Our life is love
and peace, and tenderness;
and bearing with one another,
and forgiving one another,
and not laying accusations one against another;
but praying for one another,
and helping one another up with a tender hand…
–Isaac Penington
Greetings
In this newsletter you will find…..

From the Presiding Clerk (Interim)

For more than 350 years the type of worship and the good order and manner of Friends has inspired spiritual growth and moved thousands of people into action. Early Friends were able to articulate and nurture a way forward towards the “reign of God”, peace, harmony, and the good. Many of us who have benefited and grown spiritually by our engagement with the Quaker way believe and hope that something will happen and that folks who have a need for and would benefit from the Quaker way will discover it.

Intermountain Yearly Meeting evolved out of gatherings of Quakers in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1950s. In 1970 these gatherings grew to  include Friends from more states and became the Intermountain Friends Fellowship. In 1974 we became the Intermountain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. The original mission was to foster fellowship, community, and spiritual renewal with minimal organizational structure.

Both our Monthly Meetings & Intermountain Yearly Meeting are all facing challenges, including an aging membership & a shortage of volunteers to perform committee jobs. IMYM’s inability to find sufficient volunteer help to carry out the work of the yearly meeting is an immediate crisis. The recent debacle surrounding the nomination of a new Presiding Clerk demonstrates the dysfunction in our Quaker process.

We have many questions facing us. How can IMYM serve the needs of our members and Monthly Meetings? What level of volunteer and financial support are our Monthly Meetings willing and able to provide? Can we find Friends with the energy, imagination, and prophetic sensibility to help discern a way forward? Does IMYM need to revitalize its original mission or find a new vision and mission? Can we find ways to articulate and communicate the Quaker Way in language that resonates with a broader range of people?

As we seek ways to address these and perhaps other questions, how do we do it? Which questions do we address, what tools and resources do we have, or can we find to help answer the questions? For example, some of the tools from formal “Strategic” planning and Project Management may be helpful to us.  Are there Friends within IMYM with experience and expertise in this type of work? Have others either inside IMYM or the broader world of Friends already worked on these questions and thereby be resources for us?

To create a roadmap for planning, the Representatives Committee approved minute:  

2022.10.28-1 Intermountain Yearly Meeting (IMYM) will create a Visioning Working Group to develop a process to discern a way forward for envisioning the purpose and mission of IMYM and the structure that will support these.  The clerk will appoint this group and facilitate its work. The working group will report to the Representatives committee in February 2023.

I need your help to begin this work. Please contact me if you have passion and energy for discernment around moving IMYM forward. 

In summary, how can we “Become the Quakers the World Needs Today?”

Seeking the Light,
Jerry

Job Opportunity – IMYM Administrative Assistant IMYM is seeking a part-time administrative assistant.

For more information and to apply:
https://www.imym-old.org/job-opening-administrative-assitant-imym/

PLEASE CIRCULATE THIS INTERNET LINK WIDELY IN MONTHLY MEETING ANNOUNCEMENTS AND PUBLICATIONS. ALSO, THE JOB DESCRIPTION CAN BE DOWNLOADED TO ADOBE.PDF FORMAT, PRINTED AND POSTED ON BULLETIN BOARDS.

New IMYM Website

Imym.org has been redesigned and updated. Prominent on the opening page is Recent News and Announcements. A goal of the “Recent News and Announcements” section is that if your meeting has unified around a peace and social justice minute, please send it and other news to annoucements@imym.org. Increasing communication among our monthly meetings is important!

IMYM Mailing List and Internal Directory – Please Update Your Contact Information.

IMYM is working to improve how we communicate with and serve the IMYM community.  As part of that effort, we are working to improve how we collect, manage, and use our mailing list information.

Unfortunately, much of the contact information now in our mailing list is incomplete or outdated.  If now receive email messages and newsletters from IMYM, please click on the “update your preferences” link in the footer of the email message and take a minute to review and update your contact information.

IMYM is committed to protecting your privacy. Our mailing information contains basic contact information to facilitate communication with individuals that have either participated in an IMYM related event or who signed up to be on our mailing list through the imym.org website.

IMYM uses the mailing list primarily to send out newsletters and notices about events sponsored by IMYM and affiliated regional and monthly meetings.  As a Friends General Conference (FGC) affiliated Yearly Meeting, IMYM allows FGC very limited use of our mailing list.  IMYM does not sell or share our mailing list information for use by other outside organizations. See our privacy policy here for details.

