Tag Archives ⇒ Mystery

Last weekend I was invited to speak to Abington (Pa.) Meeting’s First-day school…

November 8, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Last week­end I was invit­ed to speak to Abing­ton (Pa.) Meet­ing’s First-day school (n.b. prop­er FJ stylesheet) to talk about vocal min­istry in wor­ship. I haven’t been to wor­ship at that meet­ing for eons and can’t speak to the con­di­tion of its min­istry, but I do know that vocal min­istry can be some­thing of a mys­tery for unpro­grammed Friends. Many of us are “con­vinced,” com­ing to the Soci­ety as adults and often have a nag­ging feel­ing we’re play-acting at being Friends, but I’ve met many life-long Quak­ers who also won­der about it.

Per­haps as a response to these feel­ings, we some­times get rather pedan­tic that what­ev­er way we’ve first encoun­tered is the Quak­er way. The cur­rent fash­ion of vocal min­istry in the Philadel­phia area is for short mes­sages, often about world events, often con­fes­sion­al in nature. What I want­ed to leave Abing­ton with was the rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent ways unpro­grammed Friends have wor­shipped over time and how some of our prac­tices out­side wor­ship were devel­oped to help nur­ture Spirit-led ministry.

(writ­ten this a.m. but only post­ed to lim­it­ed cir­cles, cut and past­ed when I saw the mix-up)

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Mystery

July 12, 2011
· Martin Kelley

I come back from a day off and my office door is unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly closed, with a sign read­ing “Wet Paint.” Inside are black vel­vet cloths act­ing as drop cloths and… my old walls, unpaint­ed. Have I been punk’d? Are there elves with bad follow-through liv­ing in the office?

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Check out KD’s defense of organized (Quaker) religion

February 14, 2009
· Martin Kelley

It’s up on the side­bar and fea­tured on Quak­erQuak­er, but I want to give an added boost to my friend Kevin-Douglas’ post “Why I both­er with reli­gion.” I’ve writ­ten about the Emer­gent Church / Quak­er exper­i­ment that Kevin-Douglass is help­ing to orga­nize down in Bal­ti­more. Check out their new’ish web­site, http://​www​.seton​hill​friends​.org/
Here’s a snip­pet of today’s post:

Orga­nized reli­gion is based in com­mu­ni­ty. Being in a com­mu­ni­ty chal­lenges me. Sim­ply hang­ing out with my friends and engag­ing my fam­i­ly isn’t enough. The risks of such an inten­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty and the sup­port avail­able there­in offer so much more than if I just do what comes eas­i­ly or go along with what exists around me. I’m chal­lenged in com­mu­ni­ty. I’m held account­able. And while it could be said that I could get this out of a gay rights group, or being part of an eth­i­cal soci­ety, the truth is that in a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty, we all seek to go much deep­er than the psy­cho­log­i­cal or emo­tion­al lev­els. We seek to under­stand that Mys­tery — God. We seek to under­stand that trans­for­ma­tive and heal­ing pow­er that comes from that Mystery.

Kevin-Douglas orig­i­nal­ly post­ed it to Face­book ear­li­er today and I asked if he would sign up to Quak­erQuak­er and post it there. There’s a lot of great stuff that goes up on Face­book and it’s a use­ful tool for keep­ing in touch with friends, but most posts are not vis­i­ble beyond your own Face­book friends list (it depends on your pri­va­cy set­tings). If you post some­thing real­ly good about Friends or belief on Face­book, seri­ous­ly con­sid­er whether you might repost it some­where more pub­lic. If you don’t have a blog handy, you can do what KD did and post it on Quak­erQuak­er, where every reg­is­tered user has blog­ging capa­bil­i­ties (it cre­ates a bit of a meta­phys­i­cal con­nun­drum for the Quak­erQuak­er edi­tors, as it means we’ll be link­ing QQ posts to the QQ site, but that’s fine).