Richmond

• Interchange, Fall 2008
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2007
• Interchange, Spring 2008
• Peace Call, 2007
• Interchange, Fall 2007
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2006
• Interchange, Spring 2007
• Interchange, Fall 2006
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2005
• Interchange, Fall 2005
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2004
• Interchange, Spring 2005
   
• FUM Policy Concern
• Interchange, September 2004
• FUM Policy Concern
• Interchange, March 2004
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2003

As usual, it’s a challenge to condense all the activity of our Meeting into a few paragraphs, so the following are special highlights. In late spring, it was announced that the Meeting had paid in full through gifts and bequests the $660,000 mortgage that was negotiated in 2005 for renovation of the Religious Education building. In May, a group of 11 RFM volunteers spent six days in Waveland, Mississippi doing Katrina-related relief work. With over $1000 raised by Young Friends, they were able to assist several families and worked on four homes, as part of Camp Gulfside, a United Methodist relief mission. Also in May, we held our spring retreat at the Clearing and in early June, celebrated several of our graduating Young Friends.

Over the past several months, we’ve been crafting language for an historical marker that will be placed near the location of our Meeting’s original structure, built in 1797. Ours was the second faith group to establish a home in Richmond, after St. John’s Episcopal Church.

We continue to follow closely the humanitarian work of Friends Church Peace Team in Kenya and in July hosted a presentation by David Zarembka and others about peacemaking efforts in central African countries.

We marked the International Day of Peace September 21 with a period of silence at noon during our Meeting for Business, participation in the Family Peace Festival hosted by local faith communities, and a family vigil and silent walk that evening at our Meeting House.

Many in our Meeting are looking forward to the November 8 event that will raise funds for the Richmond Peace Education Center. RPEC has selected RFM member Betsy Brinson as Peacemaker of the Year, an honor that recognizes Richmond or Virginia residents who have contributed significantly to the struggle for peace and justice.

In preparing this report, we first asked: “What does ‘spiritual state of the meeting’ mean, and by what measures can we assess it?” In worship sharing and subsequent discussion on this question, a theme emerged that our “spiritual state” is embodied in our sense of community.

Many participate in Richmond Monthly Meeting because we find here a place where people sincerely try to listen and reach out to each other in ways we rarely find elsewhere. In our tradition, this sense can be characterized as recognizing “that of God” in each of us and attending to that Spirit, and hence to each other.

This attention to Spirit is nurtured in Meeting for Worship and reflected in our interactions, in the sense of a gathered meeting, in the feeling of love in our worship and community. It’s also part of Quaker process in our committees and in Meeting for Business.

Looking back over recent years, we are becoming progressively trustful of the process, encouraging people to engage and working toward productive outcomes.

Our committees are accomplishing many things while operating in the spirit of the sense of the meeting, and the issues they bring to monthly business meeting are well seasoned, which helps business meetings be more Spirit-centered.

Still, we see that building community is sometimes confusing, messy, and difficult, and we appreciate the patience and energy that all contribute, often over long periods of time. Yet by applying hard work and close attention to process, we have been better able to solve problems, resolve or transcend differences, season issues in committees, and find unity with the Spirit.

While many participate, we wonder if we might better engage more people, while recognizing that many participate at a pace that fits their lives and spiritual seeking. We would also like to have more dialogue about how our range of beliefs play out in the life of our community. As individuals, we may be Christ-centered, Bible-based, Universalist, nontheist, or hold other beliefs. Some people self-censor lest they somehow offend others, so we still seek a shared “Language of the Spirit.” We find guidance in BYM Faith and Practice’s suggestion that “We have a profound, often tested, durable respect for individuals … and each Monthly Meeting must, as always, fit its practice to its own situation and the needs of its members.” This is our continuing challenge.

In these many aspects we report that our “spiritual state” is strong yet, as ever, struggling … changing and developing as our community attends to the Spirit and each other.

