Celebrating the liberal tradition
Marion McNaughton teels us about a new book, Celebrating the Quaker Way
In the world of charitable trusts and foundations the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust is known nationally and internationally as a funder of radical causes that challenge injustice and inequality and aim to create a better, fairer world. Within the Society of Friends in Britain and Europe it is seen primarily as a funder of Quaker projects and concerns. What is not often realised is how deeply the two are linked, and why they are interdependent.
The Manchester Conference in 1895, the setting up of Woodbrooke in 1903, and the establishment of the Rowntree Trusts in 1904 all grew from the same concern – the perceived spiritual poverty in modern British Quakerism and the dwindling of the Society of Friends. Concerned Quakers were asking how the liberal or unprogrammed Quaker tradition could find ways, without a paid and trained ministry, to keep replenishing itself spiritually, to foster a vibrant sense of itself in relation to other branches of world Quakerism, and to maintain a Quaker voice in national and world affairs: The empty benches and deserted galleries of our meeting-houses are signs of a high-water mark from which the tide has ebbed away. We may recognise local or particular reasons, more or less pertinent, but the real causes, which cannot be minimised, are the poverty of our spiritual life. - John Wilhelm Rowntree: Manchester Conference 1895.
