Mystery

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

Martin Kelley — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:41:27 +0000

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

Martin Kelley — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:37:54 +0000

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

Martin Kelley — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:31:31 +0000

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.setonhillfriends.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).