Quaker Disorientation: Learning and Unlearning Quaker Faith & Practice is a brief four-part video series for newcomers to Quaker faith. It is intended to provide some information about core practices and insights about the faith, a pathway for entering into Quaker faith and practice. In these four 20-minute videos there is an overview, but this is by no means intended to be comprehensive. 

It is an opening presented as one Friend’s experience and understanding of the faith, but hopefully can speak to others and offer a way into the practice. Lucy presents this in such a way that it can offer the opportunity to ask questions, to probe the faith, to enter into co-creative relationship with Quaker faith and practice with an understanding that practicing Quaker faith in community is an experimental process, always unfolding.  

These videos and the below queries and resources are an invitation to join in that experiment, to ground in some of the history and understanding of what is intended by Quaker practice, but to also bring one’s full self and lived experience into that practice. This is called Quaker disorientation because it is intended not to represent traditional Quaker and faith and practice as perfected, but to join in the wild becoming of entering silence, Quaker business practice, and testimonies and to co-shape the practice with us. There is much to learn within the tradition, and the ways Quaker faith has not lived up to its promise, and we invite newcomers to enter with curiosity and with the fullness of their own experience, to find their way in our fellowship, and join with us in our practicing of ongoing discovery which we call continuing revelation.

Episode 01: Worship

Agenda

Open this session with worship.

Watch the video.

Worship for a bit after the conclusion of the video.

We suggest the facilitator invite spacious discussion, but rather than worship sharing, I suggest that folks host open discussion, reminding participants to leave space for everyone to share. You may want to offer or co-create community agreements for the sessions. 

Queries for this session

  • What spoke to you in this session?
  • When do you feel most centered and grounded?
  • What stories and sharings about worship in this session spoke to you or troubled you?
  • What do you experience in the silence of Quaker worship?
  • Have you heard powerful messages in worship? What were they?
  • Have you ever felt a sense of ‘quaking’ which led you to offer a message?
  • How do you practice discernment in knowing when to speak in worship?
  • How do you understand the concept of the “gathered meeting”?
  • What more would you like to hear from Friends in your meeting about their experience of worship?
  • Take time to write a haiku about your experience in worship. Share with the group or in pairs (this could be homework before the next session, if so, make space for sharing as you open the next session).

Resources for further inquiry

Episode 02: Meeting for Business

Agenda

Open this session with worship.

Watch the video.

Worship for a bit after the conclusion of the video.

Queries for this session

  • What spoke to you in this session?
  • What experiences have you had with group discernment and decision making? How is what is described the same or different from your experience?
  • What did you make of Lucy’s story of the same sex marriage minute at Iowa Yearly Meeting (C )? What was difficult? What supported the community in moving toward unity?
  • How do you practice discernment in your own life?
  • What do you think it means that the clerk of the meeting is the servant of the meeting?
  • What do you think of the Quaker practices of standing aside or standing in the way?
  • What excites you about participating in meeting for worship with attention to business? What makes you more hesitant?
  • Take time to write a paragraph/poem about spiritual discernment in community. What supports collective discernment? What gets in the way? Share with the group or in pairs (this could be homework before the next session, if so, make space for sharing as you open the next session).

Resources for further inquiry

Episode 03: Quaker History

Agenda

Open this session with worship.

Watch the video.

Worship for a bit after the conclusion of the video.

Queries for this session

  • What spoke to you in this session?
  • What surprised you in this session?
  • What did you take away from Lucy sharing about the complexity of Quaker history? How does that relate to other faiths and the concept of continuing revelation?
  • What did you make of the story of Benjamin Lay?
  • What stories of Quaker history have you heard? What would you like to know more about?
  • What is your interpretation/understanding of this statement Lucy makes toward the end of the video? 

“We hold within our faith a kernel of deeper transformation and the power of living up to a more prophetic light. If we are truly the Religious Society of Friends of Truth then holding and facing this complex history is part of living the faith that we may become collectively a more integrous embodiment of the original revolutionary insight of Quaker faith, of living and practicing heaven on earth.”

  • Imagine: draw or write about your sense of the stories of Quaker history Friends might tell in 20-30 years? What part might you play in that history?  Share with the group or in pairs (this could be homework before the next session, if so, make space for sharing as you open the next session).

Resources for further inquiry

Episode 04: Testimonies

Agenda

Open this session with worship.

Watch the video.

Worship for a bit after the conclusion of the video.

Queries for this session

  • What spoke to you in this session?
  • What surprised you in this session?
  • How do you think testimonies differ from a creed or a statement of belief? 
  • What does it mean to live one’s faith as described in this session? How do you support yourself in living your beliefs?
  • What is your sense of the testimony of integrity?
  • What is your sense of the testimony of peace?
  • What is your sense of the testimony of simplicity?
  • What is your sense of the testimony of community?
  • What is your sense of the testimony of equality?
  • What do you think of Lucy’s offering of a new testimony, a testimony of justice? 
  • Based on your own experience of the divine, is there a testimony you live by that is not included in the testimonies spoken of in this video?
  • Draw: Imagine yourself living one of these testimonies. What does your daily life look like? How does living that testimony show up in your life?  Share with the group or in pairs.

Resources for further inquiry

About Lucy Duncan

Lucy Duncan is co-director of reparationWorks with a focus on organizing. She is a racial justice organizer and educator who has worked for decades supporting white people in becoming co-conspirators for racial justice.

From 2022 until recently she served as Truth and Reparations Co-Fellow for the Truth Telling Project and Grassroots Reparations Campaign. From 2020 until 2023 she served as co-chair of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission on Faith-Based and Interfaith Affairs, launching a campaign to invite 100 congregations into sincere reparations work, which continues under the stewardship of the Rise up for Reparations Campaign steering committee.

From 2011 until 2022 she served as Director of Friends Relations for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). In that role she was lead organizer and  co-facilitator for Radical Acting in Faith for white people and co-conceived and birthed the ongoing Quakers Uprooting Racism community of practice project. She has published many articles on working to end white supremacy including the 2023 “Reparations and Transgenerational Healing” in Friends Journal.

She is a member of Green Street Friends Meeting (a congregation of the Quaker regional body Philadelphia Yearly Meeting) and founded their Reparations committee which inspired the meeting to budget $500,000 toward reparations in 2021. In the early 90s she co-founded the storytelling troupe, The Five Bright Chicks, and co-hosted a storytelling radio show for three years. She uses storytelling as a tool for enlivening community and understands reparations as a powerful vehicle to remake the world beyond colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. She lived in a Quaker cemetery for 15 years, her son who was born there is currently a grave digger, and she takes her daily morning constitutional in a nearby Victorian cemetery.

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