Approaches to having children in Quaker meeting for worship

[NOTE: I wrote this as a comment on Wess Daniel's post, "Thoughts on Bringing Children to Meeting for Worship."

[His article in turn also refers to Kathleen Karhnak-Glasby's excellent article in Friends Journal, "Bringing Children to Worship: Trusting God to Take Over from There."]

Green Street Monthly Meeting, our liberal unprogrammed Friends meeting in Philadelphia, is looking at how to better integrate the children with the rest of the meeting -- though I doubt we're ready to ditch Firstday School.

A commenter on Wess's post decried the practice in some unprogrammed meetings of having an occasional "all-ages" meeting that is poorly conceived, and a "poor hash." I can certainly imagine being in an otherwise-unprogrammed meeting that did a semi-programmed one poorly. However, I wanted to share some of my recent experience of the last two years.

Green Street has the children in Firstday School for the first 45 minutes (in two groups, elementary and middle school aged), and to worship the last 15 minutes. The teens generally come to meeting for worship.

On the 5th Sundays, a few times a year, we have a mostly programmed meeting for worship. It's definitely a hash, and a tasty one at that!

The one or two I've attended were led by a Friend who grew up expecting to be a minister in another tradition, so has some ability to lead worship; and more important, who is now a high school teacher, with a real gift for drawing young people at many different ages.

One 5th Sunday I missed featured my older son singing a Green Day song ("21 Guns") with his peers playing electric guitar. Since he has never sung with those peers before or since, I'm sorry I missed it. (And it's not like we're about to organize a worship band or something; I have personally never seen anything more high-powered than an acoustic guitar or a violin, usually around the year-end holidays, at this meeting myself.)

The warmth of the greetings at rise of meeting and expressions of joy following these semi-programmed meetings are enough to reassure me that we are saying something quite positive about our worshiping community. To me, it needn't imply anything negative about expectant waiting worship the other 48 Sundays a year.

Something I just learned from children's religious education

I've decided to extend my leave of absence teaching Firstday School at our Quaker meeting past the summer and into the fall. I've been teaching once every month or two for, oh, seven? years now. Since Eleven Year Old was still Four Year Old.

However, I'm still on the group email list for the Children's Religious Education Committee. And tonight I reflected that the committee right now has four key -- nay, critical -- components for successful Quaker program activity:

1. Enthusiasm: to be enthused is to be infused with the Spirit, after all! They've got that in abundance as we head back into the fall and the school year.
2. Organization: Just because unprogrammed Friends are volunteers doesn't mean we have to be badly organized. (My #1 complaint about Quakers!) The committee has been coming back together after summer, and putting systems in place and talking about some longer-term goals and needs.
3. Communication: Keep each other posted! The Children's Religious Ed Committee has a great and very active email list and an online calendar which is slowly gaining in utility. Teachers also have a commitment to writing brief reports about what the lesson was, what worked, and what didn't, and sharing that via the email list. I hope they can keep up this level of diligence.
      Too often, people assume others know something just because they do. Use a variety of channels: email, calls, in-person conversations and meetings, posters, flyers, the meeting's print newsletter. Bad communication is probably my #2 complaint about Quakers. (How many times has this happened at a monthly, quarterly, or yearly meeting? "Well, the fact that the children's program was going to be closed early was announced at the end of the business meeting." "Yeah, but I had to leave meeting early to go get my kids at the children's program, so I didn't hear it!")
4. Distributed leadership: How many times has a committee suffered because the clerk kept too many of the tasks close at hand, and then couldn't get them all done? Well, this committee has a clerk and two assistant clerks, and several active, engaged members who are taking on different tasks.

The above are four fundamental building blocks to organizing successful Quaker activities and programs. I'm sure there are others (staying rooted and grounded in Love and the Spirit, for example), but these are some of important ones too often missing from our work. I think Friends concerned about other aspects of Quaker life -- such as building race or class diversity within the Society of Friends, or helping people integrate the practice of one's faith with faithful activism, for example -- would do well to keep those four principles in mind as they engage in the work they feel called to do.

I'm impressed with the level of all of the above in our committee right now. As mentioned, there is a clerk (a non-parent educator, and a blogger, but I'll leave it up to him if he wants to be linked to in this context), and two assistant clerks, of whom one is a parent and the other is both an active uncle and a childcare provider. And of course there's a nice group of committee members, most of whom are parents.

The committee has some work to do to build up the Quaker curriculum and train new teachers after a few of us laid teaching down for now. The good thing is they're building from a really solid base. Thank you, Children's Religious Education Committee!

Firstday School Lesson: The Meeting Community

Advices and Queries for 12th Month, Pacific Yearly Meeting: The Meeting Community

1. Song: Pat Humphries, "Swimming to the Other Side"
This was an improvisation by the other grownups when I had some extra preparation for my lesson when we walked in. The students at the Friends School have been learning this, so several of the participants in the class already knew it. Whew!

2. Circle/Silence

3. Introductions and Icebreaker
The person who is speaking will get the Talking Feather. (This is like a Talking Stick. It signifies that the holder is the person who is entitled to talk. It gets passed from person to person around the circle.) Say your name, where you were born, and the name of a family member other than parents, siblings, or children. (We had three adults in the room, all of whom were parents, so that last item was relevant.)

