Letters - 11 September 2026
'In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.'
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Reparations
I think our Friend David Bower (Letters, 28 August) doesn’t quite realise what the reparations work undertaken by Britain Yearly Meeting is really about.
It’s not about individual ancestors, or finding deserving individuals from the past. Apologies and reconciliation are on a much wider scale and against a background of structural inequality which has built up over centuries. It is about the now and the future.
We in the wealthy west have long benefited from capital resources which have come originally from slave or indentured labour and other oppression. This has accumulated in our country’s coffers. By virtue of living in privileged countries (and indeed in most cases, by being white), whether rich or poor, we benefit from this. The descendants of the exploited people are still being exploited by the world economic system and indeed suffer most from climate change.
As Quakers, whether or not we have Quaker ancestors, we are specifically concerned with what was done in the name of Quakers, and particularly how this has disadvantaged people (including local Quakers) in particular countries now and into the future.
Firstly, we need to apologise – to show we recognise there has been fault. This is very important in order to repair our relationship with Friends elsewhere in the world. Following that, the practical reparation would not be giving money to individuals, but together initiating projects which communities feel will help them to grow a better life for themselves and their children.
Evelyn Shire
Turning over a new leaflet
In Richard Stewart’s letter (28 August) he comments that the latest leaflet from Discovering Quakers (DQ) is ‘obviously aimed at newcomers’. He goes on to describe it as ‘deplorable dumbing down’. I am a member of the DQ team – though I didn’t write the leaflet – and I disagree.
A newcomer is someone who is already expressing an interest in Quakers and has come to find out who we are. This leaflet is not aimed at those people. It is for the ones who, like the vast majority of the British public, know nothing whatsoever about Quakers, but have seen the name from time to time, perhaps on a porridge packet or outside a Meeting house. Theirs is a casual, passing interest, no more. They don’t want a full description of who we are – and anyway, that would be impossible to achieve in the confined space of a leaflet.
What a few carefully chosen words can do, though, far from dumbing us down, is intrigue people and inspire them to find out more about Quakers for themselves. And the stuff we find out for ourselves is the stuff that sticks.
DQ doesn’t just publish leaflets. We use social media to advertise and, as a result, our database of interested enquirers now numbers over 8,000 people. We provide online Meetings once a week, in which first-timers and newcomers hear a guest speaker, ask any question they like, and take part in a short Meeting for Worship. We are piloting schemes to help families find Quaker Meetings. And we publish books, too. One is subtitled A Guide for Newcomers. It is 50,000 words long.
Geoffrey Durham
