The Jan­u­ary issue of +Friends Jour­nal will include an inter­view with +Robin Mohr. One of the clas­sic Quaker tracts that’s inspired her is a 1944 speech that Rufus M Jones gave to young Friends in Bal­ti­more Yearly Meet­ing. We couldn’t locate a copy online so we scanned, copied and typed it in and will use it as a sup­ple­men­tal link to Robin’s piece. #blog

Embed­ded Link

What Will Get Us Ready | Friends Jour­nal
By Rufus M Jones Web-only fea­ture Rufus M. Jones’ 1944 lec­ture for Bal­ti­more Young Friends Yearly Meeting.

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Non­profit blog­ger Beth Kan­tor often finds gems about pre­sen­ta­tion. Yes­ter­day she shared a “unpre­sent­ing” style of work­shop. She writes:

I do a lot of pre­sent­ing and am spend­ing to much time writ­ing bul­let points, cre­at­ing slides, and prac­tic­ing what I’m going to say. I think that this puts a stop to cre­at­ing con­ver­sa­tion in the room. I wanted to learn some con­ver­sa­tional mechan­ics — so I could stop talk­ing at peo­ple and begin talk­ing with them.

Beth’s main link is to a Google Tech Talk “unpre­sen­ta­tion” by Heather Gold. Might be good back­ground lis­ten­ing today. I’m par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in this for two rea­sons: first, obvi­ously, is that pre­sen­ta­tions are often very bor­ing and it’s nice to think about more inter­ac­tive ways of engag­ing with an audience.

But sec­ond, many mod­ern Friends have defaulted to a lec­ture style in their reli­gious edu­ca­tion. I’m not sure it works. I’ve met peo­ple who have par­tic­i­pated in mul­ti­ple Quak­erism 101 classes and still don’t know basic facts. I myself have rebelled against power point pre­sen­ta­tions and pre-set cur­ric­ula to be more engag­ing but I’m not con­vinced that this has made me a great presenter. It’s always worth find­ing new ways to present in a clear and direct and engages them with the issues they expe­ri­ence day to day.

I imag­ine this would be of inter­est not only to lib­eral Friends who give work­shops, but pas­toral Friends with a con­cern to stay open to imme­di­ate rev­e­la­tion dur­ing wor­ship–Cherice B has a great post about this yes­ter­day , a response to part four of Brent Bill’s Mod­est Pro­posal series.

Some inter­est­ing points from Heather Gold’s pre­sen­ta­tion on “tummling”

• The best way to tummle is to be a very big ver­sion of your­self. Tummle means to make noise.
• If you’re happy, i’m happy. The num­ber one way to do that is to care and to notice them—especially the peo­ple who don’t seem that involved.
• I’m notic­ing [the dis­en­gaged per­son in the back]. if i can involve him a lit­tle bit i’m much more likely to involve more of you faster than if i pick the per­son in the front row with their arm up. a tech­nique to pull every­one in is to go to the fringes. go to the peo­ple who seem on the end, who seem like they have lower sta­tus in what­ever com­mu­nity you’re in (speak less, more nervi­ous, know fewer peo­ple) and go up to them.
• Some peo­ple will be mad at you. Some peo­ple will be schmucks. Some peo­ple will want to talk a lot. You have to let all that be okay. Tools and rules will never ever do as good a job as your con­fi­dence that you can han­dle any­thing. It’s time con­sum­ing to run through fifty rules in your mind; it’s not so time con­sum­ing to just be there.