Quaker Meeting for Fun

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1. Open Table Friends Church lists “fun” as a core value alongside Jesus and justice. How does prioritizing fun change the way a community interacts with and grows spiritually?
2. One community member noted that fear was often used as a tool for control in their past religious experiences. How does shifting from a foundation of fear to a foundation of joy fundamentally reshape a person’s faith?
3. Mark talks about the life-giving freedom of holding theology with open hands and realizing that some “non-negotiables” are actually negotiable. What does it look like to remain faithful while holding your beliefs loosely?

Julie Nalow 

So having fun builds connections that allow us to feel close to one another as a community, and in those connections, it allows us to be our honest selves with one another, and ultimately, that’s why we’re all here. Community connection, fun.

Zack Jackson 

Welcome to Thee Quaker Podcast. I’m Zack Jackson. Throughout season 3, we have endeavored to take you inside various Quaker Meetings for Worship to experience some of the diverse expressions of Quaker worship. We went inside pastoral meetings in North Carolina and Indiana. We visited a Conservative Meeting for Worship and even recorded an entire hour of unprogrammed worship. But today, as we close out season 3, we want to take you somewhere… else. To a Quaker Meeting that began in Northeast Ohio, but today is primarily… online.

Mark Winner 

My name is Mark Winner. I’m the co-pastor of Open Table Friends Church. I do a lot of the creative things, a lot of the technical things for the meeting.

Liz Brainard 

I’m Liz Brainard. I am one of the co-pastors of Open Table Friends Church, and I do more of the administrative side. Mark is the creative genius, and I am the one who makes sure things get done and bills get paid.

Zack Jackson 

Mark and Liz didn’t set out to be digital church planters. After decades of working in pastoral ministry, and following a messy break with their previous Friends Church, they were ready for a new beginning. But they quickly realized they couldn’t just walk away. They had witnessed too many people—especially in the LGBTQ community—who had hit an invisible wall in church life, but who still were searching nonetheless.

Liz Brainard 

And that’s where I think we were: “Oh, we can’t really step away because people are crying out for a place.” Because where we live, there is not necessarily a place for them to go and worship, and feel like they’re accepted and affirmed as part of a child of God. So that’s why I think we jumped into it so quick.

Zack Jackson 

So, in the summer of 2020, they gathered a handful of committed people. They put on their masks and sat in a local park to dream up a different kind of faith community.

Liz Brainard 

So we met early on. We did this a little backwards. We had some pretty committed people early on, and we started fleshing out what are the things that we feel like are important that we want to value. We brainstormed a mission statement, a vision statement, and all those things that other church planters would have done years in advance. We did on the opposite end, and so that’s where our core values all came out of that initial meeting with the people who I think we would call stakeholders at the time. So when we—and I laugh because when you came from this evangelical tradition of church planting, people would come up with this whole plan to plant a church that would take years. And we did the opposite. We started a church with little to no planning. We just felt this movement.

Zack Jackson 

To build a genuine community for the digital age, Mark and Liz went backwards in time. They had spent decades in the Evangelical Friends Church, but realized they had lost touch with their early Quaker identity. So, they started digging up the roots of their faith.

Liz Brainard 

So I think part of what we were trying to do at Open Table is rediscover our roots. That’s why you probably see this odd mixture of an evangelical planned church service, and yet there are these Quaker elements that we’re trying to rediscover and get back into.

Zack Jackson 

Guided by the conviction that there is that of God in everyone, they wanted to birth a community where “you are welcome here” was a lived reality and not just a slogan. They needed to lower the barrier to entry so people felt secure enough to actually show up as their authentic selves and not who they thought they were supposed to be.

Mark Winner 

There’s just a lot to that notion of coming to the table. In my prior evangelical life, I’ve heard many people talk about the empty chair, leaving it open for Jesus to show up. But anymore, Jesus is there. The empty chairs, the empty tables—they’re for all the people who might just want to show up and get a bite and hang with us. We limit ourselves so much in religion, don’t we, Zach? But we don’t need to, and we certainly don’t limit ourselves at Open Table.

