Different kinds of friends united
Friends Abroad: David reflects on his recent tour of Australia and New Zealand
In December 1842 Quakers Martha and Samuel Strong arrived on the vessel Bombay at the new settlement of Nelson, on the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. Eager to establish a Quaker presence in Britain’s newest colony, they joined with another Friend, John Cotterell, to buy Town Acre 667, a plot of land on a steep hillside where Nelson’s first Quaker Meeting house and burial ground would be established.
Soon half a dozen Friends were meeting regularly, including local storekeeper Isaac Hill, who wrote in his diary on 2 October 1843: ‘I must acknowledge sitting in silence though with only a few to be a great privilege, and so all will find it who are absent from large Meetings.’
Today there are around a thousand Friends in New Zealand, still enjoying the relative silence of mainly small Meetings. Given New Zealand’s population of just over four million, the ratio of Quakers to the rest of the population is much the same as in Britain. There are around a thousand Friends in Australia too, but they make a smaller minority in a country of over twenty-one million.
With my wife Anthea I have just had the pleasure of visiting Meetings in both countries, on the back of a promotional tour for my book Who on Earth was Jesus? organised by the Sea of Faith networks. Where African and most developing world Meetings owe their origins to the nineteenth century missionary activity of American evangelical Quakers and reflect the theology and ecclesiology of their founders, antipodean Friends have stayed with the liberal unprogrammed tradition they brought from Britain.
So, visiting and talking with Friends in Canberra and Melbourne, Wellington and Wakefield, Takaka and Christchurch and points in between, I found their concerns were familiar. How do we broaden our social base? How to attract children – and keep them interested and involved when they hit their teens? How best to cope with tensions within the Meeting over theological diversity and corporate identity? And how to make our still, small Quaker voice heard in a world where liberal values and social justice are increasingly shouted down?
Australian and New Zealand Friends don’t have the luxury of well-staffed, well-resourced centres to take some of the strain. On a previous visit I asked the then clerk of New Zealand YM how many full-time staff they had and where their ‘Friends House’ was. The answer was 0.5 staff (herself, part-time) and the centre was ‘a table and chair in the back of my garage’. But lack of professional resources hasn’t prevented them from producing their own delightfully unstuffy Quaker Faith and Practice, and both YMs use lively newsletters where all the hot topics familiar to addicts of the letters pages in the Friend are aired no less passionately in Australian and New Zealand accents.
But spending my time not only with Friends but with progressive Christians from other denominations, including the inspirational ‘St Mary’s in exile’ (a thousand-strong Catholic church in Brisbane disowned by the hierarchy for its liberal theology and too-inclusive liturgy) and the interdenominational, interfaith Sea of Faith groups that sponsored my tour, I found myself reflecting on how much louder and more persuasive a voice we could have if we all made more effort to get to know each other better and work with each other more often.
‘Sitting in silence though with only a few’ is indeed a great privilege, as Isaac Hill noted in 1843 when he met in worship with half a dozen fellow-pioneers in the shantytown that would become the city of Nelson. But is it enough? Here in Britain, as well as overseas, we would perhaps do well to seek out allies among like-minded liberals and progressives with a view to ‘giving the winds a mightier voice’. None of us need abandon or dilute our cherished corporate identities, but we might learn from each other and find that different kinds of friends united can speak with power.
To Friends, churches, Sea of Faith groups and humanist societies that invited Anthea and me into their Meeting houses, halls and homes: thank you for being what you are and doing what you do, separately where necessary, together where possible. And thanks for having us. http://thefriend.org/uploads/shutterstock_11158039_Martin_Horsky.jpg
