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The second harvesting season at the Friends United Meeting Sustainability Farm (the Ambwere Farm in Kenya ) commenced on 30 September 2025. This week marks the third week since harvesting began. This season, farm workers planted 800 acres of maize on our 902-acre property, with the remaining acres being occupied by roads, forests, and storage buildings. We managed to get a combine harvester to do our harvesting and, unlike last season where we used four machines, this time around we are only utilizing one machine for our harvest. This allows for easy, proper, and effective monitoring and management as we carry out our harvesting with a key aim of minimizing or reducing wastage and losses.
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When the Friends United Meeting General Board met on October 3-5, members approved the recommendations of new members to serve on the Board of Trustees of Ramallah Friends School. The recommendations were brought by Omar Tesdell, Rania Maayeh, and Kelly Kellum, who served as the RFS Board Nominating Committee.
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Elections are an exercise in integrity. Whether choosing high school cheerleaders or determining the presidency of the United States integrity matters, regardless of choice or time. Perhaps the strongest testimony of Quakers is that of integrity. Query 38, London YM asks this: ‘If pressure is brought against you to lower your standard of integrity, are you prepared to resist it? Our responsibilities to God and our neighbour may involve us in taking unpopular stands. Do not let the fear of seeming peculiar, determine your decisions.’ Oh, but we are peculiar people! Rather than eschewing responsibility, Quakers can take on responsibility for integrity in elections. We and our meeting houses can be safe, neutral places for inviting discourse, for use as polling places. We can exercise our integrity.
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With no employees allowed on the Ramallah Friends School campus for a month, no one will be there to do the heavy landscaping work until at least April, after I leave. I won't be able to participate in the installation of the Circle. My disappointment is pretty intense—so much design happens when you actually install. Besides the landscaping, the connections I have been developing with people here are not going to have this last month to deepen.
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I served as a pastoral minister among Friends for most of my adult life. In preparation for a recent move, I sorted through twenty-three years of sermon files, notes, and manuscripts. This revealed a lot about me and the kind of messages I like to preach—and the kind of messages I avoid.
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The Fall 2019 issue of Quaker Life, on justice, is in the mail and on shelves now. In the Bible, justice has to do with land and labor and family structures; with ownership and employment; with widows, orphans, and immigrants; with food and water and housing; with access to God at the Temple—with everything, material or spiritual, that is required for a human being to thrive. God cares for ALL of what God has created, and therefore shows a special regard for the weak and the marginalized for whom society cares less. And since God shows a special regard for the weak and the poor, a corresponding quality is required of God’s people. God’s people must also be especially concerned with equity and fairness in society and economy, with guaranteeing every creature’s access to the necessities of life: to water, food, health, respect, attention, kindness, helpful community, and the opportunity to draw near to God. As a foundation for life together, justice is a vast and widening gyre, and our authors in this issue explore the theme from many angles.
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Throughout our history, the people known as Friends (or Quakers) keep rediscovering an essential and enduring truth: There is one who speaks to our most basic needs and most significant hopes—Christ Jesus the Lord. Both individually and communally, we are learning to know and follow the Voice that guides us in the way we should go. Together, we seek to understand and obey that truth which sets us free. As a people, we share in the experience of that powerful life which makes all things new. Maybe you are searching for an authentic and transforming faith and community to call home—if so, come in and join us as we seek to know and follow Christ.
Friends United Meeting commits itself to energize and equip Friends through the power of the Holy Spirit to gather people into fellowships where Jesus Christ is known, loved, and obeyed as Teacher and Lord.
