The Conservative Friend

An Outreach of Ohio Yearly Meeting of Friends

News and Events


Our News and Events page helps you keep up-to-date on unusual happenings, announcements, meetings, and other topics of interest to Conservative Friends in the United States and abroad.  If you have something that needs to be publicized within and without the Conservative Quaker world, please visit our Contact Us page and let us know.

We are also interested in links to websites, blogs, or any information describing other Yearly Meetings, retreats, workshops, seminars, or just about anything newsworthy.  Let us know, and we can tell other people.

We can't keep everything up front all the time, so click here for the 2007 News and Events Page Archives.

Friends Together--QuakerCamp at Stillwater

If you yearn for a more vibrant spiritual community,
If you hunger for more time for worship, reflection, and deepening the connections among Friends,
Come to QuakerCamp!

Barnesville, Ohio, USA 22-28 June 2008

We invite all Friends hungry for spiritual community, of all ages, to spend time in worship, reflection, conversation, and play. We hope to bring together Friends from all branches of Quakerism, to share what Spirit-led Quakerism is about at its core--and to experience it together.

Program:

  • Mornings will begin with Bible study or other preparation for worship, followed by unprogrammed worship and opportunities for sharing our spiritual gifts. There will be several opportunities for extended, open-ended worship during the week.
  • Afternoons will be free for workshops and focused conversations arising out of our time together, as well as play and family activities.
  • Evenings will include plenary offerings, and opportunities for corporate discernment around issues rising out of the group.
  • There will be a number of special presentations by members of Ohio Yearly Meeting, introducing others to Conservative Friends' experience of Quakerism. (These were a wonderful part of last year's Quakercamp!)

Families are welcome. There will be a program for children in the morning, and childcare will be offered in the evening so parents can fully participate.

There will be dormitory housing at Olney Friends School, and space for camping (with rv hookups and bathroom and shower facilities) around the Stillwater Meetinghouse. For more information on available free-time activities & the surrounding area, click on Site & Activities.

Suggested contributions, adequate to cover the fees charged by Olney Friends School, are shown on the attached registration form.

Registration will begin Sunday afternoon, June 22, at 3 pm. The gathering will close with meeting for worship on Saturday morning, June 28, with box lunches available. (For those attending the FGC Summer Gathering, travel time is about 3 hours to Johnstown PA.)

For more information: Email the quakercamp planning group

2008 OYM Gathering of Conservative Friends Schedule is Up and Running:  20-22 June 2008, Barnesville, Ohio USA

The Gathering schedule is out, and available on this site at Gathering Registration.  Go look at it, or better, send it in.  There's a handy webform so that you can register without even having to get up to find an envelope.  We make it easy.

Note that the weekend Gathering is immediately followed by the week-long QuakerCamp at Stillwater (described below).

2008 Yearly Meeting Agenda is Up: 12 to 17 August

Click here to go to the Agenda.

Click here to go to the online Registration Form.

The 195th consecutive Yearly Meeting of Ohio Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends will be held in Barnesville, Ohio, USA 12 through 17 August, 2008.  For many years, it was necessary to specify which of the three "Ohio Yearly Meetings" we were referring to--the old Wilburites (Conservative), the old Orthodox (Gurneyites), or the old HIcksites.  Ohio Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) laid itself down about 1913, and the Ohio Yearly Meeting (Gurneyite) re-aligned itself as Evangelical Friends International (Eastern Region) in the 1970's, abandoning the old relationship entirely.


For about 20 years, all three "Ohio Yearly Meetings" shared Yearly Meeting facilities at the old Mount Pleasant Meeting House, built in 1813, but in the 1870's the Wilburites abandoned the property and built the new Stillwater Meeting House in Barnesville, "deep within Wilburite territory."  The new structure holds about 1500 people (2000 if you're Friendly) and used to be filled every year with Friends, visitors, newspaper reporters, sight-seers, the general public at large.  An extensive history of the Yearly Meeting has been written by William P. Taber, Jr., entitled The Eye of Faith, soon to be available for purchase on this website.  This book explains the origins of Ohio Yearly Meeting, and covers the history up to the middle 1980's.  You can read about our high points (our obedience to the immediate promptings of the Holy Spirit, for example), and our low points (the fist fights on the meeting house porch during the schisms, really).

There are modern camping facilities (tent or RV, indoor plumbing (really!), lots of space for walking, contemplation, conversation, or worship, and facilities nearby.  As we think of other interesting things to mention, we'll put them up here.

You are welcome to visit with us, for an hour, a day, or all week.  That's what it's all about.

Sixth Annual Gift of Light Expo in Columbus, Ohio, USA

The 2008 Sixth Annual Gift of Light Expo in Columbus, Ohio, USA was a fine time of meeting people who didn’t know much about Quakerism, and were often curious.  The Expo took place in the same Veterans Memorial Hall as last year’s Universal Light Expo, and while smaller, was attended by a similar mix of people.

The website for the 2008 Gift of Light is currently at

http://www.giftoflightexpo.com/gift_of_light_6th_annual_001.htm

so you can visit yourself and see what was there officially.

These events are part of the New Age culture popular throughout the western hemisphere, with extensive links to older beliefs and practices, and contemporary interpretations of those beliefs.  Various presenters provide lectures and seminars on psychic phenomena, metaphysical readings, palmistry, Tarot cards, and various other aspects of the common culture.  The many vendors provided palm and Tarot card readings, astrological horoscopes, aura photography, books, rocks and minerals, exotic clothing, purified water, plus a selection of alternative churches and religions.  An interesting, varied and eclectic mix.  Look over the photographs here.

We fit in with the latter.  In North America, there are approximately 90,000 people directly associated with the Religious Society of Friends.  The Friends World Committee on Consultation estimates that of the 350,000 or so Friends worldwide, only 0.3 percent refer to themselves as “Conservative,” so that means that as far as fringe elements go, we’re right in there.

We’d like to change that, which is why we were there.  We set up a ten-foot booth in which we sold local Ohio honey, beeswax candles, beeswax and honey-based skin-care products.  We also had a stack of Quaker literature out for the taking—book catalogs from the FGC Bookstore, Pendle Hill, and other sources.  We had papers from the Tract Association of Friends, New Foundation Fellowship, Ohio Yearly Meeting, and as many useful individual pieces as we could.  People would stop by to look these over, or to buy a jar of honey, and would sometimes stop to ask us what we had to say.

As has been our experience previously at these events, everybody was friendly and welcoming.  Our next-door booth neighbors were a bit put off during set-up by the verbal style we use to guide various highly intelligent and distracted children in setting up a 10-foot booth with hundreds of items for sale in an hour or so.  “Drill sergeant!” they were overheard muttering.  But the kids are quite used to the noise and symbolic bluster, and after they were turned loose and demonstrated no ill effects everybody mellowed out.  “You’re not what we thought you were,” they said.

How often have we heard that before, in the larger context?  As a comment on the Conservative branch of the Society of Friends, it seems a sad but common observation.  So many people have various learned baggage that they bring with them when meeting “Christian Unprogrammed Quakers.”  So often it is the same story over and over—early wounding experiences with one Christian church or another, confusion of Christianity with some particular political movement, or a disagreement with gender politics in some form or another.  Little or none of it ever pertains to the basic message of Quakerism that it is Jesus Christ who has come to teach his people, and that it is He to whom we look for guidance.  Even Friends of other branches are often unsure of exactly what we are.

Look over the photographs that we have presented at the event.  We’re planning on being there next year, too, and we invite you to come and visit, or to help out, too.  There’s a world of people out there looking for spiritual guidance, and we believe that we have something that Jesus Christ would like us to share with them.

.