Zack Jackson 

And to keep those tables truly open, they established a simple list of convictions. It included things like Jesus, inclusion, and justice. But it also included a core value that most theologians and church planters completely ignore.

Mark Winner 

So we say we’re about Jesus, we’re about people, we’re about love, we’re about inclusion, we’re about community, we’re about justice, we’re about service, we’re about kindness, we’re about learning, and we’re about fun. And I’ll be honest with you: at that first meeting when the notion of fun came up, we’re like, “Duh.”

Zack Jackson 

Back in 2020, thousands of churches set up webcams in the backs of empty sanctuaries, and many Quaker Meetings tried to recreate unprogrammed meetings on Zoom. They were just trying to survive by translating an in-person routine to the internet. But Mark and Liz weren’t translating. They were creating an internet-first community designed to reach people with a message of hope and liberation.

Liz Brainard 

And again, the online experience works for our people who are not local. As Mark said, they’re living out of state or out of country, but it gives them a chance to engage. We try to keep the comments section active during our meetings for worship so people are contributing. We also do segments where people’s voices can be heard or they could be seen on screen beyond just us. I think that’s one of the ways we’re trying to get back to some of these old Quaker lines of thought: that the pastor doesn’t need to be held above anybody else’s spiritual gifts. Just because we have this spiritual gift of being a pastor doesn’t mean our voice is any more valuable. So we really should be hearing from our people on a more regular basis than just the two people who hold the title of pastors.

Zack Jackson 

By leaning into the digital medium, they broke down the polished facade of Sunday morning. They wanted to capture a very specific, unguarded energy.

Mark Winner 

It’s so fun in the chat. It’s the type of things that you would do when you’re in a church building but church isn’t happening. It’s all the laughter in the foyer. It’s all the hysterical stories that you tell in the parking lot because you don’t dare say those words inside of a sanctuary. We just do that all the time.

Zack Jackson 

To see what that parking lot energy looks like when it’s made the center of a Quaker Meeting, they sent me a recording from February 2021. It was the final week of a series on their core values, and the theme for the day was ‘Fun’.

Elizabeth 

Open Table Friends Church. It’s your pal Elizabeth here, and I’m gonna be your host today, and I can’t wait. Can you tell how excited I am? Look at my eyes—they’re huge. Okay, we have a lot.

Zack Jackson 

Because this was a virtual meeting, a lot of the fun was highly visual. So, allow me to be your audio tour guide. On screen, a community member named Elizabeth is hosting from her living room, projecting as much joy and fun into her webcam as is humanly possible.

Elizabeth 

Because at Open Table, we’re all about fun. And I haven’t met all of you yet in person, but I’m fairly confident that we all have this one in the bag. Okay, so another thing I need you to do: I need you to get up, stretch it out, walk to wherever your pens and paper are—pencils, colored pencils, crayons—just something to draw with. You need something to draw with and a piece of paper for everyone watching service right now. We’re gonna play a game in a little bit, and you don’t want to miss out because it’s going to be really fun and there’s a really cool prize.

Zack Jackson 

The game was a blindfolded drawing contest. Everyone in the virtual meeting had five minutes to close their eyes and draw a portrait of Pastors Mark and Liz from memory. The winner would be mailed a box of gourmet chocolates. But as is the case when you try something new, things didn’t exactly go as planned.

Mark Winner 

More technical difficulties. How fun is this? Apparently, you are no longer able to post pictures in the comments section. So those of you who tried to do so, you can’t do it.

Zack Jackson 

With a nod and a disarming smile Mark pivoted the contest to Facebook on the fly. Later in the meeting, they read prayer requests over a bed of static from a malfunctioning microphone. And then, it was time for the kids.

Lee

Hi, I’m Lee. Today we’re going to be having a dance party live. Take it away.

