Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business

The start of every school year begins with lots of meetings - reminders of school policies, new guidelines, learning about the upcoming class, etc, etc, etc. As I said to a friend the other day - a fire hose of information coming at us every day. This makes me grateful to teach at a Quaker school. Our meetings are run with some periods of reflection and silence built in, giving us all at least a minute to begin to process all that we have to remember. 

To help our faculty stay focused on how we should conduct ourselves in a meeting, I first went looking at materials from the Friends General Conference, which were very helpful in thinking about using purposeful language. 

They state: "Whenever we remember that we are in the presence of God, transformation is possible. Every task, no matter how mundane, becomes an act of worship, a word of praise offered to God. This is the basis for Quaker business practice. We call it “meeting for worship with attention to business” because it is grounded in an awareness of God’s presence." (from Quaker Business Basics by the Friends General Conference)

There are some useful guidelines to remember while in a meeting, which I turned into a visual to help all of us. I first took the list of guidelines and shortened them to phrases.

I also tried to think of symbols that would go with each section that could spark a general feeling of that topic.

Then I tried to figure out how to put these ideas in a format that could be easy to see from across a room. I used big 12x12 scrapbook paper as a background and wanted each section to be a different color. It was slightly challenging to get all the pieces to have a similar size showing.

I added the headings and symbols (which kept making me think of the Color Symbol Image routine - why did I put each title on a particular color? Was I being purposeful with that?)

I finally added the phrases from the original list of guidelines. My hope is that if we have more examples to add to each heading, we can do so throughout the year.