London Quakers face the future

Trish Carn reports on a recent meeting about the challenges facing London Quakers

The concerns of London Quakers took centre stage at Friends House last Saturday when two hundred Friends gathered together to consider a range of issues facing Quakers in the London area.  A pressing problem facing London Friends is having too many Meeting houses with too few Quakers to support them. There are approximately 1,440 Quakers in London in seven Area Meetings.

Many creative and radical suggestions were made during the day: one was to reduce the number of Area Meetings to four and another to take over an empty shop in a busy shopping area and transform it into a cafe on the ground floor and a worship space above. Other proposals included a larger Meeting house being used as a Quaker Centre – a faith-in-action specialism, such as a Quaker Peace Centre or a Quaker Sustainability Centre. Another suggestion was to develop social housing on land owned by the Meetings.

John Marsh, an architect, asked: ‘Is your Meeting house a resource or a millstone?’ He was continuing the theme of how we use all our resources: buildings, people and finance. Clare Scott Booth, of the Quaker Stewardship Committee, described other innovative projects by Meetings already in progress around the country. A presentation by John Dash, secretary of Six Weeks Meeting, the group responsible for all Meeting houses in Greater London and co-organiser of the day, illustrated various ways that London Area Meetings could be divided – by criteria such as compass points or transport links.

Beth Allen, clerk of London Quakers, was pleased with the ‘pace of the day’ and that many Friends had spoken ‘out of the quietness’. Alec Davison echoed her positive attitude. He began his talk on ‘Sharing a vision for London’ with the words ‘Friends, Prophets and Visionaries, we come to praise Quakers and not to bury them!’

The talks are available as podcasts at http://bit.ly/tbu3r0

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