Messages

  • Call ye upon him while he is near

    “Hear instruction and be wise, while the good Spirit of the Lord is nigh to teach you; seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near.”

  • The nature of inspiration

    “Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the divine influences in our own hearts, is the cardinal doctrine of Quakerism.”

  • Believing in what we may become

    “We seek to affirm in each child at school, each member of the meeting, each person we meet in our daily lives, the person that he or she may with God’s help grow to be. We are all the merest infants in God’s world, struggling to stand upright and walk unaided, trying in vain to articulate our halting thoughts and feelings. We stumble and fall. We give way to self-pity and shame. God hauls us to our feet again and makes sense of our childish babble, never ceasing to believe in what we may ultimately become. Do we do the same for our children and one another?”

  • Fox: God has come to teach his people himself

    “The Lord God of heaven and earth is come to teach his people himself by his light, Spirit, grace, and truth, and to bring them off all the world’s teachers. God hath raised up Christ Jesus, his Prophet, whom people should hear; and saith, ‘This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him,’ and Christ saith, ‘Learn of me, I am the way, the truth, and the life; and no man comes to the Father, but by me.’”

  • Teaching First-day school is ministry

    “Religious education has always been public ministry. After Pentecost, Jesus’s disciples became apostles; those who had been his students became teachers and the early church’s foremost religious educators. Seventeenth-century Friends traveled in the ministry, sharing an emergent faith and developing practices. The nineteenth-century invention of First-day school moved formation outside the home, where family worship was experiential learning, and placed religious education in the public community of the meeting. Friends who step outside the meetingroom while the adult community is in worship in order to attend to the younger generations’ spiritual formation are public ministers.”

  • Parker Palmer on the mind vs. the heart

    “My vocation (to use the poet’s term) is the spiritual life, the quest for God, which relies on the eye of the heart. My avocation is education, the quest for knowledge, which relies on the eye of the mind. I have seen life through both these eyes as long as I can remember – but the two images have not always coincided… I have been forced to find ways for my eyes to work together, to find a common focus for my spirit-seeking heart and my knowledge-seeking mind that embraces reality in all its amazing dimensions.”

  • The two most important things to teach children

    “Teachers are optimists. We would not be teachers if we did not have confidence in the future and in humankind. We trust that given the right opportunities children will grow up into responsible adults capable of making good choices and of saving the world from disaster.”

  • Knowledge that doesn’t need to be taught

    “Everyone who believes in the existence of God attributes to him justice, mercy, and love, and that he is unchangeable in his nature, and incapable of partiality. Hence he must—and no doubt has—given to every man and woman a complete and sufficient rule of faith and practice without the aid of books or men. And [God] hath so ordered, in the course of events, that the more strictly and faithfully every man and woman lives up to the guidance and teaching of this Inward Anointing… the more instruction and help they afford one another.”

  • The way to world peace

    “Friends view education broadly as the pursuit and proclamation of Truth. The process of expanding and refining one’s understanding of God and of all creation ideally continues throughout one’s life. Development of a moral sense, an appreciation of right and wrong, along with guidance and practice in discerning Truth, is as important as other learning….”

  • The Quaker approach to education

    “The attitude of the Society of Friends towards education has been determined by their belief in the Inner Light. Holding as they do that there is something of the divine in every [person], they have regarded education (in the broadest sense) as the developing of the Divine Seed, or the fanning into a flame of that Divine Spark . . . To Friends, therefore, education is an intensely religious thing; it means the training and development of the spiritual life, the liberating of the Divine that is within us.”

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