May 2011

Dear Friends,

All over the world, Friends are exploring a spiritual understanding and response to Global Change. We view environmental, climate, economic and social change as interconnected. In 2011, Friends will hold a worldwide consultation on how God’s love, justice, peace, and the integrity of creation can be made visible through Friends’ response to changes and challenges facing the world today. For more information on the consultation process, please visit www.fwccglobalchange.org.

The Wider Quaker Fellowship invites you to consider how you understand the changes in our world and how best to respond in faith and love. We have prepared for you two very different pamphlets on this topic. The first, ‘Beyond Stewardship of Nature: Friends and the “Great Story,” is the text of a plenary speech by Doris Ferm, a Friend in her 80s, given at Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting in 2006. It offers a broad and challenging framework for considering our place in the world. The second is a collection of excerpts from Spirit Rising, a new book of essays and poems from young Friends, ages 18-35, from around the world, on a variety of topics.  We have selected the pieces that seemed most connected to ecological concerns and likely to provoke lively discussion. They represent a e variety of experience and theological perspectives, coming from the United States, Sweden, and Korea, and while (as the book’s introduction says) they may surprise or even offend you, we ask that you remain open to different manifestations of the Spirit as you read them.  We also include a gently humorous, yet respectful, Creation poem.   

We encourage you to use the pamphlets and the queries in each one for local discussion of Global Change. You may also wish to visit our website, www.voicesoffriends.org, for more articles from the archives of the Wider Quaker Fellowship. Your financial support is needed to sustain the work of the Fellowship. Please give as generously as you can to share these thought-provoking articles with more people. As always, your prayers are also a welcome form of support.

Yours in the Light,


Robin Mohr, Pacific Yearly Meeting
for the Clerk, Judith Inskeep
Wider Quaker Fellowship Program Group