Zack Jackson 

Instead of singing hymns or praise songs, the musical selections for the day were actually taken from the movie Frozen and the early 2000’s rock band Jimmy Eat World. But the lightheartedness wasn’t just in the games or the music. It was the foundation of the message. When it was time to teach, Liz used the chaotic tech glitches of the morning to talk about something deeply vulnerable.

Liz Brainard 

I don’t know about many of you, but I know I’ve been part of communities in the past where we’ve had to put on that kind of mask of Christian perfection—of “Of course I have everything together.” Even if we didn’t mean to put on that mask, we would often come into service and act like, “Yep, I have it all together.” Especially, as pastors, you guys think that we may have it together more than you, but we probably have it together less than you, which is good for you to keep in mind. Not that you hold us to a lower standard, but that we’re human just like you, trying to figure this out. But these are the values that we feel called to live by.

Zack Jackson 

It was a profound way to teach that the Divine cares more about our honest reality than our polished facades. Towards the end of the meeting, Mark drove that point home.

Mark Winner 

The truth is, we can’t truly enjoy life until we can be our authentic selves. When we feel like we have to pretend to be someone else, life tends to get more difficult for us, or at least not very fun. In the same way Jesus looked at Peter, warts and all, and still called him, God looks at you for who you truly are and He still wants you. You may think that you’re not worth much to God, that you’ve done too many bad things, or that you’re carrying too much shame around. But those are nothing more than the lies of the great tempter. God sees you, God knows you, and God wants you. God knows your heart, and when you allow yourself to bear your whole heart before God without trying to be someone that you’re not, that’s when the fun really begins.

Zack Jackson 

For Liz, that messiness isn’t a distraction from worship. It is the great equalizer.

Liz Brainard 

So I leave with so much joy just from seeing people who I think are not putting the pastor on this pedestal. They see that we are just part of this community together and that we’re figuring this out together. Mark and I are very upfront to say that we don’t have all the answers and we’re not any better than the rest of you. We’re figuring this out; sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t. A lot of the time it’s messy, and we’re going to laugh about it. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to continue learning, but we’re not going to take ourselves too seriously. I think that’s the joy of every time we get together in person. I walk away with so much joy and lightheartedness that I never had beforehand.

Zack Jackson 

Mark, Liz, and the Open Table team poured out their authentic selves to create a digital sanctuary where people could finally breathe. But a dance party over Zoom is one thing. Sustaining a community for years is another. Is “fun” actually strong enough to hold a spiritual community together for the long haul, and can silliness inspire real transformation? We’ll find out after a quick break.

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Zack Jackson 

Hey friends, Zack here. I love getting messages from you, and recently I got an email from Ashley Long in Edmonton, Alberta, that caught my eye. By day, she’s a chemical lab tech who tests breathing systems, and until recently, didn’t think too much about religion.

Ashley Long 

And yeah, all I knew from about Quakers was I read the books Outlander and there’s some Quaker characters in that. Yeah it just occurred to me one day I was like, “Is that still around? Do they? Maybe I should look them up”, and I just started on Google, Wikipedia, and I’m and I’m just reading about you know some very broad overviews of what they believe.

Zack Jackson 

The more she read, the more she resonated with Quakerism. She even found a Quaker meeting not too far from her house. But there was just one problem.

Ashley Long 

I’m like, okay, maybe I’ll just pop in. And I was like, I don’t know. I’m not really good with social situations, and this is a very small group. Like, if it was like another church, you could like sit in the back of a pew somewhere and kind of observe without being observed yourself.

Zack Jackson 

That’s when Ashley discovered Thee Quaker Podcast, and as she listened to real voices tell their stories, she found the courage to actually walk into her local meeting in Edmonton for the very first time. I asked her what that first meeting felt like.

Ashley Long 

It was very calming, like there’s just this feeling that I was, you know, being enveloped with this warmth and being surrounded by people who were believing and just caring, and I just felt very much at home.