With one year ending and another beginning, it is hard not to acknowledge some nitty gritty accomplishments: adoption of another carefully considered budget, a roster of full committees and service opportunities, and new clerks learning the worshipful ways of Quaker business. We marked the end of 2007 with a minute supporting full Congressional approval of HR1294, the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Recognition Act of 2007, giving federal recognition to Virginia native tribes as sovereign peoples, to enable eligibility for federal funds through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In the midst of all our usual endeavors, the Ministry and Worship Committee is leading a careful process for community discernment on concerns about BYM’s continuing membership in Friends United Meeting. Meanwhile, families are encouraged to consider sending children to BYM camps (with financial assistance available from our Meeting), and a work group will again travel to Mississippi in early May to continue Hurricane Katrina relief activities.

The peacemaking activities of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of Richmond Friends Meeting bear witness to a range of local, regional, and national concerns. On the second Saturday of every month, we lead a silent “Take a Second for Peace” vigil and walk along our busy city Boulevard. The committee purchased “War is Not the Answer” yard signs and distributes them at no charge to Friends.

Members of the Committee have been an “informed presence” at several high schools career fairs with brochures and guidance about alternatives to military recruitment. With the Richmond Peace Education Center, we have improved the visibility and accessibility of the Opt Out form in the Richmond Public Schools information packets for parents and students, so that they can elect not to be contacted by military recruiters. Members of our Meeting have provided financial and volunteer leadership support for Quaker House in Fayetteville, NC.

Richmond Friends, along with the Peace Center and Midlothian Friends Meeting, provides ongoing oversight of Virginia’s “Eyes Wide Open” display, coordinating storage, maintenance and updating of the boots and signs for Virginia venues.

Our Meeting agreed on a minute opposing military action in Iran, and notified elected officials and the media of our position. The Committee organized two FCNL-related letter writing campaigns. Annually, our Meeting sponsors of the ecumenical and inter-religious International Day of Peace Vigil on September 21, with a silent vigil and candlelight walk that draws participants from area churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. And finally, last summer we hosted a forum for the Christian Peacemakers Team (Maurice Trimmer, Maury River Friends) and Alternatives to Violence coordinator, Hezron Masitsa from Kenya.

The International Day of Peace on September 21 launched a weekend full of Richmond Friends’ activities. In addition to hosting a public candlelight vigil, our Meeting, the Richmond Peace Education Center and Midlothian Friends Meeting sponsored a workshop led by Chuck Fager of Quaker House on “Strategies for Long-Term Peace Work: What Peace Activists Can Learn from the Military.” Our Outreach committee organized our presence at the 4th annual community-wide Family Peace Festival.

Highlights from this summer included an evening meal hosted by RFM for Cindy Sheehan and her colleagues during their march to Washington, and a forum on Kenya and the Alternatives to Violence Project with Hezron Masitsa, from the Friends International Center in Nairobi and the lead facilitator for the AVP. We took time this fall to celebrate the expanding peacework of Quakers in Kenya through the Friends Peace Teams’ African Great Lakes Initiative, especially Linda Heacock’s continuing embraced ministry as an AVP trainer, and Barbara Myers’ workcamp experience at the Laboa AVP Peace Center.

Closer to home, the Katrina Relief group is planning its third trip to assist with Gulf Coast rebuilding, another session of Quakerism 101 gets underway this fall, and our religious education classrooms are full of children. Expanded community use of our renovated and enlarged facilities has required a closer look at and refinement of building use practices and processes.

Richmond Friends Meeting (RFM) began the new year firmly resettled in our renovated home, our first full year here. For a number of years, many of us had devoted our energies and enthusiasms toward the real-world decisions and concerns (fund-raising, mortgage rates, construction delays and the like) that undertaking and executing such a large renovation project entailed.

We are gratified at the success of our efforts, which has led to increased use and enjoyment of our renovated building in the larger Richmond community. We also are proud of the fact that, at the end of 2006, we had nearly completed paying for the renovation.

