Baltimore Yearly Meeting celebrates 350th Anniversary: Annual Session Registration opens May 3

Anniversary Logo

Baltimore Yearly Meeting is one of the oldest Yearly Meetings in the US. RantWoman always has website envy when she visits their website so RantWoman will leave that as an exercise for readers. 

RantWoman, however is VERY happy to offer Baltimore Yearly Meeting, blended July 2022 

This link is a 25-page document about BYM annual session.

From the Clerk's call:

I am pleased to invite everyone to join with Friends of Baltimore Yearly Meeting for our 2022 Annual Session. Many Friends will be appreciative that we are able to be in person together again at Hood College in Frederick, MD, on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway. We will also be inviting Friends who cannot be with us physically to join us virtually, and whether you join in-person or online, Annual Session will follow a Pay As Led model. With the many different options for participation, we hope this Annual Session will be accessible for more Friends as we commemorate our 350th year of being a faith community in this geographic region. 

Our theme - Consider the Wildflowers: Rooted in History, Growing Toward Spirit- asks us to consider our Quaker faith as “a meadow full of wildflowers” with each of us a bloom spreading the seeds of our ministry. We are asked to contribute to the tending of our communal field, that the earth does not become hard packed, and to repair those places so new flowers have space to join us. 

Our time together will be enriched by many Friends who will be part of plenaries, workshops, worship sharing, Bible study, and other planned events. We will also be engaging in the business of our Yearly Meeting: the more earthly parts that keep us rooted, the blooms of Spirit that we see in each other, and the seeds we carry out into the world in our work. We will take time to look back on our 350 years - celebrations and challenges, where we find ourselves today, and what we hope to grow into as a faith community together. And we will enjoy and celebrate in the simple gifts of being present to each other, in community, in the spaces between events. 

I hope that you will join us, for the first time or after many previous years, to broaden and deepen our community in its search for what we are asked to do as Friends searching for Truth, living in Love, and helping each other learn and grow. 

Steph Bean,

 Presiding Clerk (they/them or she/her) 

Baltimore Yearly Meeting 

of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) 

One small accessibility quibble: RantWoman can see what look like lots of fun images but they all read to a screen reader as "unlabelled image." RantWoman wonders whether Friends might also enjoy knowing who is in the pictures aoreabit more context.