FALL 2005
Drew Smith
Head of School
riends School is a business. We pay our bills, contract for goods and services with vendors, meet payroll, purchase commercial insurance, and attempt to negotiate the best price for employee health coverage. Our business is affected by the cycles of oil prices, interest rates, and employment. And we must attend to the concerns of marketing, publicity, and public perception.
I was hired to teach here straight from Earlham College. Business was the farthest thing from my mind. I felt called to be in these classrooms, to share the excitement I felt about studying United States history, and to be part of the transformative experience that Friends' schools can be for their students. I hoped that I could model the very best teaching techniques I had learned from my own favorite teachers. Teaching seemed like the right way to thank those teachers who had helped me begin my journey in the world.
In June, I attended a meeting of representatives from more than 40 Quaker organizations and institutions. There were business managers and chief executives, human resources managers, and board or committee members; organizations with few employees to those with over one thousand; organizations owned and operated by monthly, quarterly, or yearly meetings, and those governed by independent, self appointing boards of trustees. There were several Friends' schools in attendance, along with three yearly meetings, Friends General Conference, Friends Center, the Friends World Committee for Consultation, and a large number of Quaker continuing care and retirement facilities, including Friends Village at Woodstown.
Our gathering listened intently to a presentation by the Mennonite Health Services Group. A significant group of Mennonite organizations has banded together to essentially form a health insurance company, supported in part by Mennonite Mutual Aid, an insurance and financial services company formed by Mennonites around one of their central testimonies: mutual aid. At the beginning of our careers, I am sure that most of us in the room never imagined sitting through such a presentation. And I am equally positive that none of us imagined feeling excited about the details of initiating a Quaker version of the Mennonite Health Alliance, but we were.
On my way home from the meeting, I thought about a metaphor that Phil Anthony has used often in conversation with me—which, he hastens to point out, he took from Martha Bryans' minute of exercise as clerk of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting at the first residential yearly meeting. A community, or for that matter any group of humans embarked upon a joint adventure of the spirit, is like a tent; it needs the tension created by the guy wires pulling outward and down and the counter force of the poles pushing the canvas up in order to remain stable as a shelter for those gathered underneath.
In our neck of the woods, there are two important Friends' institutions that exist in the minds of our neighbors, as service businesses. We know these organizations as the outreach of our spiritual lives as Friends.
Friends School and Friends Village will prosper as long the positive tension between of the push of the calling of our spirits and the pull of our budgets remains in appropriate balance. And those who are appointed to tend to each of those tensions are celebrated for the gifts that they bring to bear within the great variety of our Quaker institutions and communities.
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Last modified:
Monday, August 15, 2005 at 07:27 PM
