The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
Loving Greetings to Friends everywhere,
British Friends of all ages, and visiting Friends from around the world, have gathered in London for our second of three Yearly Meetings looking at ‘Living out our faith in the world’ and have experienced a great depth of worship.
During the Yearly Meeting at the University of Warwick between 29 July and 5 August Friends dealt with an enormous number of items of routine business, including various nominations, and the business sessions were ably dealt with by the clerking team of Deborah Rowlands, clerk, and assistant clerks Clare Scott Booth and Siobhan Haire.
At the recent Yearly Meeting Gathering participants were given a daily journal for their notes. At the top of each page were a few questions on the particular theme of each day. As often happens, some spoke to me more than others, and some spoke to me because of the alternative questions they provoked.
There are positive things we can look forward to, Molly Scott Cato, Quaker and Green MEP, assured her audience at the 2017 Salter Lecture, ‘Brexit, Chilcot and the Role of Conscience in the Political Life’, which was delivered on Wednesday evening at Yearly Meeting, but ‘something is rotten in the public realm’. She argued that the UK now faces ‘a more serious crisis than any my generation can remember’. At a time when leaders of stature were needed it can seem that ‘small souls with little wisdom’ are governing us. ‘Politicians are still human beings,’ she said, ‘so, how can we balance reason and intuition; the need to represent people with conscience?’
If the Spirit is in every person then the Quaker community is, by definition, open to all.
In the George Gorman Lecture, held on Tuesday 1 August, Tim Gee explored themes such as power, diversity, and the spiritual root of action.
"If you truly want to be led you must put yourself in a position that allows following" (PYM)
Though written within a Quaker and Christian context, this book can be used by anyone of any religious faith or secular inclination. The only requirement is a desire to follow, to be guided by, to align with the richness of the ineffable, which this book calls "the Way". This book seeks nothing less than to aid readers in aligning their lives with the same power and richness that animated the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
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