Peace is the Way

By Anna Woofenden

“There is no way to peace, peace is the way.” 

I’d heard the phrase many times, spoken it even, but it was not until this past Thursday at Peace Forum that I leaned it’s source. The Rev. Abraham Johannes (A. J.) Muste, a leader in the pacifist movement, labor movement and civil rights movement in the early 20th century. I learned this gem from graduating Masters of Arts student Jeff Myers as he presented excerpts from his thesis: The Way of Love, the Way of the Cross: A.J. Muste’s Theology of Pacifism.

Jeff began by sharing a glimpse of his own journey as an evangelical Christian who was exposed to theories of non-violence and pacifism through the legacies of people such as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Dr. King while he was in undergrad at Hope College. He found a collection of essays by A. J. Muste and shared that  until that point he had, “never been so powerfully struck by the written word.” Muste brought to light the depth that his Christian faith informed his pacifism and how at heart, Muste was a theologian and from his teaching one could make the argument that “Christianity is pacifism.”

Muste’s theological basis for pacifism, Jeff presented, can be summed up in the value of each individual person, the command to love the neighbor and the life of Jesus Christ, especially as it culminated on the cross. Muste presents a way of pacifism that is far from passive. He presents an active and powerful way of life, claiming that God is love, love is active, love is the most powerful force and that it is this love we need to embody. Muste proclaims the ineffectiveness of meeting violence with violence and reminds us to look to the way of Jesus. Jesus did not respond to violence with violence, culminating in his crucifixion when he proclaimed forgiveness for those that were killing him.

This way of reading the gospels and looking at the life of Christ through the lens of pacifism came to Jeff through his reading of Muste. He shared, “I am a pacifist because of A. J. Muste. He showed me that the Bible speaks to pacifism.” As someone with evangelical roots, Jeff is passionate about how to have the conversation about pacifism with a variety of Christian modalities. He shared, “If you’re talking to an evangelical about pacifism, do not talk about the secular arguments, talk about the Bible”, as that’s what is held as the authority.

Jeff presented a vision, which he is actively engaged in, of growing conversations of pacifism from the Biblical conversation and lives engaged in being peaceful, loving and powerful beings in our communities. I know I, for one, was changed by Jeff’s presentation and urged more deeply into my own exploration of what it means to follow Christ and how the actions and principles of pacifism are part of this journey.

Anna Woofenden is a MDiv student at Earlham School of Religion and the Swedenborgian House of studies. She blogs at http://annawoofenden.wordpress.com 

Raising Up A New Generation of Quaker Leaders

By Anna Woofenden

Questions around engaging young people in the life of faith are being asked across denominations, as faith communities notice that many children who came faithfully to church with their parents as children are no longer involved as young adults   Within the scope of the Religious Society of Friends this question is being raised and addressed in various venues. One that may be of particular interest to the readers of this blog is work that is being done by the Newlin Center for Quaker Thought and Practice on Earlham College campus.

Emma Churchman and Trish Eckert spoke at Earlham School of Religion’s Common Meal and shared stories of the work they are doing to create spaces to raise up Young Friends through the Newlin Center. “The Newlin Center aims to identify young Quaker leaders, nurture Quaker scholarship and dialogue on campus, and provide members of the Earlham and wider communities with information about the Religious Society of Friends and Earlham's living Quaker character. More broadly, the Center aims to promote conversation and cooperation among Friends, and to provide a gathering place for Friends of all sorts.”

Trish, an ESR alum and Emma, an ESR current student both bring an infectious and deeply thoughtful energy to the topic of Young Adult Friends. Trish, who has been working at the Newlin Center for three years, started there as a project for her supervised ministry in her final year at ESR. On a search to discover her calling and passions, she began working with college students and discovered her ministry niche. She shared the joy she finds in the connections she has with the Young Friends she has on Earlham campus as she meets with groups weekly for fellowship and mentoring and provides spaces for Young Friends to gather and grow together.

Emma describes herself as a “visionary” and came into the Newlin Center overflowing with new ideas and ways to grow community and leadership among Young Friends.  Building on her experience of working with young adults at Pendle Hill she dove right into create programs, most notably the Quaker Fellows @ Earlham College program which works with Earlham College students to offer a transformative college experience.

“(The) Quaker Fellows echoes Earlham’s core values. Utilizing Quaker faith and practice, the program engages the whole person and prepares students to be agents of change in the world. Quaker Fellows includes three formation cores: spirituality, community and leadership development. The program is designed for young adults who are serious about serving as leaders in their communities, developing tools for social transformation, and living a life grounded in the Spirit.”

The ESR Community engaged in a thoughtful discussion with Trish and Emma, examining some of the questions that come up working with Young Adults and expressing a desire to support this important work.  If you are interested in spaces that nurture and develop Young Adult Friends, check out The Newlin Center and see how you can contribute to raising up the next generation of leaders.