4. Pedagogy: Community
a. Teacher describes roots of the word = "com-" with + "unity" as one. The Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, is one type of community.

b. What are some of the communities you are part of? Stand if the following apply to you:

• Are a member of a family.
• Ever been a member of a team.
• Ever been part of a musical or dance group.
• Part of humanity.
• Part of the mammals.
• Part of the earth. Solar system. Milky Way. Universe.

c. Read two passages from Catherine Whitmire's Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk through the Quaker Tradition: p. 76, Tom Mullen, "Oh God, help us not to cry over spilt milk"; p. 83, Deborah Fisch (quoting a Friend from SF about redwood trees)
Point: One of the places we find God and the Spirit of God is in community – a group of people together

5. Light and Livelies: These are fun group exercises conducted during Alternatives to Violence Project workshops. We did about three: the rain is coming down; "I love you honey, but I just can't smile"; and vampire frogger.

This was very good for the boy energy in the room; we had one girl and six boys (three pairs of brothers, in fact). The girl had fun, too, though!

6. Affirmation: Sing first verse and chorus of "Simple Gifts" (partly because one child asked for it!) Closing silent worship. Thanks for being here, and help me move the table back to the center of the room and distribute the chairs around it.

Update 12/15: added tags.

Lesson on development of Quaker peace testimony

Recently I taught a Firstday School lesson that aimed to get the group of older elementary students to think about the origins of the Quaker peace testimony.

We specifically read quotes from George Fox ("I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars"), James Nayler ("There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil"), and the declaration to King Charles II in 1661 ("We utterly deny all outward wars...").

It helped that the week before the lesson had been a timeline from George Fox's first journeys through the north of England in the 1640s, through to Margaret Fell Fox's death in 1702. So they had a bit of the historical context.

I asked them to think about where the early Friends had developed this view, and where could we find it today. (I'm hoping to feed this into some preparation to being in meeting for worship for longer periods.) Then we went to change the window signs at our meetinghouse.

As grace would have it, the sign was the declaration of 1661! The children noticed it and made the connection right away. Through a modified business process, they reached unity on picking the sign for equality. It also gave them a chance to explore the meetinghouse basement, where the signs are stored, so that was a bonus for them. All in all, a pretty good lesson.

Here's my outline for the lesson:

Introductions and Check In:

· Tell us your name and about a time when you felt peaceful inside

Objectives:

· Learn about early Friends, the Inner Light and the testimonies in our window

Strategies

1. Hear three passages from early Friends, including the peace testimony of 1661

2. Talk about where that sense of peace comes from

3. Discuss terms Inner Light, Inward Teacher, Christ Within, Seed, Spark

4. Review window signs from News Committee

5. Choose a new sign for October and replace it in the window

Results:

· Discussion happens

· New sign in window

Activity (this was filler, and we didn't have time for it):

Write what would you like to put on a sign in the window of the meetinghouse, your house, or your school

Affirmation:

Shake hands, like at the end of meeting, and say, “Good morning.”

Chris presenting epistle

Western Friend (formerly known as Friends Bulletin) has a photo of me presenting the Early Elementary Epistle to the plenary session at Pacific Yearly Meeting. Click to enlarge...

From Western Friend's Pacific YM photo album on Flickr: http://westernfriend.org/photo-gallery/

Epistle in Three Parts

Early Elementary Program Epistle, Pacific Yearly Meeting, 2008

Part I

Part II

Part III

Preparing for Pacific Yearly Meeting 2008

I've signed up to teach afternoons in the Lower Elementary level of the children's program at Pacific Yearly Meeting, 7/28-8/2/2008. Six Year Old is happy because that is his group. I hope that Ten Year Old's group will be nearby. I don't know, because I haven't been to the site before.

I've never done something like this before. However, I've taught plenty of Firstday School lessons, and I was clerk of the Children's Program Committee for two years. So I do know the lay of the land, the current committee members, and many of the children and families, which gives me comfort. I helped out plenty of times at the parent participation nursery school where our sons went. But I've never had to be "on" with a group of children for that many hours, for that many days in a row before.

Do say a prayer for me if you have a chance. Thanks!

Music-based lesson in Firstday School

In spring 2008, I taught a Firstday School lesson that involved playing recordings of music having a spiritual theme and wildly different styles.

I asked the students to listen, then to comment on how they felt and what they thought of when they heard it. There were seven children, ranging from six to 11. It was too big of an age range.

The two 11-year-old girls loved this lesson. They were very engaged, and they really enjoyed listening and then commenting. They had a rich variety of observations to share.

The 10- and 11-year-old boys did not show much interest. One of them (fortunately not my own) kept reaching for his book to read, until I put it out of reach. The same boy mostly said he didn't like the songs, but he couldn't or wouldn't articulate why not.

One six year old boy was just too hyper for this lesson. I spent a fair amount of the time following him around to get him to put things down. I encouraged dancing to the music (don't let the ancient Quakers know), but it wasn't enough to engage him. The other six year olds, a girl and a boy, seemed content just to listen. The girl got her hair braided by one of the 11-year-olds, and she (the 6-y.o.) was surely in heaven about that.

I played the songs on a boombox with CD and cassette. I left my own at home despite having pulled it out of the closet and left it near the door. Fortunately, I called someone who lives near the meetinghouse, and she had not left yet and she did indeed have such a boombox. So I was saved by the community -- thank you, God, for your manna!

