Live Oak Friends Meeting offers online Meetings for Worship on Zoom from 11:00 am – 12:00 noon on the second, fourth, and fifth Sunday of every month.

For more information please contact us: mail@liveoakfriends.org

Here is the beginning of a newspaper article about the quality of online worship:

“Can You Gather With God Over Zoom?” by Bianca Giaever, The New York Times,  Friday, May 22, 2020

For the past 27 years, Ted Ehrhardt has awoken on Sunday morning and headed to worship at the Brooklyn Quaker Meetinghouse. “I wait all week to get there,” he said. “I know every board in the room, every crack in the plaster.”

Quakers have worshiped in the meetinghouse on Schermerhorn Street since 1857. The walls of the room are bare and white, and when you look up to check the time, there is no clock. The room’s only decoration is a bouquet of flowers, brought every week by the flower committee.

After fighting in the Vietnam War, Ehrhardt, 76, was drawn to Quakers because of their message of nonviolence. “I’m a very conflicted, confused and bewildered man,” he said. “The meeting for me is a touchstone. It’s the thing holding me together.” So when he found out that the meeting could no longer continue because of coronavirus, he felt unmoored. Not long after, the members of the Quaker ministry and council came up with a back up plan. The meetings would resume over Zoom.

“In order to foster stillness and quiet, you’ve been automatically muted upon joining this meeting,” the worship host now announces at the virtual Brooklyn meeting each Sunday.

In Quaker worship, members sit together in silence, waiting for a message from God to move through them. This new frontier in virtual Quakerism posed a question — was it possible to gather with God over Zoom?

To read the entire article, click on the link below: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/arts/quaker-meeting-zoom.html

Contact us: mail@liveoakfriends.org