We are also creating an Internal Directory to support communication between Friends who serve on IMYM Committees or work on IMYM sponsored events and projects. This Internal Directory will not be shared with the general public but only with others included in the Directory. Online access to the Internal Directory will be password protected. By default, your information will not be included in the Internal Directory unless you opt into being included by checking a box when you update your mailing list contact information.

Send questions about the IMYM mailing list, the Internal Directory, or our privacy policy to meeting@imym.org.

Faith & Practice Committee Announcement

A call to discernment for all in the IMYM Community who among us have the needed gifts as writers, experts, curious, and interested people: 

The Faith & Practice Committee invites you to join a content working group to contribute to the revised Faith & Practice. We seek collaborators to research, share knowledge, interview, discern, edit, or write. We are currently forming working groups to explore our IMYM Community’s light on right relationships within our families and our shared planet.

Whether you have interest in a whole chapter or specific parts of it, we look forward to hearing from you! (If you have already shared your interest, we will be in contact with you soon.) Contact us at faithandpractice@imym.org.

Fall 2022 Queries from IMYM to our Monthly Meetings.

The Representatives Committee approved the following queries. Please forward your meeting’s responses to me at clerk@imym.org on or before Sunday, January 15, 2023.

Both monthly meetings and the yearly meeting are experiencing challenges, for example: aging members and too many volunteer roles. To be relevant and vital we need to be open to change. To provide a context for discerning the change needed, the theme for Intermountain Yearly Meeting for 2023 is “Becoming the Quakers the World Needs.”

• What does Intermountain Yearly Meeting mean to you?
• How should  we continue to support the action, service, and events of the Yearly Meeting?
• In what ways can Friends in Intermountain Yearly Meeting come together in fellowship and sharing? 
• Can we build energy and broaden our sense of community with mutual action, connection, and support?

2022 Annual Gathering While many of us miss Ghost Ranch as a host site for Annual Gathering, overall, clearly, Fort Lewis College in Durango better meets our needs at this time. There were 175 participants in person including children, and 40 joined the online sessions.  To understand what happened at the Annual Gathering check out our well-crafted Epistle from IMYM to Friends everywhere available HERE. 

Indian Boarding Schools Minute of Concern

See the text of the minute HERE. 

Nuclear Disarmament Minute of Concern

See the text of the minute HERE.

Coming Events

• Arrangements Committee Martin Luther King holiday weekend January 13-16, 2023 will be hosted by Mountain View Friends Meeting, Denver, CO.  We are planning for this to be an in person meeting be hosted by Mountain View Friends Meeting.
• Representatives Meeting is planned to be online on Presidents’ Day holiday weekend February 18 & 19, 2023.

Dear Friends and beloved community,

The only thing that is certain is uncertainty…and that has been particularly true over the last two years. As you may have already heard numerous times, we stand with both the hope that we will be able to gather in person, and the possibility that we may have to pivot to a fully virtual platform.

The Program Working Group and Arrangements Committee continue to make plans for our time together, on a dual track. If we are able to gather in person, there will be some virtual elements; we want to make our community as comfortable, safe, and inclusive as we possibly can. Stay tuned, and watch the IMYM website for more information! Please continue to hold all of us in the Light as we move toward our gathering.

Like much of the land on which IMYM Friends live, the area around Durango has a rich and sometimes difficult history, as well as a forward-looking mindset. There are activities in the area and on campus that encourage empowerment and hands-on experience for farmers and future farmers, and a vision of how the future can be sustainable, based in part on the methods that have been used for centuries by the local indigenous people.

Fort Lewis College’s website has a lot of information about things to do. In preparation, we are providing a few links that will help Friends familiarize themselves with the area and the history of both the land and the peoples.

History of Fort Lewis College and Land Acknowledgment

Up from the Sagebrush – Old Fort at Hesperus

This short film (15 minutes) covers the 20th and 21st centuries as 6,279 acres on the La Plata River served as a military fort, Native American boarding school, high school, two-year college, and a Colorado State University Agricultural Experiment Station (San Juan Basin Research Center).

Colorado Voices: An Indian Boarding School

Check out this short PBS documentary on Indian Boarding Schools (27 minutes)

History of the college and reconciliation projects, including sustainable farming

A talk by Dr. Majel Boxer and a short documentary about the Clocktower Panel Removal Ceremony by Rocky Mountain PBS provide more information about the difficult legacy of the boarding school and how Fort Lewis is handling it today. You can also read more about how the Farmer Training Program acknowledges this history in a blog post by Rocky Mountain PBS.

