European and Middle East Young Friends outside Quaker House in Brussels with Andrew Lane. Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Flynn.
Letter from Brussels
Daniel Clarke Flynn writes about Friends in Belgium and Luxembourg
Quaker House Brussels is home to the Brussels Meeting of the Belgium and Luxembourg Yearly Meeting; the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA)’ and a host of Quaker and other faith communities, and international nongovernmental peace organisation activities.
Quakers first arrived on the continent of Europe in 1656, but it was not until young professional expatriates started flooding into Brussels in 1973 to work for the European Community (EC) that Quaker life blossomed in the young country of Belgium.
These Friends had a dream – a dream that became a concern. With youthful enthusiasm and confidence, they saw great openings for political Quaker work to be done in Brussels.
They met at first in private homes, where the Brussels Meeting was born. The first Meeting for Worship for Business was held on 2 March 1975, transfers of membership started coming in and, in September, a concern was recorded that a Quaker International Affairs Representative (QIAR) should be appointed in Brussels. The Brussels Concern Advisory Committee (BCAC) was created to pursue this concern and subsequently called for an international nonprofit organisation to be formally established under Belgian law with the name of Quaker Council for European Affairs.
The 8 December 1978 issue of the Friend featured a front-page photo of the BCAC, and the first meeting of the newly formed QCEA took place in Brussels on 27 October 1979. The Brussels Meeting and QCEA quickly outgrew space they had leased in a house at 28 Avenue de la Brabançonne near the EC offices. Not far away, a four-storey Maison de la Belle Epoque at 50 Square Ambiorix wanting repair was found for sale, and British Quakers purchased it in April 1985 to house QCEA offices and rent meeting space to the Brussels Meeting, which eventually became the Belgium and Luxembourg Yearly Meeting (BLYM).
Community activities
The house is a listed and protected Art Nouveau building designed in 1899 by a student of famed Belgian architect Victor Horta. Refurbished with the support of the City of Brussels, it is open to the public on several days a year as part of Brussels Patrimony Days. QCEA offices are on the ground floor and Brussels Meeting for Worship is held on the first floor. In addition to QCEA, there are also the Brussels offices of two other international peacebuilding organisations: the Nonviolent Peaceforce and the European Network Against Arms Trade.
The first floor features interiors restored to their fin de siècle glory, wood panelling, gold wallpaper, polished wood floors, and stained-glass windows and doors. The rooms are used for a variety of Quaker and non-Quaker community activities. Some are organised by the Meeting, many by individual members, and some by individuals or groups who are not Quakers.
There are fundraising events for charity causes in Brussels, such as Hébergement Plateforme Citoyenne for refugees without shelter, and causes abroad such as Friends House Moscow. Training classes are sponsored by QCEA and other local not-for-profit organisations. Quiet diplomacy lunches are held where interested parties can meet and talk in confidence. Saturday afternoon offers films for young refugees from war-torn countries. Annual meetings of European and Middle East Young Friends (EMEYF) are held.
Meeting opportunities
Worship meetings of the Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists in Brussels and a local Jewish organisation take place. There was even a joyous New Year’s Eve party for recently arrived refugees from Africa and the Middle East at the end of last year. The house also offers a modest bed-and-breakfast room on the third floor for overnight visitors.
BLYM Meetings for Worship are held weekly in Brussels, every other week in Ghent, and nine times a year in Luxembourg. On the first Sunday of each month in Brussels, there is community singing before Meeting for Worship, and a ‘bring and share lunch’ after Meeting.
On the third Sunday, there is a ‘brown-bag lunch’ deepening-spirituality gathering, which currently uses material from Woodbrooke’s ‘Becoming Friends: Living and learning with Quakers’ course. The BLYM library features Quaker and related literature in English and in Belgium’s three official languages: French, Dutch and German.
The best opportunities for members of the geographically dispersed BLYM to meet are the annual residential gathering and an annual community day.
The Meeting has recently published two booklets: Approaches to Meeting for Worship in 2014 and Ministry in our Meetings in 2017, and two small pamphlets for visitors in 2017: Quakers: A Simple Faith and Quakers: A Journey into Silence. The bimonthly BLYM newsletter serves as ministry and notices in print, open to all Quaker contributors in all languages. It is currently distributed electronically to seventy current or former BLYM members and attenders, and to more than 140 other Quaker addresses worldwide.
Some say that the greater part of faith in action is not by Meetings, but by individual members of Meetings. For example, the Border Meeting was started sixty-one years ago to help countries reconcile after the second world war. Every third year, individual members in Belgium organise it in rotation with committees comprised of individual members from the Netherlands and Germany in the other years.
Perhaps the primary value the Meeting contributes is the community’s Meeting for Worship, from which individuals can draw spiritual strength to do what faith requires of them as individuals.
Challenge
The main challenge facing BLYM today is outreach (attracting new members in Belgium and Luxembourg of different origins and languages than the Meeting’s founders) and effective communications with its geographically widespread membership.
BLYM grew from an English-speaking expat community in Brussels, but now it must reach out to multilingual nationals from Belgium, Luxembourg and other countries in order to survive. We no longer have a Children’s Meeting, but we frequently have one or more visitors from abroad.
As one member has written:
Our Yearly Meeting started out with a few Quakers who happened to be expats working for the European institutions. They decided to worship together and put Quaker concerns on the political agenda… Things have evolved since then. Our Meeting does have Quakers who happen to be Anglo-Saxon expats, but I notice it often works in the opposite direction now. Anglo-Saxon expats who are curious about Quakers, or just want to try something new, join our ranks and later ask to become members.
In that sense our Meeting is very different from, for example, the French or Dutch Meetings with a long history and members who spend their lives in the same place. People are more mobile in our Meeting. They come and go according to contracts and assignments. Their children spread all over Europe pursuing their careers where it suits them best. Ours is a Meeting of stranger – strangers to the country they live in and often strangers to each other. Nevertheless, our Meetings are often gathered and our worship deep. We are proof that personal history or motives for worship don’t matter to the Light that transcends all. This to me is the real meaning of our Meeting.
