SEYM Faith and Practice

Ft. Myers Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends is a member of Southeastern Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Monthly and Yearly refer to the frequency of Meetings for Worship with a Concern for Business, or, Business Meetings.

One of the traditional roles of Yearly Meetings has been to produce an act of corporate discernment in the form of a book commonly called, in these times, Faith and Practice. In times not so long ago these books were sometimes called the Book of Discipline, by which was meant, how a Quaker was expected to live a Quaker life. Faith and Practice today is concerned with individual spiritual life, and also the life of the meeting.

SEYM is currently in the process of writing, and revising, its book of Faith and Practice. Like Quaker process generally, the mill of Quaker discernment grinds exceedingly finely, in a manner not unlike the glaciers, and at a corresponding pace (5 years has been allotted for this effort). This is good, as the process consists of sending drafts out to meetings, gathering comments from the meetings, making revisions, and continuing this process until there is Quaker agreement on the result. It is a consciously spiritual process, like all else Quaker (when we are at our best, of course).

We are aided in this process by the ability to disseminate drafts electronically, over the web. In some Quaker meetings, and FMMM in particular, some 90+ % of members and attenders have email access. We still fell trees to make paper copies available where needed.

The current drafts available from SEYM change on a regular basis. For that reason, we are not listing them directly on this site, but encourage members to visit the Faith and Practice page on the SEYM site to obtain the latest versions. Note: when you click on the document link, it will attempt to open the document in the Adobe Acrobat Reader browser add-in, which is free, and is easy to install: you can download the free Adobe Reader from here. You want the free reader. You will be given a choice of the fancy or the plain free reader: if you have a fast (cable, dsl) connection or an abundance of patience, the fancy free reader will give you the ability to search the documents you are reading, which can be useful in longer documents. When you have opened the document in your browser, you can save it on your computer by going to File/Save As in the Adobe Acrobat Reader.