Reminder of deadlines:

We don’t have definite dates for registration to open or close. Please watch our website to stay up to date!

DOCUMENTS IN ADVANCE (requests to monthly meetings and IMYM committees)

• State of the Meeting reports from each monthly meeting
• Memorial minutes
• Committee reports and proposed minutes
• Direct reports from Quaker organizations
• Reports from our delegates to Quaker organizations
• Epistles from other yearly meetings
• Clear statements of any concerns for consideration by the business meeting (most commonly, these will come through our committees)

Special Request to Monthly and Regional Meetings

Please keep the Presiding Clerks and Nominating Committee Clerk informed of the terms and contact information of the monthly meeting and regional meeting presiding clerks and nominating committee clerks. Also send the terms and contact information for any Friend who agreed to serve the yearly meeting as a member of an IMYM committee or as a delegate to a Quaker organization.

We sincerely hope we will see each other in person in June, with safety measures that may be appropriate at that time.

This year in Durango!

Peace,

Gale Toko-Ross and Valerie Ireland

Presiding Co-Clerks, Intermountain Yearly Meeting

Clerk@IMYM.org or IMYMClerk@gmail.com

Celebrating the Divine in All of Us
June 13-19, 2022
(Early Days June 13 to 15; regular sessions June 15-19)
Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado
Including some virtual options

Dear Friends

BE BOLD!!!

Once again, we find ourselves in pandemic limbo, with a two-track planning process for our annual gathering in June. We have every hope that COVID will allow us to gather in person, and are seeking ways that Friends will be able to safely and confidently gather together. Meeting in person will be complemented by equitable and reasonable access to meaningful programming on a virtual platform.

We look forward to creating an inclusive Spirit-led time for all Friends and others who join us, whether in person or virtually. Many of us have a deep yearning and need to see each other “live”, to hug each other (COVID permitting), and to renew our emotional and spiritual connections with each other. Others find that the safety and convenience of the virtual platform can serve the same functions (even if the hugs are only cyber-hugs).

Our planning this year seeks to center our youth and their ideas and desires. We will do all that we can to make our time together work for all Friends, young and old. Many Friends, both young and old, have expressed a need for face-to-face time, to build and strengthen our community and relationships.

Regardless of whether we attend in person or purely online, we will schedule fewer events at the same time, with less overlap between interest sessions and other activities. This allows for more socializing and re-connecting in spontaneous unstructured ways.

Keynote Speaker and Theme

Our keynote speaker this year will be Ernest House, Jr. — a senior policy director at The Keystone Center, a 2018 Gates Harvard Kennedy School Fellow, and an enrolled member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

Our theme, Celebrating the Divine in All of Us, was suggested by the Children’s Yearly Meeting coordinators. They feel that this will easily lend itself to children’s programming and understanding. In addition to our usual keynote address and Q&A session, we will ask our speaker to meet with Senior Young Friends (SYFs), Junior Young Friends (JYFs), and possibly our Children’s Yearly Meeting (CYM).

Registration Info

We expect registration to open in March and to close earlier and more firmly than it has in the past. Fort Lewis College has a fixed deadline for our headcount. Please watch the IMYM website for registration info.

Meeting location/activities

We hope you will join us to experience worship, fellowship, and deep learning, and that you will participate in business meetings to help with discernment on a variety of issues. Whether virtual or in-person, we expect to welcome Friends of all ages from Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, West Texas, Wyoming and nearby states, Mexico City and more distant locations.

The Durango area has a rich and vital Native American community, as well as a number of sites and activities in the Durango area that could be of interest. There is also a variety of recreational activities. In addition, we intend to have several “drop-in rooms”, for conversation and/or support.

COVID-19 concerns

We have not yet determined what requests we may make of Friends. At this time, it seems that awareness of how each of us can protect ourselves and each other will be key. It is our intention to have a process that includes all Friends who wish to join us, while making sure that all Friends feel safe, and are able to remain in community, in confidence and joy. This year calls for special discernment on issues of safety and inclusion in our beloved community.

Possible pandemic pivoting

We acknowledge and recognize the possibility that we may have to pivot to fully virtual sessions. We also acknowledge that an inability to gather in person for a third year would weigh heavily on all our hearts, particularly the hearts of our younger Friends, for whom the in-person experience is particularly important. We deeply hope that we will be able to gather together in fellowship for close interactions, including “live” hugs, in safety, joy and confidence.

