Workshops Open to All

Do you have experiences and insights to share? Do stories call upon you to tell them? We will explore story presentation, train our listening ear to help each other develop stories, and connect storytelling with our faith and practice. We will have opportunities for telling stories in the workshop and elsewhere.

When God calls us into discipleship, God wants all of us, body, mind, soul. “It is an overwhelming experience to fall into the hands of the living God … to be, without warning, wholly uprooted…” (Thomas Kelley). Let’s explore together what it means to be faithful and courageous disciples of the living God.

Join an ongoing conversation with these two experienced clerks. The workshop will examine the roots of rightly ordered clerking: Worship, Process, Authority, and Leadership. Participants will consider clerking as a spiritual discipline, and examine the great truth that listening in the Light means giving up being right.

In worship, we accept God’s invitation to pause and be gathered in the Spirit. There we are held, we are searched, we are known. In holy Friendship with the Eternal and with each other, we find our joy, our peace, our wholeness. We will gather in worship each morning during workshop time.

Ecology as spiritual practice lessens the boundaries between the perceived separate self, the Creator and the earth. We will acknowledge the Presence throughout Creation during experiential exercises, worship-sharing and small groups emphasizing forgiveness and affirmation. With practice, we’ll re-awaken prophetic justice, yielding a fierce desire for survival seasoned by love.

Hundreds of Friends are reading Fit for Freedom. We will look at the reality behind the myth of widespread Quaker involvement in abolition, the Underground Railroad, and Civil Rights to ground our efforts against the underlying racism in our society. The goal: reflect on the truth of our past to illuminate our future.

If you were accused of being a Quaker, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Using queries and real-life scenarios, we will examine how our lives “speak” today and how Friends' testimonies may define what we do and who we are.

Do we find in Jesus an upholder of “Sabbath economics”— a prophetic voice calling us to right sharing and covenant renewal— or a Wisdom figure with a message of personal transformation? Can Jesus be both? What power does combining these traditions create in the historical Jesus? In us?

We will focus on how we create spiritual lives and co-create with the Divine: the relationships, vocation and Friends Meetings that we desire in our lives. Will look ideas of: abundance vs scarcity, tuning into leadings and spiritual guidance, obstacles to faithfulness, and knowing and aligning with our spiritual purpose.

Godly Play® and Faith & Play are Montessori-inspired approaches to teaching children the Bible and Quakerism respectively. Both require training and practice. This workshop, intentionally small in size, will provide what is needed in a nurturing, worshipful and wonder-filled environment. Participants will also attend one two- hour afternoon session.

We will examine our experiences of the Light through excerpts by four imprisoned authors: Bonhoeffer, Ilibagiza, Hermann and King. Bonhoeffer suggests that the restoration of the “church” depends on a new kind of monasticism and an uncompromising life according to the Sermon on the Mount. What do Friends say?

Open your heart and join in building a singing community. We will sing songs of transformation - spirituals, gospel, jazz, folk and the indescribable. We will write songs together. We will make a joyful noise and a sorrowful noise. You do not have to think of yourself as “a singer”— the Singer is there!

Drawing on the workshop leader’s teaching experience in public schools, university classrooms, and at Junior Gathering, participants will collaboratively explore the possibilities and challenges for teachers when they use the social imagination of the arts and literature with young people to seek and sustain a spiritual dimension to K-12 education.

This experiential workshop will discover the experiences of body awareness, movement, internal energy (chi) and meditative practice. Participants will learn a simplified tai chi form called Tai Chi Chih®. We will also explore the Taoist, contemplative classic, the Tao Te Ching. We will practice and examine silent waiting Quaker worship.

Are you a “Christian” Quaker? A “Universalist” Quaker? Early Friends emphasized a direct experience of the divine that undermined such distinctions. We will explore the roots and present-day reality of “experiential Quakerism” including the range of beliefs it supports, from non-theist to evangelical Christian.

Whitman's sprawling poem “Song of Myself” is one of the foundational poems of American literature; its influences include Quakerism, the Bible, Eastern religious texts, Deism; its themes include ecstasy, evil, God, nature, worship, love, birth, death. Reading it together is always deep and full of surprises.

Friends have used writing as ministry for centuries. Join us as we use worship, intergenerational dialogue, and writing prompts designed for the Quaker Youth Book Project (Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices) to share authentically about our spiritual lives and get to the heart of youth and intergenerational concerns among Friends.