Minute to
Establish the South Mountain Friends Fellowship
at the Maryland Correctional Institute-Hagerstown
under the care of Patapsco Friends Meeting
On Second Day, First Month, 2005, Patapsco Friends Meeting
approved a Minute of Recognition of a Patapsco Friends Meeting Prison Ministry
to support and hold in the Light inmates at the Maryland Correctional
Institute-Hagerstown (MCI-H) as they followed their leading to start a Friends
worship group. Since that time the meeting at Hagerstown has grown from three
to seven attenders supported by nine prison ministers from Patapsco Friends
Meeting. As the group has grown in number they have grown in awareness of their
meeting as a safe and caring community, a cherished community they have built
in the midst of difficult and dangerous circumstances.
For those of us who have had the opportunity to support
them, it has been a time of testing. Friends have no creed, no catechism. What
do we teach and how do we teach it? Again and again we have been brought back
to the foundations of our faith: that Jesus taught us to love God, to love our
neighbors as ourselves, to love our enemies. We teach by our faithful
attendance, by our care and concern for the attenders of this meeting and for
their community, and by modeling Friends exploration of their spiritual
experience through queries, in worship sharing and in silent worship. They
think our presence is a miracle. It opens us to the power of the advice of
George Fox: “Friends, meet together and know one another in that which is
eternal, which was before the world was.” We’re not sure any of us know exactly
what that means, but we all know what it feels like.
Ten years ago, a small number of us determined to found a
meeting in Howard County. We had the same concerns that the early attenders at
MCI-H had. Would it work? Who would come? How could we make ourselves known to
the community? Each week at Mt. Hebron House a miracle happens. Each week at
Hagerstown a miracle happens. It is the gift we give to each other and offer to
the world.
Now the men at Hagerstown desire their community to be
known as the South Mountain Friends Fellowship. In recognition of their
continuing commitment to meet together in the manner of Friends, we hereby
minute our approval of the establishment of this Fellowship under the care of
our meeting. We will forward this minute to Baltimore Yearly Meeting; and place
this Fellowship on the list of Friends Meetings in Friends Journal.
Approved, Fifth Day, Third Month, 2006
Ramona Buck,
Clerk, Patapsco Friends Meeting
