Friends in community
Abigail Maxwell describes a busy and enjoyable event
The Quaker Life Representative Council (QLRC), which met on 13-15 October, is a community. Ninety Quakers are assembled together. Christ dances with us, fizzing and stimulating. A Friend told me she is pleased to see strong and stable Friends who can ground our gathering. I am free to float like a brightly coloured balloon bobbing below the ceiling.
We have this community at Yearly Meeting Gathering, outreach conferences, and whenever clerks, treasurers, trustees, Meeting for Sufferings representatives or other groups gather. There are websites detailing the joy and privilege of sharing and bonding, learning and growing in the QLRC community.
Rachel Matthews, Vibrancy in Meetings programme coordinator, reflects on similar exercises in other Christian denominations. It seems that people can embrace a wide variety of worship and theology if the community suits them.
Recording clerk Paul Parker tells us that ‘Gospel Order’ is the formal structure that releases our life and energy for the service of the Spirit, upheld by our inward life of worship and discernment, our social testimony and our community.
This community is accessible wherever there are Friends. Libby Adams, head of library and archives at Friends House, has spent twenty years working with local authorities and finds the work in a spiritual organisation to be very enlivening. The library has various artworks and other objects of interest and has loaned some of them to the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition on peacework. Eating with Libby, I see her enthusiasm and get a real sense of the person.
I also meet Alison Mitchell, who is paid by The Retreat Benevolent Fund to stimulate Friends’ thinking on mental health issues. She is happy to talk to Area Meetings, and is organising a forum on dementia in December where Friends will be able to share their own experiences. Alison has also organised a six-hour Meeting for Worship at her Local Meeting.
Community flourishes in Young Friends General Meeting (YFGM), which meets for three weekends a year. Some Young Friends (not all at QLRC) tell me that they go to church rather than Meeting, or that their Local Meeting has some lovely people but…
I want to see their vitality nourishing and energising our whole Society.
Stories flow through our community. We share news from Meetings: of Liverpool’s Meeting house as a place of witness and outreach, for instance, and of ‘Light groups’ in Leeds. I hear, again, the suggestion that the word ‘Religious’ was added to ‘Society of Friends’ only recently. Actually, ‘Religious Society of Friends’ is in the 1861 Book of Discipline.
I am rationally atheist but emotionally theist. I have an intimate relationship with the God I do not believe in. So, I am glad to meet a person, rather than a ‘nontheist’, for a heart-to-heart discussion and not a talk across a political divide; to build respect and perhaps win it. My most stimulating conversation concerns the complex interplay between cooperation and competition, among animals, human societies and even eukaryotes. (An eukaryote is any cell or organism that possesses a clearly defined nucleus.)
I ask: ‘What would you tell readers of the Friend?’ ‘We exist,’ says Jocelyn Burnell, who is on the Quaker Life Central Committee.
There is an expression of community, among a profusion of communities, that brings Friends together.
Issues around transgender are likely to come up across Quaker Life. As a trans woman I want to be involved with that. The Quaker Gender and Sexual Diversity Community, which was once the Quaker Lesbian and Gay Fellowship, could play a useful part in discussion and discernment.
Friends come out of our weekend to ‘cross-pollinate’ – to spread the ideas we have shared throughout our Area Meetings and all the varied Quaker communities we seek to enrich.
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