On Sunday of Spring Continuing Sessions weekend, we encourage meetings to “create your own” intergenerational gathering of Friends. While the pandemic has opened the possibility to join together from across the PYM region without travel, which we’ll do on Saturday online, our local meetings are where we gather most often across generations for fellowship, worship, learning, and business. Let’s continue the energy of being together at Sessions in the time after worship on Sunday morning, March 27. Shared here are resources and suggestions to plan simple opportunities for togetherness!
One person is a Friend, together we are a meeting
The lovely small book “Together” by Mona Damluji is a great anchor for this time! The book is a story of how we are more whole when we are together. Children’s books are accessible for everyone, and this is one belongs in every meeting library! If you do not have a copy, and would like PYM to send you one, email: sessions@pym.org with the request. You can also watch the story being shared in a read aloud on YouTube. Activity suggestions to use with the book are listed below.
How to gather?
Save the date, Sunday, March 27th* and ask Friends to come early or stay after worship for 30-45 minutes. If the weather is nice, being outdoors is great! The activities suggested below are for all ages, and “intergenerational” means sharing across generations, including everyone. This could be generations of adults, or include youth and children.
Consider providing a light breakfast if you’re gathering before worship, or coffee hour or picnic lunch after worship — and if serving food isn’t comfortable yet with Covid safety, do it BYO! You’re still together.
*Meetings also do not need to stick with the March 27 date — if another Sunday or time works better for your meeting, do that!
Creating bridges between local meetings and the Yearly Meeting
As a Yearly Meeting, we’re creating connective pathways to celebrate how we gather in local meetings and then share those ideas and images out to the wider PYM community, hoping to inspire one another in what is Spirit-led and gathers us.
We hope meetings will send photos or videos of what they create together — art, music, fellowship, love — and we’ll continue the sharing out to everyone through the PYM website and social media.
Ideas for being together
If you have more ideas for us to add here, please send them to sessions@pym.org.
- Take a photo of your meetinghouse (if you include people, please be sure to have photo permission.)
- Create a mural together with images and words that speak to “One person is a Friend, together we are a meeting.”
- Ask everyone to bring an item that represents something about them to share with the group (or in small groups). Place them together in on a table or blanket as a mosaic of your community. (This one works in online sharing, too!)
- Engage in all-ages worship sharing around the queries: What brings us together as a meeting? In what ways would we like to be together more?
- Invite everyone to bring a musical instrument – homemade ones, too! – and make noise together! Send a video to PYM!
- Play Silent Squares! Directions are shared here — Silent Squares encourages ways to get to know one another with movement and joy!
- Create a simple loom, and weave into it pieces of paper that everyone has written or drawn on (see queries above).