Here is the list of songs I chose:
Ensemble Project Ars Nova, "Lucis Angeli" (medieval polyphony)
Anonymous 4, "Jewett" and "New Britain" (two very different versions of "Amazing Grace" from the American Angels CD)
U2, "Yahweh"
Godspell, "Prepare Ye" (from a tape I made of the original vinyl album I have from the early 1970s!)
Reading of the passage in Isaiah 40, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord..."
Lisa Gerrard, "Abwoon" (an atmospheric rendition of the Lord's Prayer in ARAMAIC!, from a solo CD by the Dead Can Dance'r)
Moby, "God Moving Over the Face of the Water"
Reading of the beginning of Genesis, the source of the image for the song title
Incredible String Band, "The Mountain of God" (very postmodern in that it combines snippets of lyrics from hymns as well as a glancing reference to Christopher Robin)
Five Blind Boys of Alabama, "This May Be the Last Time" (this upbeat R&B gospel song was the most popular of the set, by far)
Willie Nelson, "Uncloudy Day"
Carin Anderson, "Instrument" -- from a lovely album by a member of San Francisco Monthly Meeting, now living in southern Arizona, the song is a prayer to "Make me an instrument."

Firstday School lesson on Walk with Earth

SF Friends Meeting Firstday School Lesson on Walk With Earth, 3/2/08, followed by real walk in the neighborhood!

Today was our last chance to have a lesson on Rolene Walker's Walk With Earth before she departs in a week. She leaves from San Diego, Calif., to go to Santiago, Chile, taking about two years.

Meanwhile, Ruah Swennerfelt and Louis Cox, Vermont Friends who are doing their own walk for Peace With Earth from Vancouver, B.C., to San Diego, Calif. And they happened to be in the Bay Area this weekend! So they came over to join us after meeting, when a large group of us walked from the Meetinghouse about two miles down to the foot of Market Street at San Francisco Bay.

Here is the lesson plan, followed by photos of the walk this afternoon.

Introductions: Say your Name, and A Time When You Walked Really Far

Objectives:
· Learn about Rolene Walker’s Walk With Earth
· Imagine what it’s going to be like for her
· Learn a short hymn that includes the earth
· Prepare a banner for the walk down Market Street this afternoon

Strategies:

1. Lecture for five minutes about the Walk with Earth:
   where Rolene’s going, how long it will take, why she’s doing it: to raise awareness about the earth especially its beauty and not just the problems we know about
2. Learn about where she’s going and imagine what it’s going to be like:
   how long will it take? how many seasons will she walk through? how many steps will she take?
3. Learn “For the Beauty of the Earth” – 1-3 verses plus the refrain
4. Write out these words on a butcher paper banner, one sheet per word:
   Walk, With, Earth, .org
   - Use open letters and have the children decorate them
   - If we need to fill more time, ask each child to sign his or her name

Affirmations:
1. Look at each other's banners.
2. Line up behind the banner(s) as we go into the meeting room, and sing the song
(I had hoped for some "group discernment" on what the group wanted to do when we went back in, but it was too late to bring that much focus back to the group. Plus we had a dozen participants today, from six to 11 or 12 years old or so, and that was too big an age range to add such a discussion on at the end.)

Here are some photos:

Rolene Walker:

Rolene's cake (the number of steps refers to the calculation I did in Firstday School a month ago):

Pete gets a boost from the kids: This was really amazing. Pete hadn't plugged his scooter in properly during meeting, so the batteries didn't have enough energy to take him two miles. Fortunately, human power worked fine, and the kids had a blast pushing him for blocks and blocks and blocks. What a great example of community for them!

Young Adult Friends carry the banners the kids made (thank you so much, YAFs!):

Firstday School: Walking with God

Our friend Rolene Walker begins her Walk with Earth in a month (see www.walkwithearth.org). She will be walking from San Diego, Calif., to Santiago, Chile, for the beauty of the earth.

Ruah Swennerfelt and Louis Cox from Quaker Earthcare Witness will be in San Francisco later in March as part of their Peace for Earth Walk (http://www.peaceforearth.org/PeaceforEarthWalk/itinerary.htm).

Of course, a year and a half ago, Marshall Massey walked from Nebraska to address Baltimore Yearly Meeting's annual sessions (see this link for a description of his leading).

Today in Firstday School, I talked about people being led by God to walk. Here's my outline.

Introductions: What's the farthest you've ever walked or run?

Objectives: Learn about people being led on walks; specifically, George Fox and Rolene Walker. Consider how far the walks might be.

Strategies: I read a brief excerpt from George Fox's Journal, in which he talked about being 11 and having a strong sense of right and wrong, and saying Yea and Nay. I showed a map of England, highlighting the general area of Leicestershire where his home village, Fenny Drayton, was, and connecting it to Pendle Hill and Kendal, near where Swarthmoor Hall was located. He walked most of that distance.

Then we looked at the map of Rolene's walk route (shown). I had made copies of maps of Central America and South America from my historical atlas, which showed when Santiago was founded (in the 1540s) and the names of the indigenous peoples in Mexico and the Inca empire.

Finally, we calculated how many steps her walk might take each of us. On a straight line, the distance is about 5,500 miles. Her route will be something over 7,000 miles.