Those are "real-world" accomplishments, to be sure, but we also are gratified at the "renovation of our hearts" that occurred during the long process. From the very beginning, we focused on bringing our members and friends into the effort, holding threshing sessions, small-group “listening circles” and a multitude of fun(d)-raisers that built community as we worked toward building the structure. Through the various get-togethers, focused on a large and important goal, new friendships were made and existing ones strengthened. We emerged not only with a new home but with a more close-knit and spiritually alive Meeting.

In 2006 as is usual with our Meeting, we directed our energies into a wide variety of projects, and sometimes we wondered about being spread too thin. We know that some of us are more interested in an inwardly directed spiritual journey, while others gravitate toward a more outward-focused journey.

We continued to realize the positive impact of moving Meeting for Worship with a concern for Business (MWB) to a regular 11 a.m. worship time. More families have gotten involved, and the various projects and work of committees are more integrated into the Meeting as a whole. Having our MWB on Sunday has helped to keep us together.

We would like to define “the spiritual state of the Meeting” in terms of how RFM nurtured the spiritual development of individuals and our community as a whole. In 2006 most of us were engaged in some of the following activities, which nurtured our spiritual growth:

• embracing fellow Friends who hold a wide variety of beliefs about God and Quakerism
• striving to listen closely to each other with open hearts
• allowing people to decide their own level and type of participation in the work of Meeting
• being responsive to individual personal needs and caring for one another
• helping our community grow through scholarships and educational activities
• planning and teaching our 55 children and teens with creativity and enthusiasm
• attending a weekly Bible Workbench
• participating in the midweek worship group
• joining in fellowship through groups like Friendly 8’s
• enjoying the Young Friends’ Coffee House and
• singing together once a month.

Most important, since we have no pastor or hierarchy, each of us was also individually responsible for upholding Quaker ideals and adding our truth (silent or vocal) to weekly worship.

RFM additionally nurtured spiritual growth through activities that involved people beyond the RFM community in the following ways:

In 2006 we expressed a desire for more visibility. We already have an RFM website, and we decided to further expand our visibility efforts by creating a new Outreach committee.

We participated in the greater Quaker community through organizing the BYM women’s retreat, supporting BYM camping, hearing directly from leaders at FCNL and learning Godly Play from an FGC coordinator. Two of our Young Friends travelled and worked in Ramallah Palestine with a group of BYM Young Friends. We also continued our dialogue with FUM about our different beliefs related to homosexuality, and we encouraged understanding between us by beginning our dialogue with a discussion of our shared goals.

We involved ourselves in greater Richmond by working with the Richmond Peace Education Center and a homeless shelter in the inner city, organizing counter-military recruitment efforts, sponsoring the Journey of Hope exhibit about the death penalty, inviting the wider community to recognize the UN's International Day of Peace (planned with our RFM children and Young Friends), working with a refugee family from Afghanistan and another from Somalia, and sponsoring regular "work camps" in a Richmond neighborhood.

We were also led to participate in activism against Virginia’s proposed “marriage amendment” and in certain other state and federal legislative concerns. An RFM group traveled to Biloxi, Miss., to provide relief for a community recovering from Katrina. In addition, one of our members continued with an embraced ministry with theAlternatives to Violence Project of the African Great Lakes Initiative of Friends Peace Teams. She brought back ideas and also invited a Quaker pastor from Burundi to enrich our Meeting. Four of us participated in the annual protest against the School of the Americas in Georgia.

We also acknowledge areas where we could better nurture our spiritual development:

• being more mindful of and helpful to committees under stress
• welcoming new attendees and helping them figure out who we are and how they might further participate in Meeting
• recruiting more adults (especially men) to help in children’s RE
• processing differences in more constructive and loving ways
• improving communication between committees and MWB, especially in processing agenda items and
• helping people realize that being on a committee isn’t just work, that it’s fun and an important way to get into the life of the Meeting.

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive, and next year we’ll look at the progress we made in those areas.

