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| "High lights", get it? It's okay to groan. |
Well, here's some of my personal favourites to get
you started.
Stories
Sometimes my written ministry comes in the form of
a story. The
Marvellous Fudge is pretty banal, to be honest, but What
You Will is an interesting, abstract story about the nature
of the divine. The Test
of the Cup is a slightly
longer parable about, well, a certain angle of spiritual growth –
you'll have to work out for yourself what you think it really means.
My favourite of
the stories, and perhaps of all my written ministry, has to be The
Wise Child. Probably the
longest piece of written ministry on this blog, it is a parable about
acceptance and celebration of difference, despite the general
attitudes of wider society excluding people. If I ever recommend
anything as a generally powerful piece on this blog, it has to be The
Wise Child.
Advice for Conduct in Meetings
I've written
several posts, both deliberate writing and written ministry, that
give advice about the conduct of our meetings and the running of our
Meetings. It might seem strange to have so much of this from someone
so much younger than average for Britain Yearly Meeting's membership,
but it's something that my experience has taught me a lot about –
and I certainly won't argue with what the Spirit urges me to write
about.
A key series of
posts for this is the Improving
Business series, for which
I've recently posted an index page. Take a look at that page, but
basically it's a series with principled and practical advice for
different things we can do to improve our decision-making.
There's also a
couple of posts on a really fundamental question – how we know when
to speak in worship, or in Meeting for Worship for Business. These
posts on Testing
Ministry (and testing
ministry during business) provide some broad guidelines Friends
might like to consider, but naturally no hard-and-fast rules.
There's lots more
advice and food for thought, but this wouldn't be highlights if I
listed them all!
The Nature of Quaker Faith and Experience
This is an area
that an awful lot of my writing and written ministry touches on, but
here's details of some of the bits I'm most fond of.
The most-read
post on this blog, at the time of writing (and setting aside the
topical post from remembrance season), is on a key question for those
trying to understand Quaker faith – just what
do we mean by “that of God in every one”? The post looks at
where the phrase comes from (or at least where it's usually cited as
coming from), some ideas about what different people think in
relation to the term, and my own ideas about it.
While it might be
less well-known that our pacifism and attitude to integrity, the
Quaker approach to marriage is one of the more distinctive elements
of our faith when you drill down. I was very pleased, as I prepare
for my own marriage, to be given written ministry On
Marriage, and it seems to
have been pretty popular with readers as well.
Then there's the
story of my First
Conscious Contact with the Divine,
a personal anecdote I was moved to share as ministry. Perhaps
unlikely-seeming, it tells of how I first had an experience that I
later recognised as conscious contact with the divine as a result of
being visited by Mormon missionaries.
I'm sure that
some of my own readers have their own personal favourites – get in
touch if you have particular favourites that you think should be
featured here.
Quaker Non-theism (or Nontheism?)
One thing that many people know about me, if they've dealt with me much
in the context of religion, is that I am a non-theist.
Of course, there's a lot of misunderstanding about that, so some of my blog
posts try to explain it, as in What the Heck is Non-Theism Anyway?
There's also a lot of fear and uncertainty about what increasing visibility
of non-theist Friends might mean, which I address in Non-theists Under The Bed?
Diversity of belief also has an impact on Quaker processes, at least in terms of how
we think of them. My series Quaker Business Method and Theological Diversity looks at
different ways of thinking about the core Quaker process of discernment, and hopefully helps
people to see that, while they are different, they are compatible in practice.