I put a long piece of butcher paper on the floor, we taped markers to the front of our shoes, and we took turns marking how long our strides are. Fortunately, there were only two students; if the class had been as big as sometimes, it might have been a bit chaotic. Anyway, our strides ranged from 14" to 27". So the estimation was:

Results:

Six Year Old: 7,000 miles x 5,300 ft/mi x 12 inches/ft x 1 stride/14 inches = 31.8 million strides!

Me: 7,000 mi x 5,300 ft/mi x 12 in/ft x 1 stride/27 inches = 16.5 million strides

Affirmation: We reported back to the full meeting about our findings. Before we said the number of footsteps, Rolene said, "I don't think I want to know!"

Best wishes, Rolene. We will hold you in the Light as you go.

Lesson on Early Friends

Last Sunday at meeting, the Friends School community was specifically invited to attend meeting for worship and the regular potluck afterwards. There was a wonderful turnout and a great potluck, and not that many new people actually came. Mostly, the regular-but-not-every-week families from school came. And one family that likes to come once a year when we do this, and otherwise goes to a really interesting, progressive Episcopal church.

So the potential (hoped-for? feared?) turnout of two dozen children at Firstday School did not materialize. (It did in 2003, when we first had this intervisitation event.)

I had three third-grade boys and one fourth-grade boy (my own), plus two adults. A decent ratio when dealing with that much boy energy! (One of our older girls decided to help in the nursery with the babies, and I missed her participation in the conversation.)

This time I decided to teach more about the Society of Friends; I wanted the children to know why it's called the Friends School -- it's NOT just because your friends go there! I post the outline here in case there are seeds that might be planted in other locales.

INTRO: Say your name, year born, and something true about you.

OBJECTIVE: Learn a bit about Quaker history and testimonies.

STRATEGIES:
I lectured much more than usual. I'm not sure it served the boy energy well. Yet I think they were listening.

1. History: George Fox sought answers about God as a young man, beginning to wander about the countryside as a teenager. In 1652 in his early 20's he had a revelation about the "Inner Light" being available to all. He wanted others to know, too, so he walked across northern England and preached. He found a lot of others who agreed with him.

2. Names of what became Society of Friends:
- Children of the Light
- Friends of Truth
- Publishers of Truth
- Quakers: Fox on trial, the judge asked if he quaked before the Lord, the name stuck
- Religious Society of Friends (later)

3. Testimonies:
I asked if they knew what "SPICES" stood for. One boy quickly rattled off, "Simplicity Peace Integrity Community Equality and Sympathy." I said that was very good though most people talk about "Stewardship" if they use a second S. I explained a little bit about each word, then asked the group if they knew what integrity meant; none did. I also added Love as a testimony (thanks, Pam and Allison).

4. Exercise:
- Write your own newspaper on a form I cadged from another church's Sunday School.
- Space provided for a main story, a sidebar on an upcoming event (soccer game? choir practice?), space for a "truthful" ad, and a weather report. (Earthquakes and various forms of fantastical hailstorms were popular!)
- Space at bottom to write your name in as "Publisher" -- hence becoming a Publisher of Truth!

RESULTS: Mixed, but I think they picked up some content along the way.

AFFIRMATION: They had fun. See comment above about picking up content.

Retrofits, compaction grouting and t-shirts oh my!

Thursday was the groundbreaking for San Francisco Friends School's new site: 250 Valencia Street, the former Levi Strauss & Co. factory. It was built in 1906 after the earthquake and fire destroyed their previous factory. It has amazing old-growth redwood timbers, which of course require extensive and expensive shoring up.

If you're a Bay Arean or Southern Californian, you're well aware of the practice of seismic retrofitting. Some of you may not be as familiar with compaction grouting. This is the pouring into the soil of seemingly endless amounts of some form of concrete-like substance to stabilize the sandy soil on which the building rests. There's an old streambed under it, and the edge of the bay used to be relatively nearby.

The highlight for everyone was when Bob Haas, the CEO of Levi Strauss, choked up just a bit when talking about the meaning of the building for him. He remembered when his father brought him there as a young boy to see how a pair of blue jeans is made, and to meet the workers. He talked about how they usually had accents, were recent immigrants, and were paid modestly but enough to support their families and move into opportunity in their new country.

My personal highlight was the six 3-foot-wide by 8-foot-tall banners hanging from the rafters, spelling out the words: simplicity, service, peace, integrity, community, equality. (SSPICE!) I was pleased that the school would place the values so visibly at this event.
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Also Thursday, Robin visited Eight-soon-to-be-Nine Year Old's class to discuss the differences between Quaker decision-making and voting. They're in the midst of a unit on government, and recently held class elections. But she already wrote about it on her blog, so you've probably already read it there! I'm just impressed with how well-written the piece was for being only an hour or two after the fact. Good work, darlin'!

