First thoughts about convergent weekend

Hey all, the Reclaim­ing Prim­i­tive Quak­erism work­shop at California’s Ben Lomond Cen­ter wrapped up a few hours ago (I’m post­ing from the San Jose air­port). I think it went well. There were about thirty par­tic­i­pants. The makeup was very inter­gen­er­a­tional and God and Christ were being named all over the place!

I myself felt stripped through­out the first half, a sense of vague but deep unease–not at how the work­shop was going, but about who I am and where I am. Christ was hard at work point­ing out the lay­ers of pride that I’ve used to pro­tect myself over the last few years. This morning’s agenda was mostly extended wor­ship, begun with “Bible Read­ing in the Man­ner of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends” (video below) and it really lifted the veil for me–I think God even joked around with me a bit.



As always, many of the high points came unex­pect­edly in small con­ver­sa­tions, both planned and ran­dom. One piece that I’ll be return­ing to again and again is that we need to focus on the small acts and not build any sort of move­ment piece by piece and not worry about the Big Con­fer­ence or the Big Web­site that will change every­thing that we know. That’s not how the Spirit works and our push­ing it to work this way almost invari­ably leads to fail­ure and wasted effort.

Another piece is that we need to start focus­ing on really build­ing up the kind of habits that will work out our spir­i­tual mus­cles. Chad of 27Wishes had a great anal­ogy that had to do with the neo-traditionalist jazz musi­cians and I hoped to get an inter­view with him on that but time ran out. I’ll try to get a remote inter­view (an ear­lier inter­view with him is here, thanks Chad for being the first inter­view of the weekend!)

I con­ducted a bunch of video inter­views that I’ll start upload­ing to my Youtube account and on the “reclaiming2009” tag on Quak­erQuaker. When you watch them, be char­i­ta­ble. I’m still learn­ing through my style. But it was excit­ing start­ing to do them and it con­firmed my sense that we really need to be burn­ing up Youtube with Quaker stuff.

I need to find my board­ing gate but I do want to say that the other piece is putting together col­lec­tions of prac­tices that Friends can try in their loca­tion Friends com­mu­nity. Gath­er­ing in Light Wess led a really well-received ses­sion that took the Lord’s Prayer and turned it into an inter­ac­tive small group even. We took pho­tos and a bit of video and we’ll be putting it together as a how-to some­where or other.

Pic­tures going up on Flickr, I’ll orga­nize them soon. Also check out Con​ver​gent​Friends​.org and the Reclaim­ing Prim­i­tive Quak­erism work­shop page on QuakerQuaker.