Business and fun

Simon Risley writes about making your Meeting ‘Awayday’ a success

Every year London West Area Meeting holds an ‘Awayday’ – or what we call an Area Meeting Gathering. We recently had our fourth and we now think we have finally cracked how to make it work.

The idea was to have a day of fellowship and fun, but the underlying purpose was to attract more people to Area Meeting – particularly younger people who had never been before. For both accessibility and price we always hold it at one of the two Meeting houses in the Area Meeting that have a large garden. We also hire a couple of ‘portaloos’ plus a marquee, should the weather turn grim. This is a formula we have stuck to.

We have broadly stuck to a formula for the day’s content. A typical Area Meeting Gathering has all-age worship in the marquee, a range of children’s activities, a slightly shorter than usual Area Meeting, presentations from our constituent Local Meetings, perhaps a speaker, a bring-and-share lunch, and we finish with tea and an epilogue.

The key to it all is to have a theme on which to hang everything. Until now we’ve had ones that were rather vague – for example ‘Who are we?’ or ‘Connections’. This year we had something rather more concrete: Advices & queries. We gave every Friend on arrival a copy of Advices & queries with a programme for the day. We started at 10am with breakfast, followed by all-age worship and then four people talked about Advices & queries: its history, how it has changed, what it is there for, and so on, complete with copies (one dating from 1835!), Questions & Counsel, and the blue and red versions. Then we had lunch. (‘Finger-food’ is the answer: much simpler, and no washing up!) After that we hold Area Meeting, which is limited to an hour-and-a-half, and then the fun activities based around our theme for the day.

We gave people several group options: to present Advices & queries to the rest of the Gathering by way of singing them; turning some into tweets; acting some as charades; and even exploring them via a game of Snakes and Ladders. Then the rest of the Gathering had to identify the Advices & queries that each group was presenting. The results were brilliant. What was surprising is how quickly Friends got them. The end result was not only an amusing afternoon but also an instructive one – there were several Friends and attenders who had never really looked at them.

After tea everyone was asked to fill in an assessment form before leaving. We have found this really invaluable in planning these events. Most rated the day as ‘excellent’. We also asked what they had enjoyed most; enjoyed least; any suggestions for improvements; whether they had been to an Area Meeting Gathering before; whether they would come again; and the participant’s age. Our total turnout was sixty-four people, including six young children and many who had never been before. In our previous three years we have had between seventy and eighty-five people. That said, the weather forecast was squalling rain and winds, so sixty-five people was pretty good – and thank heavens we had a large marquee!

So, the secret is planning (we had four planning meetings and five or six in previous years), good publicity, a programme that includes business and something instructive in the morning, and something entertaining and fun in the afternoon. Most important of all is having a really good theme, which inevitably leads to what we are thinking of doing for next year…’Testimonies’!

---

Comments

Please login to add a comment