Digital leader: Helen Johnson on worship at Woodbrooke

‘It’s different. It’s its own experience.’

Few Friends would have been surprised by the news about the closure of Woodbrooke’s building. But all would have been saddened. After all, Woodbrooke is part of most Quakers’ experience and so, of course, we’ve all got our memories. I remember going there over fifty years ago: getting off the bus, walking through the gates into a quiet and anxiety-reducing haven, where Quakerspeak was the lingua franca. It was and is ten acres of calming gardens, ponds and trees, with a building that is a Grade 2-listed property that has been an important place of Quaker learning since 1903. The whole site seems to be a part of Quaker worship in itself.

Lockdown may be behind us, but its consequences have been stunning. Many longterm trends, once sluggishly incremental, have been accelerated. We’ve all noticed that people no longer venture out as they once did, and that has impacted on so many public places, be they Meeting houses or businesses. We now have the impact of the ‘fifteen-minute cities’, where we are encouraged to expect everything we need within a few minutes from home. On the face of it this is convenient, but it can be confining too.

Online Meetings, once we got the hang of the technology, have turned out to be helpful and supportive – and have brought a permanent change to our Sunday morning behaviour. Certainly, the Woodbrooke-hosted worship is special. In this adoption of Zooming, it seems that I’m part of the trend: in 2022, participation in Woodbrooke’s online worship was a considerable 17,822 total attendances.

Why are the Woodbrooke Zoom Meetings producing such a positive response? From my own very unscientific observations, the average attendance on a Sunday seems to be about sixty to eighty participants, three to five times more than many Local Meetings. The age range of participants seems to be mostly the white-haired, but it’s their geographical locations that are also worth remarking on: the English countryside or the Scottish Highlands, further afield in Spain, or Sweden, or Russia, the USA or wherever. It’s a wonderful mixture of folk from here and there – a global connection that is both exciting and supportive. Of course, it’s not the same experience as a face-to-face Meeting (and absolutely nobody is suggesting that these should be abolished). It’s different. It’s its own experience.

What’s Woodbrooke’s role in all of this? The actual Zoom hosting seems to be highly technical – I have no idea how it works. But it does ask, and perhaps answer, some of the questions about Woodbrooke’s role and possible future. There is a need to see beyond a particular generation’s view of the world – one that is in the process of being superseded – to see what new and younger generations expect. Dare it be said, the paradigm has shifted, and Woodbrooke’s new role will surely reflect that. There are new developments, new ways of seeing the world and responding to it. Who better than Quakers to ask new questions and seek new answers – through new means?

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