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Philadelphia
YM works on “Every Meeting House a Peace Center” by Mary Arnett
In response to Mary Lord’s article in the Spring 1998 issue of Peace
Team News, members of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PhYM) decided
to explore the concept of “Every Meeting House a Peace Center.” We started
this exploration on two levels, the Yearly Meeting and the Monthly Meetings.
At the Yearly Meeting level, several PhYM members had already formed
a Working Group on Applying the Peace Testimony (APT). PhYM was in the
throes of a total reorganization to give more initiatives to Monthly
Meetings, during which all PhYM program committees, including the Peace
Committee, were laid down. APT grew out of a concern of some PhYM members,
most—if not all—of whom were on the Peace and Social Concerns Committees
of their respective Monthly Meetings, to continue to lift up the Peace
Testimony per se in the Yearly Meeting as a whole. Three of these
members, George Willoughby, Lori Kintz, and I, were also on the Coordinating
Council of Friends Peace Teams Project (FPTP).
As the APT working group sought ways to lift up the Peace Testimony
at PhYM, its three members who were also on the FPTP Coordinating Council
were taking the “Every Meeting House a Peace Center” concept, along
with copies of Mary Lord’s article, to their Monthly Meetings’ Peace
and Social Concerns Committee meetings. All three received encouragement
from their Peace and Social Concerns Committees to explore this concern
further.
At Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, George Willoughby and I, as
members of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee, asked representatives
of our Adult Religious Education Committee and our First Day School
Committee high school teachers to meet with us. They agreed. We also
invited the clerk of an ad hoc committee appointed to plan a series
of programmed meetings as an educational experience for our Monthly
Meeting. All present agreed in principle that “Every Meeting House a
Peace Center” was a concern that should be explored. In addition, the
clerk of the ad hoc committee offered to have “Peace” as the theme of
one of the Programmed Meetings.
After intensive planning, we presented a peace program as part of this
series which included peace hymns, a homily on peace, quotations from
our book of discipline, Faith and Practice, and a peace circle
activity in which we passed a yoke from person to person, each offering
to the next a prayer gift of peace. It was a very moving service, attended
by about 25 people. I felt we had made a significant beginning toward
our Monthly Meeting consciously becoming a peace center. And I felt
the weight of the yoke of building on this beginning by collecting bits
and pieces of existing programs in a conscious effort to develop an
integrated program that would become greater than the sum of its parts.
The APT working group continued to meet monthly at one another’s meeting
houses with members reporting on the peace activities of their Monthly
Meetings. At first we represented four Monthly Meetings, but were able
to bring news of what other Monthly Meetings were doing in the way of
peace programs. We would then ask to hold our next meeting at a ‘new’
meeting house with their members especially invited to be present. We
also discovered that seven of our Monthly Meetings support a peace center,
the Peace Center of Delaware County, as a Quarter, and we became attentive
to Quarterly as well as Monthly Meeting activities.
As well as gathering information about Monthly Meeting peace activities,
we had as early goals: receiving recognition of our work from the Yearly
Meeting, creating a brochure to publicize our vision, and assembling
for Monthly Meetings a suggested inclusive curriculum which would be
helpful in exploring the broad scope of peace. By the summer of 1999,
we had a brochure in circulation, and we had received recognition from
the Yearly Meeting.
We have, however, come to look upon curriculum building as a by-product
of our other work. We do seek to point out, whenever possible, that
peace exists on many levels. It exists in the self, the family, the
Meeting, the school, the workplace, the community, the state, the nation,
and the world. In so far as all are part of the whole, they each require
identification, study and training, and activation.
As we ended our first year, we had members of at least twelve of our
105 Monthly Meetings either attending our meetings or in regular contact
with us. Many others we heard from sporadically. We were also alert
to the programs of like-minded organizations, such as the Fellowship
of Reconciliation (FOR), and sought to enhance the flow of information
from them to our Monthly Meetings. Some of the programs in which our
Monthly Meetings were—and are—active are: maintaining a regular Sunday
afternoon prayer vigil for peace at the Liberty Bell; facilitating the
Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), Help Increase the Peace Project/Real
Alternatives to Violence for Everyone (HIPP/RAVE), and Children’s Creative
Response to Conflict (CCRC); offering Friends Conflict Resolution Programs;
supporting nonviolence training and intercommunity dialogue in former
Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and India; promoting gun control; lifting
up drug concerns; clearing land mines; and networking with Abolition
2000 and FOR’s Decade of a Culture of Peace.
This year our concentration is on finding ways to share the information
we have from Monthly Meetings with other Monthly Meetings. The Web site
that PhYM has developed is becoming our principle aid in this effort.
On it APT has a web page devoted to “Every Meeting House a Peace Center.”
Fortunately at least two members of our APT group are experts in computer
programming. The Yearly Meeting has authorized APT to post on its web
page the Annual Reports of Peace and Social Concerns Committees of Monthly
Meetings and any Minutes they issue concerning peace. In this way even
Monthly Meetings which have their own web page may discover linkages
not otherwise provided. You will also find our brochure—which is currently
under revision—on our web page: www.pym.org/peace/apt.
Next year, for members of our Yearly Meeting who do not have access
to the internet, we will try to add a printout of our web page as a
PhYM newsletter devoted to the peace activities of our Monthly and Quarterly
Meetings.
The members of APT are conscious of being engaged in a work-in-progress.
We feel we have many of the pieces of the picture in hand, but not the
picture itself. Our vision is to have in each of our Monthly Meetings
a program analogous to our First Day School program, in which Friends
are rooted in their peace heritage as firmly as they are rooted in the
rest of their spiritual heritage of which it is a part.
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