Peace Pedalers: A Call to Ministry

Editor’s Note

This article was gleaned from two conversations I had with Jonathan Vogel-Borne in July and August 2026. This is the third and final installment of a three-part series on a cross-country bicycle trip for peace that took place in 1982. Paul Jolly, who had the initial impulse for the trip, was interviewed for Experiences of Youth (May / June 2026). Lauren Mari-Navarro was interviewed in the last issue Fire (July / August 2026).

The specific call to go on this bicycle trip came during a pivotal transition. I had been playing in rock-and-roll bands. When you're in a band, you are completely committed, but the band my brother and I were in dissolved. I started working at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

One Sunday during meeting for worship at the Loudon Nelson Center, I had a sudden vision of my life being thrown up into the air. As it settled, I was reflecting on Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican Army member who had recently died on a hunger strike, using nonviolent resistance and fasting to give his life for his cause. I asked myself what I would be willing to lay my life down for, recognizing that giving one's life over to a higher purpose was what Jesus did.

A month earlier at Ben Lomond Quaker Center, I had met Paul, who mentioned his plan for a transcontinental bike ride to promote peace beyond draft resistance. At the time, I thought he was crazy. But during that meeting for worship, a message came to me with absolute clarity: Go on that bike ride. I walked out of worship knowing I was going.

That afternoon at the boardwalk, the leader of my former band came by to ask me to join a new project he was forming. I told him that one door had closed and another had just opened: the call to the bike ride was unmistakable. That clear sense of calling was one of the strongest I've ever experienced.

The group had the brilliant idea to do a trial ride from the Bay Area up to Grass Valley and back. When we got back, we shed a third of our gear because realized we simply didn't need it.

It was amazing that there were six of us who wanted to go on that bike ride, who felt strongly that this was what we needed to do.

We divided the trip into segments handled by different people. I was the lead organizer for California. In those days, organizing meant payphones and postcards. On a typewriter, I could fit a tremendous amount of information onto a single postcard. I sent postcard after postcard, finding payphones or using phones in the homes of people we stayed with. I made the contacts and calls to let people know we were coming, calling about two hours out as we got closer. Without cell phones or email, it's amazing to think how we managed it, but that's just what you did.

Our route from there went south from Santa Cruz and then across into the Central Valley through Gilroy, Fresno, Visalia, and Bakersfield, traveling down the middle of the valley. I remember being at the Visalia Meeting and speaking about how we were bringing seeds. Someone there corrected me and said, "No, you're not. The seeds are already here. Maybe you're watering or nurturing them, but we have a lot going on here." That was a really important lesson to check our sense of exceptionalism.

People would ask us, "How can you take this time out of your life?" We would answer, "This is life. This is not time out; this is time in." It was a wonderful balance between feeling unique because of what we were doing and maintaining humility.

I would characterize our mission as listening to the American people for the spiritual basis of disarmament. We would roll into town loaded down with gear, and people would wonder what on earth we were doing. Cross-country cycling was still relatively rare back then; the big 1976 Bicentennial route across America was about 3,000 miles, but our route was closer to 7,000 miles. People along the way were remarkably gracious. Even folks who disagreed with our message would say, "Well, I don't really agree with you, but I want to support you somehow, so here's $20."

It’s very hard for a person to deny your humanity of integrity face-to-face. When you are just an abstract concept, a political idea, or a face on TV that people judge from a distance, you can become dehumanized. Traveling by bicycle was a way of connecting directly with people. That was the core of the experience. You moved just a little faster than walking speed, but you could still stop, say hello, and engage. Time after time, people welcomed us into their hearts, offering us space in their backyards or even once paying for a hotel room for us.

When you're doing that much intense physical work, bicycling and presenting, it gets to your soul after a while. That doesn't always translate into the best behavior with each other. Peacemaking had to start within the group itself. We had some serious conflicts. But there was an underlying sense that we were called, on a mission, and guided by Spirit. Our little newsletter, Second Wind, had a line about dealing with the challenges of both "head spaces" and "headwinds”.

When we reached areas without a Quaker presence, which was true for much of the Midwest, we would pull out the local Yellow Pages and pick a church to approach. We joked about looking for the "Church of the Nectarines" when searching for Nazarene churches, or we would call up local Methodists and ask, "Can we stay in your basement?" They almost always said yes. Church basements were a blessing in the hot, muggy Midwestern summer heat, and I learned how to make coffee in every imaginable way because there was always a pot brewing in a church basement.

Paul and I fasted for three days while riding our bikes, followed by a week-long fast during Holy Week. Fasting while cycling was grueling, though fortunately that stretch of coast was relatively flat!

The trip accelerated my grounding in Quaker ministry and opened doors throughout my life. It fostered a lifelong pursuit of deeper unity among diverse Quaker traditions. My time in New England Yearly Meeting was a gift because it spanned a broad theological spectrum, including unprogrammed, Christ-centered, Wilburite roots that closely match my own spirituality. Ultimately, true witness comes from a deep testimony to the love of God, from which all other testimonies flow.

My wife Minga and I served as resident friends at Cambridge Meeting for five years, and I spent twenty-one years working with New England Yearly Meeting, followed by my work with Friends Peace Teams, where I helped modernize their operations and graphic arts. Now, Minga and I have the opportunity to serve as resident friends again in Honolulu. We describe our relationship as twin flames, derived from the same source, and working together in shared ministry is an immense blessing.

My initial call to ministry actually traces back to my mother's passing. My mother was the historian and archivist for Pacific Yearly Meeting for most of her life, a role my sister holds today, so Quakerism is a family tradition spanning three generations for me, and thirteen generations for Minga's family.

During a hiatus with my rock band in Santa Cruz, I went down to Pasadena to be with my parents during the last month of my mother's life. She was in a nursing home, and we established a routine where I would feed her lunch and my father would feed her dinner.

One day, there was a family gathering in her room—maybe six or eight of us crammed in together. The brain tumor had severely limited her ability to speak, but she was trying so animatedly to communicate that something had been left undone. As she lay dying and I was feeding her, she fell into this litany, repeating over and over, "I'm scared to death, I'm scared to death."

I felt absolute devastation. Internally, I was thinking, I'm scared to death, too, can't you be stronger for me? I felt a wave of anger and helplessness. But sitting there in that distress, an epiphany struck me: Am I living my life so fully that I would be prepared to die at any moment?

The answer was a clear no. I count that moment as my true call to ministry. I realized I was going to make something of my life and I had to figure out how to fulfill that. It was a profound gift from my mother. In the three or four years that followed, that realization led me deeper into young adult Friend gatherings, searching for unity and peace, and eventually bore fruit in the cross-country bicycle trip.