Future news

Arrangements Committee met virtually in January, and continues to work on a specific schedule and other details for our Gathering. We anticipate a rich program of activities, fellowship, learning, spiritual growth, and IMYM (and Quaker) business. A schedule of sessions and activities will appear in the registration materials, which will be posted to our website at IMYM.org in the near future.

We look forward to fellowship with Friends this summer, and to deepening our spiritual connections with each other and with the Divine.

Peace,

Gale Toko-Ross and Valerie Ireland

Presiding Co-Clerks, IMYM

Clerk@IMYM.org or IMYMClerk@gmail.com

Greetings to Friends and Meetings in our beloved Intermountain Yearly Meeting community! Here is some important information about the upcoming year in IMYM…and note that this year’s queries are set out in full on the final pages of this Newsletter.

SAVE THE DATES: Please hold the week of June 12-19, 2022 open for our annual gathering. The Clerks and Arrangements Committee are working on a dual-track planning model. It is our strong hope that we will be able to gather safely and confidently in person; we aim to have at least some of the sessions available virtually, to accommodate those who can’t or choose not to participate in person. When we gathered in normal years, we held Early Days from Sunday to Wednesday, and the main sessions from Wednesday evening through the final Sunday. God willing, Friends will be able to gather safely in Durango next June! If that seems too risky, we may gather via Zoom again.

IMYM Queries are on the final page of this Newsletter. We ask that Friends consider these queries in light of how our perceptions have changed over the last two years, seeking a future vision for our yearly meeting; we hope this process will serve as the basis for ongoing discussions. Please submit your responses by February 5, 2022, so there is time to summarize responses for further discussion and discernment. To spark your discussions, Friends might also consider this video from QuakerSpeak.com – a brief discussion about Envisioning a Strong Future for Quakerism.

New information continues to be posted on our website at IMYM.org. One of the more recent is an IMYM Census form, to ensure we have current information on your monthly meeting (please respond to that piece by January 30, 2022, or earlier if you need to update email addresses). Watch the website for other new information as we approach our winter meetings of the Arrangements and Representatives committees.

Your IMYM Representatives Committee members are asked to hold the dates of Presidents Day weekend, 2/21/22; if you don’t have anyone currently in that position, consider who might be willing to act as your Rep, to keep communications open. Arrangements Committee will meet the weekend of Martin Luther King Day, 1/17/22. Both meetings are likely to be held virtually…more info will follow. Remember to watch the IMYM website for updates.

We continue to hold each of you in the Light, with the hope that we will be able to gather in person, in joy and confidence, next year.

Gale Toko-Ross           Valerie Ireland
she/ella/hän             she/her/hers
IMYM co-clerk            IMYM co-clerk
IMYMClerk@gmail.com      IMYMClerk@gmail.com
(303) 859-1681           (720) 472-1386

IMYM – 2021-2022 Queries

How do we define our community?

Referring again to Faith & Practice, it says on p. 53: “Community is shelter, a safe place to grow, an arena for action, caring, and love—powered by and united in the Light.” A few paragraphs earlier, it says: “It is not possible to be a human being without being part of a community. We are born into a community, even if it is only ourselves and our mother. We grow up in a community, learning language, assimilating culture, and discovering the Spirit. As Friends, we know that the Spirit comes to us not only as individuals, not only as members of a community, but as the very foundation of community, moving a meeting at times as one person. The Spirit guides us when we worship in community and when we do business in community.”

Queries on Community

How do you describe your worship community? Who does it include?

Where does your community end? Who do you exclude? Are your boundaries porous enough for people wanting in or out?

How, if at all, has your sense of Monthly Meeting or worship group community enlivened or challenged you in the last 18 months?

What is the meaning of membership?

In the IMYM Faith & Practice, beginning on p. 77, membership is described as a two-way street. “As members have responsibility toward the meeting, so has the meeting responsibility toward its members. Members are the immediate family of the Society, and although all those associated with the meeting fall under its loving care, it is for the membership that the meeting carries primary responsibility. …  Membership involves a willingness to attend meetings regularly, both those for worship and those for business; to give service through committees and otherwise as the way opens; and to share in financial responsibilities. Responsibility for the meeting and its decisions resides with and is ultimately retained by the members of the meeting.”

Queries on Membership

How does that description, published in 2009, compare with your experience in your meeting today?

What distinctions do you see being made today between members and attenders?

What purpose, if any, do you think membership serves in Monthly Meetings?

Your responses to Clerks are requested by February 5, 2022, to allow time for summarization. Thank you