Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
Wallingford, Pa. : Pendle Hill Publications, 2004.
User reviews
LibraryThing member QuakerReviews
This very wonderful pamphlet is about what belonging to a living spiritual community offers, and is both a vision and a challenge to us. Is our meeting a community that nurtures the spiritual growth and the lifelong process of spiritual maturing and transformation of its members?
Gates explains
Note that despite the title, it is not about the formal process or meaning of institutional membership in the RSF.
Gates explains
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the Quaker meeting as a place of acceptance and loving welcome, a place of shared values as lived out in our Testimonies, a place of transformation offering both challenge and support, and a place of obedience and faithfulness to the leadings of the Spirit. These can be seen as stages of deepening our understanding and developing our practice as we live in the spiritual community that the meeting can and should offer. The challenge to the meeting is to meet each participant where they are, while at the same time lifting up to them a vision of and support for where they might be going. Note that despite the title, it is not about the formal process or meaning of institutional membership in the RSF.
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LibraryThing member kaulsu
Gates looks at membership in terms of four aspects.
1. a sense of belonging
2. shared values
3. transformation
4. obedience
I admit to being startled at the thought that we are called to obedience, yet after reading this pamphlet, I think I do understand the meaning Gates attaches to it.
The first two,
1. a sense of belonging
2. shared values
3. transformation
4. obedience
I admit to being startled at the thought that we are called to obedience, yet after reading this pamphlet, I think I do understand the meaning Gates attaches to it.
The first two,
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belonging and a sense of shared values, came easy to me when I began attending my first Quaker Meeting. The notion of being transformed seems so heady, so other worldly that I hesitate to claim it, yet I realize I am being transformed, and I hope to go on being transformed my whole life. And obedience? Surely not obedient to the Meeting, but obedient to God's call to me? Yes, I do try. Some days I am more successful than others. Show Less
Subjects
ISBN
0875743714 / 9780875743714
Local notes
Pendle Hill Pamphlet 371
Similar in this library
Faith and practice : a book of Christian discipline by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.,
Call number
CP 371