On Wednesday, she went to the community meeting for worship at the school. Someone let go of a blue ball, which rolled across the floor... stopping a couple of feet away from the kindergartners. Despite squirming and looking and thinking, they resisted the temptation to reach out and grab it. Cathy Hunter, the head of school, apparently talked about how much they've already learned in life if they can do that.
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I have an idea for our meeting's Memorial Day weekend retreat: a Quaker Meeting t-shirt design festival! We're figuring out if we'll just work on drawings and words and lettering on paper, or if we should bring the laptop to design things online and we'll bring some iron-on decal paper we can run through the printer, or if we should set up a Cafe Press shop.
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Inspired by that idea, today (Sunday) I taught a Firstday School lesson on clothing in the Bible, and we designed "t-shirts" traced on large sheets of butcher paper. It didn't go quite as I'd planned -- the fact that there were five males in the room meant we had lots of boy energy and lots of, um, "interesting" details in the designs.

Well, maybe if I hadn't used Psalm 22 (they cast lots for my garments) as one of the readings -- it's pretty gory in the Message version that I used. I'll post the lesson outline later.
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Also today we went to the picnic for families of incoming kindergarteners at the Friends School. The kids get a school t-shirt. Five Year Old already had his, and he very proudly picked it out of his dresser this morning. He is excited to be going to the same school as Eight Year Old.

Ministry of the drill, followed by Firstday School ambitions

I taught Firstday School on Sunday. It was an ambitious lesson covering two parables from Luke, Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, Quaker business process, and an activity to draw menu choices for the kingdom feast. It somehow worked, except I should have skipped the presentation to the full meeting. The lesson scheme is posted below.

And this was after giving vocal ministry while holding a cordless drill in its case... cubbie had asked to borrow it, and so I had it in my backpack. It felt right to use it as part of the metaphor about building community, sometimes literally by building houses, sometimes by taking meals to parents who are staying in the hospital with their 18-month-old son while he gets a long list of tests for an unknown ailment...

No wonder I'm tired even two days later.
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A Firstday School Lesson Given During Lent 2007

Introductions: say your name and your favorite season

Objectives:

· To learn about the holiday of Easter and the life of Jesus

· To practice how Quakers make decisions

· To do an activity that we decide on as a group

Strategies:

· Read two parables: the lost sheep (Lk 15:1-7) and the lost coin (Lk 15:8-10).

o Lesson: God loves all of us and wants us to find God

· Read about Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem (Lk 19:35-40) and cleansing of the temple (Lk 19:45)

o God’s kingdom is here and now if we can see it. Even the stones will shout aloud! (Some people say they find God in nature; could that be a part of what that means?)

o Jesus was also making the point that the people of Israel would not get their freedom back from the Romans by attacking the Romans with armies. They had to do it by inviting God into their lives, by acting out of love toward their enemies.

o That provoked the political and religious leaders, and they decided to have him punished, even killed.

· Jesus had a last meal with his friends, called the “Last Supper.” His friends were called his disciples. But Jesus was always eating with the people he met, even if the rules of the time said he shouldn’t. He met strangers and got to know them as friends.

· Often we talk about God’s kingdom as being like a feast, where everyone has a place at the table.

Now we’re going to learn a little about how Quakers make decisions and then make our own decision as a group.

· Quakers meet together in a “meeting for worship with a concern for business.” The idea is that we go into a meeting for worship, but we have specific things we need to do on an agenda, or list of things to do.

· Then together we all offer what we think if the best choice for a particular thing. Everyone has a chance to be heard. Then we decide as a group what we think would be best, what we think God wants us to do.

· Now we have a chance to decide something together as a group. Which would you rather do: make signs for a parade proclaiming God’s rule of love on earth, or draw food for a meal where we welcome everyone to the table?

Results: Make signs or drawings of food

Affirmation: Show results to adults

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The children chose to illustrate the kingdom-feast with drawings of food they wanted to bring to the feast. They understood the idea of a march or rally -- we live in San Francisco, after all -- but wanted to focus on the food.

We got into a great conversation about the readings. A real highlight was when one of the participants asked, "So Jesus was Jewish, right? How could he be Christian, if he was Jewish? Jewish people don't follow him, right?" She was genuinely puzzled; this was a recent insight for her. I didn't have a clear and succinct answer, let's just say, and it was also a gift to be present to her in her questioning.

By the end of the time, the children just weren't able to focus on how to present this to the full meeting downstairs. Thus the presentation fell completely flat; the children were completely silent. So I said, "Today we learned that the kingdom of God is like a feast that's available to everyone, right here on earth." And that was that.

Though realizing we weren't prepared, I didn't listen to that prompting and decide not to do it. Oh, well! Lord, have mercy on me; teach me the Way of mercy.

Yet the Spirit was apparently moving: After meeting, two Friends said the Bible Study group had been reading Luke 14 and 15 that very morning. They had spent much of the time talking about the kingdom of God; what is it, where is it, what is it like? And then the children had been covering the same territory. Lord, thank you for your many blessings; what an interesting life this is!

Scooped! Quaker Heritage and Friendly Flapjacks

Scooped again! Robin has already written about Saturday's Quaker Heritage Day and Sunday's Meeting/School meeting for worship followed by potluck pancake brunch.

At QHD, I took lots of notes on Brian Drayton's talk, and hope to post some of it. Meanwhile, here is a brief summary of the Firstday School lesson I did yesterday. We had 25 children; usually we have 3 to 6!

Introductions: Say your name and the name of one friend.