Anna Woofenden is a MDiv student at Earlham School of Religion and the Swedenborgian House of studies. She blogs at http://annawoofenden.wordpress.com 

Evolving in My Faith

By Anna Woofenden

The highlight of experience of the 2012 Spirituality Gathering started when Professor Carole Spencer asked if a few of us who had taken Carrie Newcomer’s songwriting class might read Phil Gulley’s talk prior to the event and respond with a creative piece to be used in the closing. I received the talk just before getting on an airplane, where I gobbled up the whole piece, scrawling over the PDF with the iPad highlighter, staring and circling phrases and jotting down ideas. As I read I observed reading on two levels, I was reading looking for a song, highlighting phrases and themes as they emerged, and I was reading as a theologian and a human, fascinated by his approach to the topic of The Evolution of Faith.

Over the next week I read through the talk a number of times, jotting down themes and images, choice phrases and turns of speech. I kept reading words that connected to places inside me that are questioning, wondering, searching and looking for articulation. Gulley’s talk is excerpted from his new book “The Evolution of Faith: How God is Creating a Better Christian Community.” He gives an overview of his theology and theory on how faith can move forward or diminish and posits the idea that in order thrive in our current spiritual environments, a continual evolution is necessary. Gulley points to the recurring theme in theological education to “teach us what others thought about God in the past… but often fails to teach us what we must know now—how we can evolve in order to thrive in our current spiritual environment” (Philip Gulley, “Evolution of Faith”, ESR Spirituality Gathering 2012).

As a current seminary student, soaking up layers of church history, history of theological thought, and the wisdom of ancient mystics, my ears caught this with a question mark. As an entrepreneurial spirit, an emergent/progressive oriented Christian and someone with a calling to church planting and new models of spiritual community, I knew I needed to engage in the questions posed. It supported themes that I have been noticing as I sift through church and spiritual histories: theology needs to be questioned, examined, prayerfully sought and applied to our current contexts. In my experience this is not necessarily a call to abandon the study of what has come before, rather a call to learn what the questions are that need to be asked. It is a call to learn from the processes our ancestors have worked through over the centuries, to look back over history not with the intention to find the authoritative answers, rather to spur on our current questions. It is a call to have the courage to open up space for theological discourse of how God is speaking in this time and context.

The call to listen and seek God’s call for each of us in this time and for the church in our current contexts is the message that kept ringing out in me each time I read through the talk. I began to hear the clues about the questions that are bubbling up and urging to be asked and signposts pointing to the practices of attentiveness and presence that are being called out to do this work. These messages rang through words like:

“What if every person received a full measure of our attention?”


“One of the most compelling traits of Jesus was his attentiveness.”


“For what is prayer, but our attentiveness to the Divine Presence…”


“Holy observance.”


“…root of prayer is attentiveness to the Creator and Created.”


“Faith and theology—our understanding of God—is always in process, is always changing, is always being affected and influenced by our culture.”


“…truth is never solely in the past. Truth is also ahead of us, in front of us.”


“We reach truth by evolving toward it.”

It is these threads that came together in me and through me as the words and ideas continued to flow. And it was these threads that the Spirit moved in and through to create a prayer for this day, a creative expression of the evolutionary process of faith.



“This is Our Prayer”

Music and lyrics by Anna Woofenden and H. Wayne Williams © 2012

What if every person received
all we have to offer,
our maximum attention,
and freedom unceasingly?

What if we could listen deeply
without expectations,
seeing Light in one another,
with gracious humility?

This is our prayer
for one another:
A holy heart
to hear each other.

What if Truth would grow and proceed,
questioning and doubting,
moving remnants forward,
and set the Gospel free?

What if we could just let God be
open and evolving,
above us and before us,
and in us creatively?

This is our prayer
for one another:
A holy heart to hold each other.

What if prayer was living in peace,
in love with our Creator,
observing not dividing,
that grace would be increased?

This is our prayer
for one another:
A holy heart
to heal each other.

This is our prayer
for one another:
A holy heart
of gold!

Inspired by Philip Gulley’s message: “The Evolution of Faith” Earlham School of Religion 3.3.2012

Anna Woofenden is a MDiv student at Earlham School of Religion and the Swedenborgian House of studies. She blogs at http://annawoofenden.wordpress.com 

The Slippery Slope

By Anna Woofenden

The core of this piece was written late on a Saturday night in last June, at the Wild Goose Festival (a gathering of emergent and progressive Christians), sitting under the stars at the campsite, reaching to comprehend and process the transformations that were taking place in me and around me by texting a dear friend and colleague. Turned out to be one very long text.

The warning has come in many forms over the years: watch out for the slippery slope. If we dare to question what we’ve been taught, we cannot predict what could follow, what unearthly pit is around the corner. If we dare to question, before we know it we could be... well… something and surely hell and hand-baskets are involved. Don’t raise those questions, don’t voice any doubts, you don’t know where it may lead. I had been warned.

