prayed. 

I leave the chapel hoping this will happen every morning now, that this is the start of my completely new and different, totally fiery relationship with the Psalter. . . .  Of course, that is not what happens.  The next morning the psalms are dull again, and I am not even really paying attention; except their dullness is enlivened slightly by the small new knowledge that once (and so maybe again someday, maybe this day) the psalms prayed me."  (65-66)

As I was reading, I appreciated how honest Winner was about her doubts.  It was also refreshing to read about a person going through a crisis of faith who continued to go to church.  The book chronicles the small things that helped Winner find her way back to faith―not the same faith she had before, but a different, more mature relationship with God.

I enjoyed this memoir very much and I hope that Winner will continue to write as her faith changes and grows.