In a wide variety of ways, RFM worked hard in 2006 to encourage the spiritual development of individuals and the Meeting as a whole. Ideally, our myriad activities are an expression of our spirituality. The members of the committee of Ministry and Worship (who prepared this report) are deeply thankful to everyone at RFM who labored to bring the Spirit into our lives.

Richmond Friends Meeting has joined a coalition of counter-recruitment organizations to stage a segment of the AFSC Eyes Wide Open exhibit March 20-21, tentatively at the Student Commons plaza at Virginia Commonwealth University. The exhibit belongs to the Charlottesville Friends Meeting and includes boots for Virginia military casualties as well as shoes for Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives in the war. The counterrecruitment coalition includes the Richmond Peace Education Center, the Richmond Mennonite Fellowship, Midlothian Friends Meeting, the Virginia Anti-War Network, the VCU Campus Anti-War network, two Episcopal churches and other interested Quakers.

This endeavor is just one of so many examples of a community committed to letting its individual and collective lives speak. Several Richmond Friends traveled to the January 27 march on the National Mall, participated in the Virginia Friends Advocacy Day at the Virginia General Assembly on February 5, and rallied food contributions for the monthly meal we serve at the Hull Street shelter. We hosted a visit from Guilford College friends at the end of January to learn more about the college and the Quaker Leadership program, and are busy nurturing families with children who hope to attend BYM summer camping programs. On March 10 we’ll host a workshop with Margery Mears Larrabee on the Quaker tradition of eldering, and are distilling our reflections about the past year into our annual Spiritual State of the Meeting report. This opportunity to examine more deeply the past year’s highlights and themes, and ways of improving our spiritual “home” is a communal process always more fulfilling than the tangible report itself.

Richmond Friends Meeting passed a minute this summer declaring our Meeting’s opposition to the proposed Marshall/Newman “marriage amendment” to Article I of the Virginia constitution. In keeping with the traditions of our Meeting, we historically have embraced all loving and committed relationships and believe this is the best way to strengthen marriage. Friends have been urged to take action, as they are led, to oppose this amendment.

RFM’s outreach to our local and global community continues to widen and deepen. We have established an ad hoc “visibility” committee to foster public awareness of our Meeting’s existence and basic Quaker values, and to seek more meaningful participation in the larger Richmond community. We are participating in the Richmond Peace Education Center’s Family Peace Festival in mid-September, followed by a candlelight vigil on September 21 at the Meeting marking the International Day of Peace. A volunteer work team is forming to make a second visit to the Gulf Coast region in December to provide disaster relief and clean-up assistance. We continue to support Linda Heacock’s embraced ministry as a facilitator with the Alternatives to Violence program through the Friends Peace Teams’ African Great Lakes Initiative; Linda has made a second trip to Kenya this fall, including a trip to South Africa for the AVP International Conference.

Another way we nurture the broader community is by sharing information about ways other organizations may use The Clearing, our lovely meditative retreat center in rural Amelia County. For more information about The Clearing, its facilities, and potential usage, go to www.theclearing.net.

Friends gathered on Saturday morning, March 4th, 2006 to consider the spiritual state of our meeting. Two strong themes of gratitude and holistic community emerged from our sharing; additionally, the desire was expressed that we be mindful of all that remains to be done. The dynamic tension between our gratitude and our concern for our spiritual growth and its expression in social action was acknowledged and appreciated.

We expressed deep gratitude for individuals, committees and for Meeting as a whole. The strength and energy of our community has grown in 2005. One way we saw this was our caring for one another in times of need. We came together as a community when the renovation of our religious education building necessitated a move on January 1st to a nearby church, supporting each other through a variety of stresses involved in this sojourn. In May, we joyously celebrated the return to our meeting house. Most especially we witnessed the enthusiastic channeling of our growing strength and vitality into increased community involvement – both in sharing among ourselves and in outreach to the wider community.