I didn’t listen. I’ve had conversations with people whose views differ from mine. I’ve gone to worship services that have stretched me beyond my comfort zone. I’ve traveled to other cultures. I’ve read those “edgy” theological books. I’ve entered into conversations where I am challenged and uncomfortable. And in January I finally left the church organization I had called home for many years, as a “radical” pursuing ordination as a woman. Since then, I’ve dared to open up the Bible without being preemptively sure of what it might have to say to me. I’ve become friends with fellow seminarians who are seeking to serve God wholeheartedly who also happen to be lesbian, transgendered and gay. I’ve begun to question the cultural assumptions that had defined my theological reality and am finding the Bible to be alive with humanity and contradiction and the gospels to be downright manifestos of radical living. I continue to question the theology and church culture, as I understood it, while boldly stumbling along, pursuing God and spiritual community.

You open any of these doors, and before you know it, you’re led down a road where you're speaking up about the marginalized, selling your possessions to give to the poor, and surrendering your life to something greater than yourself. It's a slippery slope. If you open yourself up to revelation being alive and moving, letting it be more than a moral code or a patriarchal history lesson, then you slide. You slide and find that you're surrounded by revelation. Poems, stories, myths, the writing and lives of Gandhi and Dr. King, Maya Angelou and Rumi, and the mountains, the people, silence, and yes, even the Scriptures are speaking to you. All overflowing with the Breath of the Spirit and infused with Divine Voice. Each offers pathways connecting the human and the Divine, enlivening and disturbing, moving you to action, bathing you in peaceful Love.

It's a slippery slope, letting go of the lines that divide, seeing people different from yourself as human. Let the walls that make me an "us" and they a "them" crumble, and there is a world of humanity to love. No longer can you ignore the vulnerability, the humanity, the absolute sinner and saint in all of us. No longer can you push others aside or arbitrarily categorize them. Confronted by the humanity around us, we confront the humanity within us and expose our collective brokenness. We come face to face with the things we are capable of, for ill or good. We lose the ability to hide behind our self-righteousness or be cozy in our carefully constructed boxes of absolutism and superiority.

And then we might start caring. We might start exposing ourselves to the people in the world around us. We might start seeing needs. We might start owning and feeling the pain of the human family as our own story, a story that we are drawn into, that we now want to participate in. It’s risky, this slippery slope of seeing humans as human. It’s transformative, God being Divine.

Entertaining the idea that God is untamable, uncontainable and immersed in all we know, might just lead us to respond. To ask what Jesus taught and at least play with the possibility, maybe for the first time, that we're actually called to follow these teachings, is a daring and radical notion. Maybe Jesus had something right when he told us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. Maybe there's something to this command to take care of the widows and orphans. Maybe Jesus wasn't being metaphorical when he told us to feed, clothe and heal our human family.

Maybe, just maybe, this whole Jesus on earth thing, this spark of Divinity walking among us, is something to pay attention to. Maybe model our lives after. And maybe when we go back to the gospels we might find that most of what Jesus was interested in were the marginalized, the poor, speaking up against the oppressing forces, confronting the hard conversations, going to those that need healing, and approaching the broken parts of each of us. We could find that this radical Messiah came to speak and live out an alternative to ruling over others, to consuming, to living only for ourselves. We may begin to entertain the notion that there's something more to live for. We could start to hear the gentle breeze whispering in our ears that there's a force of Creative Love calling. Calling us to act. Moving us to live in harmony. Drawing us to follow this Radical Christ. And that, that my friend is damned uncomfortable.

Watch out for the slippery slope.

Anna Woofenden is a MDiv student at Earlham School of Religion and the Swedenborgian House of studies. She blogs at http://annawoofenden.wordpress.com

Uncharted Waters

By Anna Woofenden

September 13th Common Meal 
Annie Glenn: Uncharted Waters

Annie Glenn came to ESR in 2004 as an unprogramed Quaker who was happy to state whenever need be: “I would never be a pastor.” Coming out of a rich variety of vocational experiences as a caseworker, writer and editor and a teacher, she came to ESR as a gift to herself. At age 49 she decided to give herself a 50^th birthday present and explore spirituality.  Her ministry goal, “To talk with people in all aspects of life”, or as she candidly admitted, she didn’t know where she was heading.

As Annie shared her story of formation and transformation during her time at ESR she highlighted the process of having everything she knew be broken down and from that place God calling her in her continued ministry. Annie related to Abram and his call and pondered how long between he received his call and struck out and followed it.  In her journey, this call to ministry has landed her right where she thought she’d never be, as a pastor of a programmed meeting. Though she fought this along the way, she’s found clarity of purpose and usefulness as she is actively walking alongside a congregation in their work. 

Annie exhorted us as seminary students to, “Let our lights shine” knowing that God will call us into and out of the work God has for us. She called out for the continued raising up of leaders, particularly in the Quaker community. Leaders who can use their gifts, resolution and guidance within a structure that honors each person’s gifts and purposes.  She ended by sharing, “I don’t think ministry is defined by a job. It is the gifts, the leadership and the calling. What defines me is the gifts that the Spirit of God has given me.” 

Anna Woofenden is a first-year MDiv/MMin student at Earlham School of Religion.  She is a member of the Swedenborgian church and did outreach work for a church in Colorado, as well as for the national office of her denomination, before coming to ESR in January of 2011.