To contact the Presiding Clerk of Pacific Yearly Meeting, Joe Franko, use our contact form.

As approved by 2008 Representative Committee, registration this year is being processed through The Conference Managers, also known as Dave and Kathy. For on-line registration or PDF forms of the registration materials, please click on the link below. You may, if you choose, also use a credit card to pay for your registration on-line!
Click here to register for PYM 2008!

Call to the Yearly Gathering of Pacific Yearly Meeting 2008

One of the signs of the early Quaker community was their love and concern for each other. When a Friend had a leading, the community would help take care of the crops and the family left behind. When the parents were locked up by the authorities, the children met in worship, taking care of each other both physically and spiritually. They described in early journals how their lives had been changed by their living in a community of faith. They worshiped with each other, held each other accountable, and rejoiced in the depth of each other's spirituality!

Pacific Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends will gather for its 62^nd Yearly Gathering July 28^th to August 2^nd at Walker Creek Ranch, Petaluma, California. As we gather together in our Pacific Yearly Meeting annual sessions, let us say, as early Friends did, that newcomers will be welcomed, no one will feel alone, and folks will feel their lives were changed by being in our community! Let's come away from Pacific Yearly Meeting saying that we care more, we love more, and we sense more the moving of the Spirit among us!

Our theme this year is Integrity and the Life of a Faith Community. We are planning to spend most of our morning in worship and worship-sharing groups, and in our first afternoon trying to bring together adults, young friends, and junior friends to share what it means to us all to be part of a faith community. As always, we will celebrate in our Meeting for Memorials the lives of members who've died in the past year, and we'll see how deeply our Quakerism is set when we try to do our business in Plenaries.

Active participation is a necessary part of our Quakerism. Join with us as we share one another's spiritual journeys, seeking to share our joys and sorrows, our relationships and our loneliness, our uniqueness and our community. Join us as we enter with imagination and love into each others lives, seeking to know each other's spiritual needs, listening to each other in our agreements and disagreements, seeking to know what work the Spirit requires of us in our community and in the world. The involvement of Friends from every Monthly Meeting in PYM ensures us of the diversity necessary to seek wisdom and understanding as Friends, and also enlivens your Monthly Meeting by what you bring back to them from PYM.

Forgo the extreme business (busy-ness) of your life to immerse yourself in our loving community, sharing honestly our faith and our beliefs, giving each other what we know of Truth and listen respectfully to what others know of Truth, since all of us are frail vessels for the divine. The power of our Quakerism is that we understand our Truth is not what we bring to the community, but how we are changed by our community. Each of us has gifts to share that are essential to the well-being and wholeness of our community. Each of us needs the hope that is the gift of our community to each of us.

This year I hope each of us will find some way to make less of an impact on the environment as we travel to PYM. I'm going to take the two weeks prior to gathering to bicycle north from Los Angeles to PYM (leaving July 13^th or 14^th). Consider how you will get to PYM ... bike, train, bus, filled cars or vans? See if you can make a difference before and after PYM by considering how you travel. If there are a few folks who might like to join me on my bicycle trip, please let me know. We'll try to arrange to stay at Meeting's and camps on the way north, encouraging folks we meet to join our community at PYM. If you want to do that with me, send me a short message.

I look forward to see you all this summer... In friendship, Joe