Conducting Meeting for Worship with a concern for Business (MWB) during the regular 11:00 hour on third First Days continues to be crucial to the increased sense of involvement, commitment and strength of Meeting. The effect of greater attendance at MWB is a stronger community that has been able to reach unity in taking on greater challenges. We have learned that we can handle projects and obstacles, and we feel confident that we will be able to do so in the future. We have provided well for our youth and First Day School teachers in the renovated religious education building and, more importantly, in the example of how central Quaker process has been to our successes.

Similarly, the clerks’ gathering on the Wednesday prior to MWB remains productive both in a practical sense and in providing opportunities for spiritual growth and deeper appreciation of Quaker and RFM traditions. By discussing the concerns of the various committees, participants help determine what business items are properly seasoned for presentation at MWB. The gathering is also an opportunity to nurture clerks, and has helped to foster communication and interaction between committees.

The holistic concept of mind/body/spirit of individuals was extended to the corporate as the effects of our new, “healthy” building were explored. Our use of Quaker process, in deciding to go forward with the construction project, in fundraising, and throughout the construction as issues arose, has reaped many benefits in other areas. We have been energized by our emphasis on building community rather than on simply renovating a building. Though our focus throughout the building process was more inward than usual, the growth and nourishment of our community is a long term investment that will continue to yield positive returns in numerous areas for many years to come.

We have been able to increase our outreach to our members as well as the greater community because of our revitalized energy and because of the pleasant atmosphere and accessibility of our facility. We have presented and hosted many more programs than in previous years. We deeply appreciate the many efforts, activities and achievements of all our committees, which are truly too many to enumerate. More often than not there is more than one group using the building on any given evening. Scheduling can be more difficult, but the increased use of the building makes it worthwhile.

In a world in conflict we have also continued to focus on the traditional Quaker peace testimony and on social justice, foreign and domestic. We desire to continue growing individually and corporately in our witness to Quaker values as we continue our corporate self examination. We desire to be increasingly Spirit-led as we seek more meaningful participation in the larger Richmond community, an arena which presents many challenging opportunities. We are enthusiastic about our future endeavors. We welcome the energy, spirit and questioning in our members and many new attenders as we try to provide support and nourishment for all of them, especially those who ask us to embrace their ministries.

On May 22, Richmond Friends Meeting celebrated a “homecoming,” marking the completion of a $600,000+ renovation and expansion of its Education building. The facility now is fully accessible on all levels, provides expanded multi-purpose space for meetings, monthly potlucks, and use by outside groups, renovated kitchens and restrooms, and two new classrooms as well as refurbished spaces for religious education and our library. There now is a bright, expanded foyer connecting the Meetinghouse to the Education building, and a lovely outdoor meditation garden. The project has been funded almost entirely through family and individual contributions, pledged over a three-to five-year period. Friends from far and wide attended the homecoming. Several weeks later, we were able to share our new facilities with those attending the BYM interim meeting.

The Meeting has embraced Linda Heacock’s ministry to Kenya this fall, where she will facilitate the Alternatives to Violence Project with Friends Peace Teams at work in the African Great Lakes Initiative.

After months of consideration and arranging many opportunities to provide individual perspective, an ad hoc Bequest Committee reached clarity of direction on the use of a bequest left to Richmond Friends Meeting by Alan McCullough, Jr. in honor of Arnold Ricks. After weighing the many views expressed and seeking a Spirit-led path to unity, the committee recommended that 90 percent of the bequest be applied to our building fund, and, in gratitude for this blessing, that 10 percent be given to charitable organizations, including American Friends Service Committee, the Baltimore Yearly Meeting camping program, and CHIP (Children’s Health Involving Parents) of Greater Richmond.

Our community-building and Spirit nurturing activities continue at good pace: Bible Workbench weekly discussions, Quakerism 101, monthly meals for a local homeless shelter, Friendly Eights, our occasional journal What Canst Thou Say, inner city work camps, vigils for peace and in opposition to the death penalty, and our religious education program for over 50 young people, infants through high-schoolers.