Zack Jackson 

But what really struck me about our conversation was her profound sense of connection to you, the listener, and why she decided to become a monthly supporter.

Ashley Long 

I was getting so much out of it, and just I enjoyed it, and I was, and it opened me up, and I was just so happy to have found it. I was like, more people need to have this experience, if at all possible. I guess I’m just very happy to be part of this community now, and I’m glad that everybody, you know, at Thee Quaker and who is Quaker and is even just listening to this podcast. But I now know you’re out there, and I’m happy to have not met you, but to be part of your community. And what can I do to help that and help other people have this great experience that I’ve had? And that’s through supporting. I can afford 10 bucks a month, so that’s what I’m gonna do.

Zack Jackson 

Ashley’s $10 a month is like leaving a porch light on for someone else who is searching in the dark. It ensures that when someone out there googles, “Are Quakers still around?”, we are here, ready to answer with stories, history, and a welcoming community. If this podcast has been a light for you, or if you want to help others find their way to a meeting like Ashley did, would you consider joining her? Head on over to quakerpodcast.com/support. That’s quakerpodcast.com/support Thank you so much, and now back to the show.

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Zack Jackson 

Welcome back. Before the break, we were looking at the chaotic, joyful energy of Open Table Friends Church during their early days on Zoom. But as the years have passed, Mark and Liz have figured out how to use the unique strengths of the internet not just for games, but to breathe new life into traditional Quaker practices. Take, for instance, unprogrammed waiting worship.

Mark Winner 

And while we did make a commitment to having some small portion of silence—or waiting worship—during our meetings for worship, which we do consistently, it’s not the same as truly silent meeting for worship. So, as an example, we have at the end of our meetings for worship now a time that we have been calling spiritual practice. We’ve tried different things. We’ve done a number of different prayer exercises or different things. But more and more, it’s where we pose a question and then just put the question on the screen with light music in the background while people can type in the chat. And then typically, if I’m the only one that’s live, I’ll come back and read some of them. It’s a good conversation that way.

Zack Jackson 

Nestling a deeply reflective spiritual practice right next to a live chatbox might seem unorthodox, but it creates a completely low-stakes environment. And for Liz, that lack of pressure is the whole point. It’s a trauma-informed choice designed to turn their entire church into a safe haven for the spiritually wounded.

Liz Brainard 

We’ve had people for whom this has been a stopping point on a journey out of church trauma. A lot of them have stopped being part of a church community altogether. I think that was a little tough at first, but now being older and wiser, I realize that’s okay. People are on their own paths and journeys, and if this is a stopping point for them to have freedom away from some of the things that harmed them in the past, then that’s who we are. We’re a safe place for them to start processing that.

Zack Jackson 

That spaciousness—the permission to simply exist without demands—gives the community the bandwidth to tackle heavy, demanding justice work.

Liz Brainard 

And so, for us, I know one of the big things is being rooted in justice. Not being afraid to talk about the things we’re seeing and witnessing that are bothering us that don’t seem to be aligned with what we value as Quakers or even as people who claim to be Christ followers. And I was raised in a mainland denomination and entered into evangelicalism in college and was part of that for about 15 to 17 years, where we didn’t talk about justice issues. They were taboo to talk about in an evangelical church. And then learning the history of the Quaker movement, being like, “No, this is a core identity feature to this. Why are we not talking about this?”

Zack Jackson 

Joy and rest aren’t distractions from the hard work of faith; they are the fuel for it. But I wondered if that was true for the members of Open Table as well as the leadership. So I asked a few members of Open Table why “fun” is still important for authentic faith formation. They sent me the following voice memos.

Julie Nalow 

So when I think about why the notion of fun is so important at Open Table Friends, I think it’s because fun is what makes people let their guards down. Fun is what helps people to open up to one another about what they truly think about their faith, about God, and know that we can do that because there’s no judgment in that other person. So having fun builds connections that allow us to feel close to one another as a community, and in those connections, it allows us to be our honest selves with one another, and ultimately, that’s why we’re all here. Community, connection, fun.