Objectives: Learn about the Society of Friends, George Fox, walking in the Light

Strategies:

• I lectured for a few minutes about the name of the Religious Society of Friends, referring to the passage in John 15:15, "I have called you friends." I also talked about George Fox's role in starting the Quaker movement, and how early Friends were called "Quakers" in scorn by a judge and the nickname stuck.
• We sang the chorus of the "George Fox Song." I did a handout with the full verses and chorus, with a portrait of Fox and a photo of his gravestone. (Incidentally, here's a pdf pamphlet about the song, published by Southern Quarter of PhilaYM.)
  
• I talked about how our Friend Rolene is Walking with Earth, and this is a contemporary example of walking in the Light.
• Then, as the children lined up for a simple snack of banana or apple slices, we unfurled a sheet of butcher paper across the room, over their heads. They enjoyed that.
• They traced their shoes on the paper, then decorated them.
  

Results: Voila! We had a group mural of walking in the Light.

I ran through this quicker than expected, so I improvised a query: "Where would you like to walk with your shoes?" The second and third grade boys were happy to answer with absolutely silly ideas. One 8 Year Old who shall remain nameless said he would walk to the ceiling! After each child answered, we sang the chorus again.

That took us to the end of the time. We went downstairs and fortunately meeting for worship was over. So the children walked in with their long mural and sang the chorus for the assembled meeting. That was the Affirmation, the last part of the mnenomic I use for lesson plans (IOSRA, "In our school, results appear").

Many thanks to parent W.S. who was one of my able classroom assistants -- she invites everyone to worship at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, by the way, where they also have lots of wiggly boy energy -- and to the meeting member who was the other much-needed assistant.

Lesson on Clearness

Yesterday I taught Firstday School, to a group including one each of a 10-, 9-, 8-, 5- and 4-year-old. The subject was clearness and clearness committees, and I related the content to Rolene Walker's Walk with Earth once again.

First, we did a check-in to see if we were feeling clear or fuzzy, was the sky clear or cloudy, and if we were wearing glasses (like me), were they clear or dirty.

Second, I reviewed Rolene's walk for the beauty of the earth from San Diego to Chile, and how she wants young people to know about the goodness of earth, not just the environmental problems.

Third, we read two Bible passages:

Psalm 85 (Message)

God, you smiled on your good earth! You brought good times back to Jacob!
You lifted the cloud of guilt from your people,
you put their sins far out of sight.
You took back your sin-provoked threats,
you cooled your hot, righteous anger.
4-7 Help us again, God of our help;
don't hold a grudge against us forever.
You aren't going to keep this up, are you?
scowling and angry, year after year?
Why not help us make a fresh start—a resurrection life?
Then your people will laugh and sing!
Show us how much you love us, God!
Give us the salvation we need! …
10-13 Love and Truth meet in the street,
Right Living and Whole Living embrace and kiss!
Truth sprouts green from the ground,
Right Living pours down from the skies!
Oh yes! God gives Goodness and Beauty;
our land responds with Bounty and Blessing.
Right Living strides out before him,
and clears a path for his passage.

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After reading this, the 10-y.o. girl said, "You know how sometimes when we read something, we do a skit [for the meeting]? Could we do a skit today?" I said maybe, after we read the second passage, which seemed easier to act out.
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John 9

Walking down the street, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked, "Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?"
3-5 Jesus said, "You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do. We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world's Light."
6-7 He said this and then spit in the dust, made a clay paste with the saliva, rubbed the paste on the blind man's eyes, and said, "Go, wash at the Pool of Siloam" (Siloam means "Sent"). The man went and washed—and saw.
8 Soon the town was buzzing. His relatives and those who year after year had seen him as a blind man begging were saying, "Why, isn't this the man we knew, who sat here and begged?"
9 Others said, "It's him all right!" …
39Jesus said, "I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind."

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We talked about this for a while. I had a revelation myself: That the people had walked past the blind man who begged daily, without ever really seeing him or acknowledging his humanity. And then Jesus healed him. That's when they saw him, as if for the first time. The people weren't even sure it was the same man, they couldn't even remember for sure what he looked like! How often do I walk past others without even seeing their humanity? How blind am I?

Next I talked about how Friends can seek help from their meetings to discern if they are really clearly being led by God to do something, or are they feeling something else. I even summarized a passage from Pacific YM Faith and Practice, which was written in my handout. I'll just include a few bits here; the full publication is online here.

On clearness and clearness committees

Sometimes members ask for help with clarifying personal problems and making decisions. Meetings usually respond to such requests for help by appointing clearness committees.

A clearness committee meets with the seeker as caring Friends, drawing on the same resources that bind the Meeting together in worship. Listening and patience are essential. All must listen not only to the person in need, but also to the movement of the Spirit.... When the individual has a strong leading toward a specific action and wants the Meeting to affirm it, the clearness committee seeks unity on whether this is indeed a leading of the Spirit.

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Walking to Chile: Where is Chile?
Here I plugged in some clip art illustrating where Chile is compared to Central America and Southern California.

Looking through Lenses

The last planned activity was to look through a few binoculars, a telescope, kaleidoscope, and magnifying glasses. The kids loved it! The four year old (almost five) really engaged at that point. The kids got a bit silly with it, but that was okay. They had been mostly great until then, and it was way more kinetic and kinesthetic than my usual activity. And anarchic! My usual activity is to draw something related to the day's topic on a big sheet of butcher paper; they actually really like doing it almost every time, but it was good to have a change of pace. (My thanks to Robin M. for the idea!)

