Quakerism and Sustainability: Camas Friends Practice A New “Plainness”

I’ve posted about this already on Twitter and Facebook so excuse the repetition, but it seems like it should be here on my blog as well. Plus, I’m really pleased with our church. Camas Friends are doing some pretty cool stuff, and it’s all stuff I cannot take any credit for! (This just shows how cool this place is). They’ve been up to some really awesome practices around caring for God’s creation: things such as, teaching classes on eating in ways that healthy and local, learning how to de-clutter our lives, planting raised bed gardens – we’ve got one at the meetinghouse right now, and reflecting on how this is all tied it to our Quaker testimony of plainness and other similar sensibilities. Camas Friends are showing their faith by how they live out their lives in very practical ways.

The other day our local newspaper got wind of it and interviewed some of us about what we’re doing. The reporter initially sent me, and a couple other folks emails, about how we see sustainability all tied into being Quakers. I wrote out some of my thoughts on the issue and then invited the rest of the church to dialogue about it over email. We got some really great responses, which I sent to the reporter.

The paper featured our church in a Sustainability section last week. Here’s a scanned .pdf version of the article because they didn’t make the essay available online:  Spiritual Sustainability