Eye - 12 July 2013

From getting to know each other to transformation

Getting to know you

Helen Wilberforce, of Brigflatts Meeting, has taken a creative approach to getting to know her Meeting community better.

‘I am a relative newcomer to Friends, attending Meetings at Brigflatts for perhaps two years,’ she writes. ‘I have been to a local course on Quakers, and one at Woodbrooke. I have read books borrowed from the Meeting library, bought some others and done a lot of thinking…

‘I usually stay after the Meeting for a cup of tea. But I didn’t feel that I was really getting to know people.’

Her solution was an unusual photographic project: ‘I took my digital camera to Meeting with me and during the social time afterwards took individual photos, with permission, of our members and attenders.’

Helen then went further: ‘When I had printed out the photographs I showed them to members, securing their permission to display them and also asking for five to eight words about them. This might be connected to their Quaker life or otherwise.

‘After several weeks I was ready to display the photos. I have used “Picture Pockets”… At four feet six inches long, these hang on the back of a door and display forty 4 inch by 6 inch photographs in plastic pockets.’

When reflecting on the results of her efforts, Helen said: ‘On a personal level I have had reason to speak to all of our members and a number of visitors on several occasions. I have re-taken a good few photos and helped people to define themselves in just five to eight words (try it!).

‘A broader advantage is that other people have been able to put a name to a face or a face to a name.

‘And, displayed in our sitting room, visitors can catch a glimpse of those of us who form the community that uses our Meeting house.

‘It’s a “work in progress”. I haven’t finished it yet and I have been working on it for some months already… but it has been a truly worthwhile project.’

Transformation

‘Of its religious products, the Radical Reformation’s most lastingly important creation and survival is the Society of Friends, the “Quakers”, who – in England at least – have clearly left behind them the Church and its dogmatic theology and are attempting to live the next dispensation, the Kingdom of God on earth…

‘As for the Churches, they’ll have to study the Quakers in order to learn how they might transform themselves into a working modern post-ecclesial religious society. It could conceivably be done, but I doubt very much it will be done.’

From The Last Testament by Don Cupitt

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