Last night LizOpp, Robin M and myself hosted our FGC Gath­er­ing inter­est group. The title was “On Fire!: Renew­ing Quak­erism through a Con­ver­gence of Friends.” All morn­ing long we’ve had Friends grab­bing our arms to tell us how pow­er­ful and impor­tant it was for them. One well-traveled Friend went so far as to say the spon­ta­neous wor­ship that occurred halfway through was the deep­est he’s expe­ri­enced in twenty years of Quak­erism. The obvi­ous chal­lenge for us hosts is keep­ing our egos securely tamed from all this praise.

The work wasn’t ours. We sim­ply set the stage. My first impulse is to say we helped cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where the Spirit could break into the event, but that’s not really it. We tried to cre­ate a space where par­tic­i­pants would rec­og­nize when the Spirit knocked on the door.

Food for Fire par­tic­i­pants.Blog­gers at the work­shop pose for a goofy attacking-one-another photo.

What hap­pened last night felt sim­i­lar to what hap­pened in last February’s Pow­ell House Food for the Fire work­shop. While I took notes and jour­naled a lot about it I never gave a fol­lowup blog post. It was pow­er­ful and I needed to digest it. Luck­ily par­tic­i­pants Rob, Amanda and Zach and Claire all shared about it or its themes in the weeks afterwards.

I’d like to share some­thing about the assump­tions and prepa­ra­tion that went into these two events. There’s no way to cre­ate a cookie-cutter agenda to force a deep spir­i­tual high. In fact part of what’s needed is to move beyond pre­dictabil­ity. Both times I’ve had a clear sense that a point came when I was no longer facil­i­tat­ing, where Spirit was actively guid­ing us and par­tic­i­pants were actively respond­ing to that process, even elder­ing us past the con­trol of facilitation.

When I came to Pow­ell House I had a work­shop descrip­tion and a keen inter­est in the topic. What I didn’t bring was an agenda. I’m try­ing to exper­i­ment with not being too pre­pared.* Early Friends held open meet­ings and while they often bore con­cerns and had themes that fre­quently reoc­curred in their min­istry. Friends today rely very much on mod­els bor­rowed from higher edu­ca­tion: we have work­shops that expect agen­das, we give talks that expect pre-printed speeches. These are often the oppor­tu­ni­ties we get for teach­ing min­istries, yet they are very pro­grammed. The chal­lenge is to fig­ure out how to sub­vert them to allow for unpro­grammed surprise.

At Pow­ell House I spent time before each ses­sion walk­ing around the grounds in prayer for guid­ance on what to do next. I had brain­stormed ideas before­hand but my main prepa­ra­tion had been a lot of Quaker read­ing and prayer in the weeks pre­ceed­ing the event. I wanted the ses­sions to con­nect to the spir­i­tual con­di­tion of the par­tic­i­pants, as indi­vid­u­als and as a group. There were a few moments I thought I was nuts. For exam­ple, walk­ing around before the Pow­ell House Sat­ur­day after­noon ses­sion it seemed like read­ing a chap­ter of Samuel Bownas’s Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions would be a good idea, but by mid-afternoon I could see the sleepy faces. We did it any­way and faces and spirit lit up. Peo­ple wanted to engage with Bow­nas. As it turns out we read all of chap­ter three, “Advice to Min­is­ters in a State of Infancy.” It was so cool.

The real inbreak­ing hap­pened a lit­tle later. The group was tired, din­ner was near­ing. I started to rec­om­mend we go into a cir­cle to break up. One Friend inter­rupted, looked at another across the room and said “you have some­thing to say, don’t you.” The sec­ond Friend said yes, then chal­lenged us that we hadn’t actu­ally answered our queries at all. The main ques­tion was still on the table. “What are we called to do?” There was a release. I knew I was not in con­trol of the work­shop any­more. We came into a prayer cir­cle and started to talk about some of this. One Friend said some­thing about nam­ing who it is that call us. A theme came out that it wasn’t enough for us to find some sort of per­sonal sal­va­tion and com­fort in our Quaker meet­ings: we needed to bring all the world into this if it was to be mean­ing­ful. It truly felt like the Holy Spirit was in the room. It wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily so com­fort­able and it some­how seemed like not enough, but it pointed to the work we needed to do afterwards.

