The newest pamphlet offered by the Wider Quaker Fellowship is now online: Being Salt and Light.  This 20-page publication contains excerpts from most of the plenary speeches given at the 2012 World Conference of Friends in Kenya, selected especially for the Wider Quaker Fellowship audience. 

Read this pamphlet online now, download a copy to print or read as a flip-book.

The Wider Quaker Fellowship lifts up voices of Friends in different countries, languages and Quaker traditions. Through the messages published, people of all faiths, or of no formal faith, are offered a means to become familiar with the many expressions of living Quakerism. The Wider Quaker Fellowship was started over 75 years ago by Rufus Jones. Today, the online expression of this work can be found in Friends World Committee's website Voices of Friends.  We still mail print pamphlets to a wide-ranging audience that includes many incarcerated persons.

Read more about Voices of Friends and The Wider Quaker Fellowship.

...that Friends worship all around the world,
...that God moves within and among us in miraculous ways,
...that God is accessible to all of us,
...that we encourage one another simply by being Friends,
...that even as we are each a blessing to God, we are a blessing to one another,
...that we all live underneath the same bright moon, in perfect spiritual equality. 

 

General Secretary Gretchen Castle has recently begun writing about her experiences with Friends around the world. You can keep in touch with her observations by following her new blog entitled "One Quaker's View of the World." 

 

Read Gretchen's blog now.

Read more news from the World Office of the Friends World Committee for Consultation.

Robin Mohr writes about her travels last month with Friends in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador:

 

What a blessing it was to travel for almost two weeks with Karen Gregorio de Calderon, the Section's Regional Coordinator for Central America, Mexico and Cuba. I appreciate her excellent planning, good humor and patience with me. My pretty-good-but-not-perfect Spanish improved as we went along, even though we encountered new colloquialisms in each country. The advice from the interpreters at the Section Meeting that not all jokes translate well became one of our running gags. Some humor does translate, even without words. So do kindness and beauty, and both were visible in abundance along our way.

 

In Honduras, Jehu Lopez, Section Executive Committee member, took Karen and me to visit an integrated child development center at one of the Friends churches in Santa Rosa de Copan. It offers after-school tutoring, recreation, healthy meals and basic health care to local low-income children. It was very similar to a site I had previously visited in Bolivia. It was especially inspiring to Karen to see a large scale project very similar to the work she and her husband have begun in Guatemala since they returned from the 2012 World Conference in Kenya.

 

Karen and I met with leaders of FWCC-affiliated yearly and monthly meetings in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. We discussed the Section's efforts at integrating more diverse representation into Section-wide committees and their reflections on the process so far. We were encouraged to continue to strengthen the communication between Friends throughout the Section, through frequent face to face meetings and all modern means of communication technology.

 

Near the end of our trip, we toured several possible locations for the Section Consultation in Central America scheduled for next February. The primitive campground and the luxury hotel were both dropped in favor of a combination of a Friends church/school with a community center and hostel in San Ignacio, El Salvador. (Look for more information on this and the other three locations in upcoming e-newsletters.)

 

For me, it had been 23 years since I had set foot in Central America. The last time, I wrote my reports home on a manual typewriter with carbon paper copies. This time, every home we stayed in had a wireless internet connection. Poverty and violence are still present and tangible, in the city and the countryside. I was reminded that our only security is in God's hands, not gates or guns or banks. I was grateful to see, firsthand, how Friends are serving God's purposes everywhere we went.

 

A women's gathering in El Salvador led by Robin

 

You can hear Robin speak about Friends World Committee at the Friends General Conference Gathering on Tuesday, July 2 at 1:30 pm. Robin will present the Carey Lecture on Friday, August 2 at Baltimore Yearly Meeting annual sessions.