Sarah Bratt 

So many of us that grew up in the evangelical Christian church, fun was not a prioritized thing. Fear was very much used to control us, the fear of hell being a pretty effective tool at keeping Christians in line. And nothing’s

Michael Bratt 

more fun than the fear of hell,

Sarah Bratt 

So that’s been so many evangelicals’ experience growing up in the church, and that’s driven so many people away from the church. Because when you do your deconstructing and you realize what’s at the root of it is love, Jesus. Jesus tells you to love your neighbor. Jesus tells you to love everybody. So that is what Open Table has chosen to really hone in on. And with love comes joy and comes fun. So that’s the route that I’ve seen us taking in this community.

Michael Bratt 

it’s way easier to reach people through fun than through fire and brimstone.

Sarah Bratt 

Yeah.

Zack Jackson 

This shift away from “fire and brimstone” doesn’t just heal the congregation. It heals the leaders, too. When they let go of the pressure to be pristine experts, Mark and Liz found the intellectual and spiritual freedom to hold their own theology with open hands.

Mark Winner 

And again, I think I could say this for both Liz and I: we have found so much freedom in this community. They allow us to try things. Liz, I don’t know if I ever even said this to you before, but I noticed a couple years ago there was a while every teaching you did, you didn’t read a single scripture verse, and I’m like, “Huh, I wonder how I feel about that.” Now you’re doing it again. We haven’t talked about it.

Liz Brainard 

I have a complicated relationship with a lot of things, including scripture. So trust me, I know.

Mark Winner 

But at the time, I was like, “I’m okay with this.” This is not something that we need to decide on because that’s not the priority. Scripture is not the only part of our faith. In fact, as Quakers, I would say it’s one of the least important parts of our faith. But I guess that’s the priority for me since I’ve been a part of Open Table: being open-hearted and open-handed with what we’re willing to try, what I’m willing to believe, or the beliefs that I need to walk away from and figure out. Even if I don’t know anymore, there’s been so much freedom in that, Zack. It has been so life giving to be a part of a community where we can figure things out together, or not at all.

Liz Brainard 

Nope, 100% agree. That’s there’s real joy and freedom just in that, not having to have all the answers and being able to walk away from things that we were told for a very long time were non-negotiables, and now we’re like, oh no, they’re negotiables. They’re totally fine.

Zack Jackson 

When you are no longer pretending to be perfect, you actually have the space to be faithful. Mark, Liz, and the entire Open Table community have discovered that a thriving spiritual home isn’t built on rigid boundaries or forced solemnity. It’s built on the radical, restorative practice of laughing together. Because when the barrier to entry is joy, then everyone truly has a seat at the table. 

Zack Jackson 

Thank you for listening, and thank you to our guests Mark Winner, Liz Brainard, and the rest of Open Table Friends Church. For discussion questions and a transcript of today’s episode, make sure you check out Quakerpodcast.com. We’ll also include links to the full meeting for worship that we talked about today. 

This episode was hosted, produced and edited by me Zack Jackson, Jon Watts wrote and produced the music.

Thee Quaker Podcast is a part of Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakerism a platform for the 21st Century.

Here at the end of season 3, we want to hear from you, our listeners, about what resonated with you, what you’d like to hear more of, and what we can do better. So check out the link in the show notes to a quick, 5 minute survey. Thank you so much for helping us to tell these stories of spiritual courage in a world that so clearly needs to hear them. 

And now your daily Quaker message as read by Grace Gonglewski

Grace Gonglewski 

The real difference between happiness and joy is that one is grounded in this world, the other in eternity. Happiness cannot encompass suffering and evil; joy can. Happiness depends on the present. Joy leaps into the future and triumphantly creates a new present out of it. Elise Boulding, 1956.

Zack Jackson 

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, go to dailyquaker.com. That’s DailyQuaker.com.

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)