Finally, we did practice the passage from John once more, though it was a challenge to get them to focus, and then perform it for the meeting. My 8-y.o. wanted to be the pool of Siloam; I insisted he at least be the narrator for the first half of the story too. And the 9-y.o. played the blind man; when he went to jump in Siloam (aka 8-y.o.), he yelled, "Cowabunga!" The 4-y.o. was delighted to be part of the crowd and deliver the line, "It's him alright!"

All in all, a rewarding lesson, especially for me. Thank you, God, for most this amazing day. Please help me see, help me notice, help me respond.

Lesson on Leadings and Callings

I taught a lesson last week on leadings and callings. The source material was Samuel's calling by God, which he mistook for the voice of Eli (1 Sam. 3:1-14), and the December 2006 Friends Bulletin article about Rolene Walker's Walk With Earth.

(To reinforce the lesson for me, this past week, Open Mikey wrote about midnight calls, such as the one Samuel received: click here.)

I use the mnemonic formula "IOSRA: In Our School Results Appear," to plan lessons. The initials stand for: Introductions, Objectives, Strategies (what we will do to achieve our objectives), Results, and Affirmation.

Introductions: How was your New Year's? Did you stay up for New Year's Eve, or do anything special on New Year's Day?

Objective: Our objective this morning is to learn about leadings and callings from God, what they are, what they might look, feel or sound like, and how some Quakers have had leadings.

Strategy: The group read the Bible passage and the Friends Bulletin article aloud, taking turns. Then I asked if they wanted to act out the Bible story of Samuel's call. The girl (there was one boy and one girl) said yes, she wanted to do that. She wanted to be the narrator and God. I was Eli, lying on the floor pretending to be asleep, and Older Son was Samuel (looking longingly at the whiteboard, where he would have loved to be drawing dragons right then).

The girl asked if we could perform it as a play downstairs for the grownups. I said, of course. So we did it a few more times, rotating the cast.

We had a lovely conversation about Rolene's walk, and about all the terrible potential environmental problems in the world. This showed the truth of Rolene's point in the article that many children know a lot abstractly about the environment's problems; we as adults have to make sure that they see the beauty and power of nature, and experience why we need to save it, not just learn about the problems and risk despair. Well, these two kids know plenty about carbon emissions, sea level rise, and the threat to polar bears, and about the importance of recycling and composting (San Francisco has curbside composting which is SO GREAT!). I want to make sure they notice sunsets and moonrises and raptors soaring and warblers flitting and so on and so forth.

We also talked about how Rolene had felt this sense of calling and leading for many years, and now her life is arranging itself to make it possible for her to go from San Diego to Santiago, Chile. It helped that a few weeks earlier, I had done a lesson with the same two children where we drew outlines of the continents on a big sheet of paper, and illustrated it a bit with drawings, and Older Son drew the approximate line of Rolene's walk. (Interestingly, he put Africa and Asia right in the center of the map, so that the Americas-based walk is right at the very edge of the page!)

Results: The result was that the children learned the story of Samuel, learned about how ordinary people can be called to do something by God, and had a great conversation.

Affirmation: The affirmation was that we went downstairs and acted out the Bible story, and the meeting welcomed the children warmly.
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Who are the Quakers in your meeting with a leading or a calling? What can they say to your meeting's children about their own experiences?

Hardhats on! We're building community!

Saturday night, I finally got to catch up on some blog reading (Robin M. was elsewhere), including the post over at Nancy's Apology on the November blahs. She wrote:

American author Annie Dillard says if we had any real faith, we'd wear hardhats to church/meeting—after all, we are calling on or getting in touch with the very forces of the universe. The universe might come crashing down on our heads.

The next day, Sunday morning, it was my turn to teach Firstday School. So I brought our two hardhats, one child-sized and one grownup-sized, and scooped up the one from the meeting's nursery, and put together a loose lesson....

We started with some check-in time. The four children, from 8 to 14 years old, of course wanted to know why the hardhats were on the table. I explained about the Dillard quote, and you never know when something might come crashing down.

I suggested that some Bible stories were like that—the Tower of Babel for example. One participant retold us that story. Henry said, "Or like the walls of Jericho." He was struggling to remember just exactly had happened to make the walls fall down. Fortunately, we had our Dorling Kindersley illustrated Bible on hand—two copies—and I turned to the illustration of the priests with their shofars circling the walls.

The 14-year-old in the group said he had played a shofar, and that he has played the trumpet for five years. It was great to learn something more about the rest of his life outside of meeting.

He also suggested that these events could have been written this way because, "It felt mentally or spiritually like something came crashing down on them."

Then we took turns reading the story of Solomon building the temple, 1 Kings 6, from the illustrated Bible. The book has sidebar illustrations of cedars of Lebanon, the story of God's glory filling the temple at the dedication, and something about ivory carvings of cherubim.

Two adult guests joined us—one of them was from Twin Cities Meeting, and is the childcare provider at Laughing Waters worship group. I made one of them read, too.

After that I pulled out a long piece of butcher paper and asked the children to illustrate what they think a temple should look like today. The two girls collaborated on an illustration of how the front of the temple would look, with red flowers reminiscent of the pomegranetes that really were on the Jerusalem temple.

