Friends Journal Staff Picks

Every year, QuakerSpeak videographer Jon Watts has put together DVDs with collections of that season’s videos. There’s a bit of irony in paying for DVDs of free videos but the collections are useful for sharing in meetinghouse fellowship rooms as part of First-day classes.

But this year’s DVD is special. It’s only eight videos and they’ve been curated with a very specific audience in mind: newcomers and first-time attenders. Because the entire DVD runs a bit under an hour, the per-disk price has been made lower. Low enough hopefully, for Quaker meetings to buy them in enough bulk that they can be given out to attenders who come to visit.

Quaker worship is an alien concept to a lot of religious seekers. And it’s very possible to attend a Quaker meeting and leave not knowing much more about Friends’ beliefs and values than a visitor had walking in that morning. Imagine having something you could hand them to teach them more about the diversity and depth of Quaker belief. That’s what these DVDs offer (and, if they’re from the cord-cutter generation, they can always use the printed playlist to open YouTube on their phones).

The difference between a curious person visiting once and a regular attender (and someday member) is sometimes just a bit of followup. I’m excited to see if meetings take up this opportunity. I think QuakerSpeak has been the most important Quaker outreach program of recent times; this DVD is yet another way that we’re bridging it with on-the-ground Quaker meetings. Check it out.

http://www.quakerspeak.com/dvd/

The favorite part of talking with Jon is his enthusiasm and his talent for keeping his sights set on the long picture (my favorite question was asking why he started with a Quaker figure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bustle of deadlines and to-do lists and to start to forget why we’re doing this work as professional Quakers. There is a reality behind the word counts. As Friends, we are sharing the good news of 350+ years of spiritual adventuring: observations, struggles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to follow Inward Light of the Gospels.

My nine year old son Theo is blogging as a class assignment. I think they’ve been supposed to be writing there for awhile but he’s really only gotten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on WordPress site, but with certain restrictions (most notably, posts only become public after the classroom teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s certain ironic to see one of my kids blogging more than me!

Enough blogging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more regular small posts so as to get back into the blogging habit. In the meantime, I’m always active on my Tumblr site (which shows up as the sidebar to the right). It’s the bucket for my internet curations–videos and links I find interesting, and my own pictures and miscellanea.