A Workshop at the 2015 Friends General Conference
Led by Minga Claggett-Borne & Jonathan Vogel-Borne
How often have you felt the Spirit alive in your meeting? How can we open to the Spirit’s power to transform us and our meetings? With worship, exercises, readings, and stories we will engage with one another and consider how deep worship, strong community, and active witness overlap to build powerful meetings.
Workshop Description
Goals and objectives:
- To offer opportunities to listen to the Spirit.
- To create a laboratory for reflecting on our Meeting experiences and for building community among participants.
- To liberate the full spiritual potential of individuals and their home communities.
- To learn specific ideas of how to unblock places in a Meeting that appear dry or stuck.
- To explore how the basic elements of a vibrant community—deep worship, strong community, and active witness—can empower and inspire Meetings
General Structure (follow links for the full day’s agenda):
Day 1 Introduction
Describe your spiritual life. How does your spiritual journey blend with your Meeting (or spiritual community)?
Day 2 Deep Worship
Look at what worship was like among early Quakers and in the early Christian community. Consider what is the mission of your Meeting. Tell stories of challenges your Meeting has faced.
Day 3 Strong Community
What are gifts? What are leadings? How do we encourage one another? How do we engage with with people with whom we disagree? How do we practice conflict transformation?
Day 4 Active Witness
We live within an empire fueled by oppression, war and greed. How do our inward motions of divine love challenge the systems of domination, violence and poverty?
Day 5 Celebration — Taking It Home
How can we lift up the power of the Spirit? How can we live in it?