Exciting Philly Convergent Friends opportunity

6 Comments

ppThe most excel­lent Peggy Sen­ger Par­sons of Oregon’s Free­dom Friends Church emailed me today say­ing she and the equally excel­lent Marge Abbott will be co-leading a work­shop at the Philadel­phia area Pen­dle Hill Retreat Cen­ter from 3/27–29. These two were cross­ing the­o­log­i­cal bound­aries and pio­neer­ing the Con­ver­gent Friend ethos long before Blogs, Twit­ter & Face­book. The work­shop is called “Are we still a dan­ger­ous peo­ple?” and as rock­ing as that sounds, I’d be will­ing to lis­ten to these two read the Salem, Ore­gon phone book for a week­end. If you have a pil­low stuffed with some extra cash ($200 for com­muters) then you should def­i­nitely try to make it (unfor­tu­nately I don’t have a lumpy pil­low­case and can’t afford to take another three days off).

Peggy wrote that she wants to make her­self “avail­able for the Sat­ur­day after­noon free time for a con­ver­sa­tion with any Friends who want to drop in and crash the party.” That sounds good to me! If I can rearrange some child­care sched­ules, I’ll try to make that. That would be Sat­ur­day the 28th from 1:00–3:30pm.

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  • http://gatheringinlight.com Wess

    Oh how I wish I was not on the oppo­site side of this vast country.

    • http://www.martinkelley.com/ Mar­tin Kelley

      Oh, but that’s not the atti­tude, Wess! We need to have lots of cool events all over the place, dozens of cool work­shops and gath­er­ings every week­end that we wish we were at.

      Hey, we’re going to need to need to have some “freely avail­able time” when we’re at Pen­dle Hill this Novem­ber for our New Monas­tics and Con­ver­gent Friends work­shop. It seems like there should be some way to piggy-back these pricier events that pay for air­plane tick­ets with free events for those who can’t afford it. We’d have to make sure it didn’t com­pete with the pay­ing gig, of course, as that wouldn’t be fair and wouldn’t get us invited back. Let’s think about it as the time gets closer.

      • http://gatheringinlight.com Wess

        I love the idea. I’m sure we can think of some stuff.

  • http://dodgytackle.wordpress.com/ Quak­er­Dave

    I saw this list­ing and I surely wish I could attend. Sadly, the money is not there.

    • http://www.martinkelley.com/ Mar­tin Kelley

      @QuakerDave: come for the 1pm free time. If there’s a lot of great con­ver­sa­tion still hap­pen­ing at 3:30 all of us vis­i­tors can just recon­vene some­where else nearby. We don’t need Peggy and Marge to be dan­ger­ous, grin!

  • Amy Ward Brimmer

    Wow, this sounds really cool, for any­one who’s not a mem­ber of Phildel­phia Yearly Meet­ing, which is hav­ing their Annual Ses­sions at Arch Street Meet­ing­house duirng the exact same time! http://​www​.pym​.org/​a​n​n​u​a​l​s​e​s​s​i​ons.
    Please check out the program–this is not your grandfather’s Yearly Meet­ing anymore.