Quaker Family Life

Windy is a traveling public minister from Baltimore Yearly Meeting. While studying for her Master of Divinity degree at Earlham School of Religion she has focused her academic work around how to enrich and care for the families in our community. Her ongoing research into who our families are, what we need, what we have to offer and how to best serve our communal interests has been supported by ESR, the Lyman Fund, BYM, Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting, individual Friends and the many yearly meetings she has visited in the last two years. 

She is currently writing a book that explores the results of her original research and integrates the tender and wise voices of Friends across North America. The working title is Holding Our Families in the Light: Reclaiming Family Values as an Inclusive Ministry.

The book is geared toward an unprogrammed Quaker audience, which is to date where her ministry has led her. It will explore topics that are often hard to honestly and completely talk about inside many monthly and yearly meetings -- such as domestic violence, our relationship to money and the economy, race, queer identities, divorce, death and other tender life transitions -- through the lens of family and pastoral care. It will also explore how we best support parents and children and intimate partner relationships where they are as well as the already emerging and hopeful ministries that support families. The book will explore deeply the development of our own explicit contributions to the conversation around family values that we have to offer the rest of the world.

Everyone has a family, whatever it may look like or feel like. Our meetings are made of families. 

Windy's public ministry is both hopeful and comforting and a necessary call for reform inside our monthly and yearly meetings.

Windy is available as a facilitator for workshops and interest groups around topics of family, transitions, and pastoral care to families.