Williamsburg Friends Meeting

Spring 2019 Interchange Report

Williamsburg Friends have been using the Quakerspeak videos on First Sundays as an outreach vehicle. We invite interested guests to view the videos and participate in discussion or worship-sharing about them, and then join us for lunch afterward. We have had a few visitors for the videos and have enjoyed their participation in considering them. We also hosted Mattaponi Meeting recently to worship together and discuss growing our meetings. A joy for us is that a long-time member who has been hospitalized a number of times over this last year is recovering well and is able to come to Meeting again.

Spring 2017 Interchange Report

After meeting for 36 years, the Quakers of Williamsburg Friends Meeting are now occupying our own Meeting House. We have recently leased Fahs House on the campus of the Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists at 3051 Ironbound Road, Williamsburg, VA. The Williamsburg Quakers first met in 1981 in the home of founding members Len and Peg McMaster. In the early 1990’s the group met on Sunday afternoons at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. Since 2006, the Williamsburg Montessori School on Longhill Road has been the Quakers’ Sunday morning home. With the new space on the WUU campus, Williamsburg Friends plan to host more community events and discussions throughout the week. We look forward to hosting more Quaker visitors in our new meetinghouse (Meeting for Worship is at 10am). And we welcome the guidance of other Meetings on how to best manage our new space.

Winter 2012 Interchange Report

Williamsburg currently meets at the Montessori School outside of town, and the school is expanding! The Montessori staff have been wonderful hosts to our Meeting, and we are delighted, but the shortage of space left us scrambling to find a new spot for the library. Fortunately, one of our new attenders, Bill O’Connell, will be housing the library for us. We are so thankful for Bill! We are attempting to reach out to the community by placing advertisements in the local paper.

Our faithful childcare high school student is moving on to JMU this fall. Katrina was well liked by the four children who come to Meeting every other week. She usually joined us for worship if no children attended, and she will be very much missed. The students in first day school studied a variety of topics this year. They discussed the meaning of many words associated with religion, and touched upon some of the stories of the Old Testament. Adult Education addressed the Gospel of Thomas, as well as reading and discussing the new BYM Faith and Practice.

We’ve had several new attenders join us this past year, and this has been enriching. We also lost a faithful attender, Lee Nichols. Lee was an upbeat, knowledgeable attender who was a member Sandy Spring Meeting. His ministry was warm and revealed a tender, kind, helpful, person. We miss him.