Blog­ging par­tic­i­pants of On Fire! work­shop pose together. About fifty peo­ple total came out for the Mon­day night inter­est group. Click photo for names and links. Lots of dis­cus­sions hap­pened at the rise of the wor­ship. The semi-impromptu post-discussion group. (Thanks for FGC’s Emily for tak­ing & post­ing this!) FGC Gath­er­ing pho­tos on Flickr and Tech­no­rati

Last night, at the FGC inter­est group, some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened. Robin, Liz and I had planned out the first half of the meet­ing. The most impor­tant piece: com­ing early to sit in prayer and hold­ing it well past the time the inter­est group was sup­posed to start. The work of Friends needs to be rooted in wor­ship. We need to be still enough to hear the Holy Spirit. If the medium is the mes­sage, our mes­sage was about the need to not pack our­selves in with agen­das. We started pred­i­cat­bly enough by ask­ing the fifty-or-so par­tic­i­pants to give their names and to name a spir­i­tual prac­tice that gives them joy. We asked for space in between speak­ers to keep wor­ship at the fore and we were blessed by a self-faciliating group; Friends did hold the spaces in between.
Then the three of us told our sto­ries of start­ing spiritually-focused blogs and com­ing to find a fel­low­ship that extended beyond our tra­di­tional Quaker branches (hence the term “Con­ver­gence of Friends”). I went first and explained that I try­ing to be care­ful not to do this to lift myself up. My story is sim­ple and like those of many Friends. I was giv­ing tes­ti­mony. The idea of tes­ti­mony rang through­out the evening. Robin’s story in par­tic­u­lar was very grounded and com­ing last it took us into the unpro­grammed agenda-less time we had left free. Friends rose to give tes­ti­mony of other “con­ver­gent” expe­ri­ences, for exam­ple par­tic­pa­tion in the North­west Women’s The­o­log­i­cal Con­fer­ences, events of the West­ern branch of the Chris­t­ian Friends Fellowship.

At some point a woman I didn’t know stood up with­out being rec­og­nized and she had a pose of sup­pli­ca­tion. My first though, “oh no!” Then I noticed another Friend, wor­ship­ful in spirit, who pointed her to us. She said she was going to sing a song. “Oh no again!” I thought. But this was the facil­i­ta­tion com­ing off our shoul­ders. This was a Friend ris­ing to name what we needed and another Friend point­ing that we needed to go this direc­tion. It was like the two Pow­ell House Friends: one rec­og­niz­ing in the other a need to share min­istry and being will­ing to break through “proper” group process. At the inter­est group the song was pow­er­ful, it brought us to a place where we could be low and thank­ful. We were now spon­ta­neously in worship.

Liz, Robin and I had planned some clos­ing wor­ship but this wasn’t the time yet. But it was the time and the suceed­ing min­istry was heart­felt and largely from the Source.
The only funny aside was that we felt we couldn’t let the group go on past our 8:45 end time, for the sim­ple rea­son that child­care ended then and we needed to let par­ents go. We men­tioned this around 8:30 but twenty min­utes later the wor­ship was con­tin­u­ing. Just then the cell­phone of the Friend giv­ing min­istry went off: it was his daugh­ter call­ing to ask where he was! He turned off the phone but it gave us the excuse to close the meet­ing and invite an extended meet­ing to con­tinue out­side. This was won­der­ful as there were a num­ber of other similarly-themed inter­est groups (one on youth min­istries, the other on the World Gath­er­ing of Young Friends) and par­tic­i­pants from all three groups met out­side and con­tin­ued the shar­ing for another two hours.

Lessons? Sim­ply to ground work­shop events in wor­ship, let the agenda be empty enough for the Spirit to inter­vene (hav­ing backup exer­cises just in case it doesn’t is fine!). I don’t think this is a fool­proof method. A lot depends on the par­tic­i­pants and how will­ing they are to share in the facil­i­a­tion and wor­ship. A lot also depends on Friends break­ing into the agenda, for both times that was what turned the event from a work­shop to a gath­ered meeting.

* For me the dan­ger is a per­sonal style that has long relied on a last-minute mir­a­cles (I was the kind of col­lege stu­dent who read all the mate­r­ial through the semes­ter but didn’t actu­ally start writ­ing any­thing until the night before an assign­ment was due). I don’t want my the­ol­ogy to be an excuse for my pro­cras­ti­na­tion and I try to test this regularly.

Related posts

Lots of folks have been talk­ing about the Gath­er­ing and the Mon­day night inter­est group:

• Co-faciliator LizOpp also details some of the process of the Inter­est Group and of the semi-impromptu multi-generational inter­est group after­wards. She’s also writ­ten about the vis­its from Free­dom Friends Church.
• Co-facilitator RobinM has the first of a hand­ful of promised posts where she empha­sizes the impor­tance of ground­ing and start­ing the ses­sion in wor­ship.
• ChrisM describes how he couldn’t sleep after the Inter­est Group.
• Dave T has a quick check-in and descrip­tion.
• Paul L felt a real cov­er­ing of the meet­ing halfway through the Inter­est Group.
• Both AJ Schwanz and Gregg Koskela have posts about a post-Gathering meet-up of some Friends around a pic­nic table in Oregon.

I’m sure more reac­tion posts are up there and I’ll link to them as I find them. I sus­pect that in addi­tion to being the biggest group Quaker blog­ger photo to date (sorry Gregg!), this will end up being the most blogged about Quaker event yet, at least till Wess gath­ers West Coast­ers together next month. I counted at least 20 Quaker blog­gers at the Gathering.