Henry enjoyed drawing cherubim—I told him he couldn't draw dragons—and then he colored in and added to a symbol I made, of a peace sign inside a heart with a tree growing out of the top.

I left it to the group to decide if they wanted to report back to the full meeting at the end. They were totally indecisive. I asked if we should wait until we got there and felt how the spirit moved us. They agreed. When we walked in the room with our large paper, though, they couldn't resist telling about it. Henry was eager to talk about how the tree showed life sprouting up when there was love and peace; go, Henry! And three of them agreed to wear the hardhats. Someone asked, "Why are you wearing hardhats?" And one of them said, "Because, well, you just never know!"

All in all, it worked amazingly well given how little I had prepared. I am grateful to have been so blessed. Thank you, Nancy, for your post, which helped me so directly.

PS I highly recommend the children's Bible mentioned above. Author is Selina Hastings.

Scrolls redux - a photo

The reportback from the scrolls lesson. Sorry to take so long, and for having such a grainy shot. We still use a film camera.

Scrolls - a Firstday School Lesson

Two Sundays ago I did a lesson on scrolls in Firstday School. I copied a few passages from www.bible.com, found the collection of cardboard tubes from toilet paper rolls, cut several long strips of paper from the big roll of butcher paper, pulled out a stapler and the pot of crayons, and we were good to go!

When I said we were going to do a lesson on scrolls, Henry said, "You mean, we're going to eat the scrolls?"

"Actually," I said, "that's exactly what the first passage says! Ezekiel had to eat the scroll." He was stunned and happy about that.

Ezekiel 3: And he said to me, "Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the house of Israel." So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat.
Then he said to me, "Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it." So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.
He then said to me: "Son of man, go now to the house of Israel and speak my words to them.

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The four boys, ranging in age from 4 to 13, loved taking the butcher paper and stapling it to two tubes to make long scrolls. They decorated them -- after going through the entire pot of crayons to find the ones that were scented, with scents like "forest green," "baseball mitt brown" and "washed dog beige"!
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Here are the other two passages I read:

Jeremiah 36: Baruch went to them with the scroll in his hand. They said to him, "Sit down, please, and read it to us." So Baruch read it to them. They looked at each other in fear and said to Baruch, "We must report all these words to the king." Then they asked Baruch, "Tell us, how did you come to write all this? Did Jeremiah dictate it?"
"Yes," Baruch replied, "he dictated all these words to me, and I wrote them in ink on the scroll."
Then the officials said to Baruch, "You and Jeremiah, go and hide. Don't let anyone know where you are."
...[T]he king commanded them to arrest Baruch the scribe and Jeremiah the prophet. But the LORD had hidden them.

Luke 4: He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

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For my lessons, I always compile whatever Biblical quotes I'm using on a page and decorate it with some relevant clip art. The scrolls were fun to find and print.

PYM 3: Children’s Worship

Last year for the first time in my-then 5 years of PYM the children participated at the beginning of MFW, with a Bible-based lesson each day, from a Friend who grew up in the Yearly Meeting and whose daughter is now in the Children’s Program. This year, my successor as clerk talked about her concern to provide discipline… to follow the Christ Light within… We agreed that we don’t often teach our children what we’re doing in meeting for worship. So we included lessons again this year, with some variety:

Monday: Centering and breathing; “This Little Light of Mine”; “George Fox Song”
Tuesday: Breathing and centering exercise
Wednesday: Passage from 1 Kings 19:11-12: “The LORD said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.”

I said, “Quakers believe we can hear that gentle whisper (“still small voice” in the NEB which I was reading from) today. Some people hear it as words, some people hear it as a whisper and others loudly, some hear it in music, some see it in nature. You can hear it too and let us know what you hear.”

Two Friends sang lovely songs before we left with the children. I’m glad they got to hear it.

Thursday: Explanation that the adults were looking at the theme of sabbath and jubilee; that John the Baptist had proclaimed, quoting Isaiah 40, “Prepare the way of the Lord!” And that Jesus’s first lesson in the synagogue proclaimed good news to the poor, release for prisoners. And that we welcomed the children’s thoughts on these things, too.

I led the lesson on Thursday and Friday, and I was mindful of Peggy Senger Parson’s description of “catching a message.” I had a strong sense of the two Biblical passage that would connect the children respectively to the processes of worship and of discernment that the adults were doing the rest of the time. I outlined some thoughts for myself (usually as I was lying in bed awake starting at 4 AM or 5 AM… it was not a restful week for me by any means). Then I waited in the actual meeting until it felt right, I read the text, then talked about it without prepared remarks, rather a general sense of what needed to be said.

I came back to dip into the meetings for worship and discernment later on every day (I think) and found them to be centered and deep, though also so full of words that it was almost too much. (Several people I talked to were concerned about that, and yet many of the individual messages were rich and deep. Though one Friend called it “sharing and won’t dignify it by calling it ‘ministry.’”

A couple of people commented that they thought the children’s worship set the tone for the whole meeting, and that some of the themes continued to resonate the rest of the morning. I feel blessed to have been able to participate and contribute this way.
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Part 3 in a series:
» Prelude: Prayers for Pacific Yearly Meeting
» Part 1: Acting Organized so Others will Act Organized
» Part 2: Committee Service as Worship Service