"We yearn for community that is intimately dependent on the earth, on our neighbors, and our own self-reliance to provide our basic needs, and allows us to see the consequences of our use of creation."

In my Sunday plenary talk at New England Yearly Meeting's Annual Sessions this August, I prominently quoted the statement above from a January 2011 Young Adult Friends Climate Change Working Group gathering held at Mt. Toby Friends Meeting. I did so because I believe these young Quakers are expressing a deep spiritual yearning on behalf of a growing number of Friends. In response, I and others issued an invitation at Annual Sessions for more and more Friends to start fostering a transition to a beloved community that lives, as George Fox put it, "in unity with Creation." In particular, we urged Friends to start working more closely with their neighbors as part of the emerging Transition Town movement. This movement, which emerged in the United Kingdom in 2005 and has now spread to close to a thousand communities worldwide, seeks to transition away from fossil fuel dependency by promoting creative community projects that increase local resilience and well-being while also lowering local energy use.

This leading among Friends is growing: Northwest Quarterly Meeting recently held a session on the theme of Quakers in the Transition movement, two NEYM local meetings are already planning to host Training for Transition weekends in their communities, Woolman Hill has asked my partner Katy and me to facilitate a weekend workshop on "Awakening the Dream of Transition" for Quakers and other people of faith this Spring, and a growing number of local Transition Initiatives in New England have active Quaker participants.

To support these efforts, NEYM's Earthcare Ministries Committee has now launched Quakers In Transition, an online project directed by Ruah Swennerfelt and myself. This new website offers resources, blog posts, workshop listings, and networking tools designed to help equip Quakers from New England Yearly Meeting and beyond to join, organize, and develop local Transition Town initiatives in their local areas.

For more information, please check out Quakers in Transition at: quakersintransition.wordpress.com.

Steve Chase gave the Plenary Talk entitled "Blessed Are The Organized" at the NEYM 2011 Annual Sessions (audio recording available at neym.org/recordings). He is a member of Putney Friends Meeting and a co-founder of the Transition Keene Task Force

 

 

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updated November 28, 2011