Encountering Spirit – FGC Retreat
February 29, 2024 § 1 Comment
Encountering Spirit—An Opportunity
Friends General Conference is sponsoring a retreat in April titled Encountering Spirit. I will join Marty Grundy and Stanford Searl in a panel and following workshop on The Gathered Meeting on Sunday, April 14. So I’m doing what I can to get the word out.
Information
Retreat website: Encountering Spirit.
Workshop schedule: Workshops.
When: Friday, April 12, 2024 – Sunday, April 14, 2024.
The Gathered Meeting Plenary: Encounter in Community—Sunday, 1 pm Eastern.
The Gathered Meeting Workshop: Sunday, 3–5 pm, Eastern.
Who: Steven Davison, Marty Grundy, Stanford Searl.
Description: How do we encounter the Gatherer in the Gathered Meeting? Thomas Kelly describes Gathered Meetings as “group mysticism of the disciplined soul and the disciplined group.” In this plenary, three Friends will describe their experiences of the Gathered Meeting and how they prepare for disciplined group mysticism. How do we encounter the Gatherer?
An “Unconference”
FGC is experimenting with a new format they’re calling an “unconfeence.” Participants will have the opportunity to add sessions to the agenda each day. Think of these as spontaneous interest groups or affinity groups, or even spontaneous workshops. Is there a conversation you’d like to share with likeminded Friends? A spiritual topic you’ve been exploring that feels alive and timely?
The topics for the peer-to-peer sessions will be decided during the event and participants may join whichever sessions they choose. Learn more about attending an unconference and preparing to convene a session.
Through the Flaming Sword 
… how did it go?
At the time you posted this I got curious and researched this unconference a bit, particularly recognizing Marty Grundy’s involvement – a ‘personage of pertinence’ back in the 1990s (if remaining memory serves me correctly!). Back then online worship was being explored [&, mostly, rejected?], and on Quaker listserves.
I guess that stop got revisited and has evolved into an unconference thing. Interesting.
This morning I was looking for my 1993 “dis for belief people” online. I found it on this blog and 2018:
https://throughtheflamingsword.wordpress.com/2018/06/16/evil-a-case-study/#comment-3907
Thanks for hanging onto this relic from Quaker WANDA days. Perhaps an open technology and free gospel ministry unconference, and this on the efficacy of active contemplation as an enconter with the antiquity of Samual Bownas’ concept of “Perfection” and discernment of spirits regarding his book “A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to a Gospel Minister” might …
https://pendlehill.org/product/description-qualifications-necessary-gospel-minister/
…well, never mind. (Quakers seem to have long been transformed into a pious non-society of Ranters enabled by dead Quaker money that’s derived from “the elephant in the room”*: CapitalismFAIL with its #AbruptClimateChange.) How is the way opening on the Q&C book going?
=)
• The title of on open technology workshop I facilitated at the 2003 FWCC Conference at Gilford College on the Peace Testimony. That workshop had the highest attendance of any of the Conference’s workshops, including the one on Conscious Objection that I facilitated with Rosa Packard (that one had 16, compared to 28, if I recall correctly …& the 16 number was also significantly large).
A young Friend from Canada – who had bicycled all the way to Columbia from Canada – named this elephant in the room as one of a session’s speaker. She challenged those gathered to consider our failure to name this “elephant” as such being our activist apostasy.
At the open technology workshop, and except for one young Friend, the 27 others, when considering the price of “perfection”, became sad and turned away. Was this sadness a functional confession? As yearly meeting funded delegates-as-activists to this Conference on the Peace Testimony did they unconsciously acknowledge that they represented a systemically imperfectible Religious Society that is functionally ‘Friends of Wealth’?