Wonder & Welcome: Holding Our Family of Friends in the Light

May 5, 2022 | Publications Videos

The 2022 Walton Lecture, with Windy Cooler & Melinda Wenner Bradley

We want a vibrant multigenerational community, but what stands in the way? What lights the way? What stories do we carry about our families, our meetings, and our faith that invite or discourage our wonder, our welcome, and our inclusion of all ages in community?

All of us belong to families: circles of kinship, of friendship, and of spiritual community. What stories do we carry about our families, our meetings, and our faith that invite or discourage wonder and welcome? How have our families modeled hospitality and boundaries, and when have we needed to find more support? How do our meetings nurture hospitality and boundaries and can we discern when to change?

In this 2022 Walton Lecture, Windy Cooler and Melinda Wenner Bradley explore our familial, community, and spiritual relationships. We need to tap into our sense of wonder, awe, curiosity and awe. We need to listen to our stories: to affirm and lament, to embrace deeper truth telling, to find the time to be tender, and to engage in supportive discernment about who we really are and want to be together.

Windy Cooler is an embraced public Friend whose ministry is held under the care of Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting, Baltimore Yearly. She is Pendle Hill’s 2020 Cadbury Scholar and a frequent guest of monthly and yearly meetings in the US where she has researched, lectured and given workshops on the connection between robust pastoral care responses, Quaker family life, and social justice in peer to peer ministry.

A current doctoral candidate at Lancaster Theological Seminary, her work incorporates ethnography and the Quaker tradition of discernment processes to help communities move forward in the Light. She lives with her husband Erik and son Ob in Greenbelt, MD, and has an adult daughter, Maggie.

Melinda Wenner Bradley (she/her) is an advocate for families in Quaker spaces whose ministry weaves together interests in children’s spiritual lives, all-ages program development, and support for parents and teachers in Quaker meetings and schools. After almost twenty years as a classroom teacher, raising her own children transformed her sense of belonging as a Friend and revealed a leading to nurture experiential religious education and intergenerational spiritual community among Friends. She is a member of West Chester Meeting, and currently serves as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Youth Religious Life Coordinator.

Melinda is a co-founder of the Quaker Religious Education Collaborative and the Director of Communications and Training for Faith & Play Stories; she co-authored and edited Faith & Play: Quaker Stories for Friends Trained in the Godly Play Method. This method of storytelling, facilitation, and spiritual nurture, grounded in “wondering,” finds its way into almost everything she does. Sharing stories has taken her into children’s programs, multigenerational worship spaces, school classrooms, teacher workshops, and international gatherings of Quakers in Peru, England, and Kenya. Melinda writes for the Illuminate Bible study series for Barclay Press, and co-authored a 2019 Friends Journal article with her children, “I Am a Quaker.”