Meeting for Sufferings: ‘Lots and lots of challenges lie ahead’ for QCCIR
Meeting for Sufferings heard about the achievements of and challenges facing the Quaker Committee for Christian and Interfaith Relations
The Quaker Committee for Christian and Interfaith Relations (QCCIR) regards its biggest achievement as The Changing Face of Faith in Britain, Stephanie Grant, a member of the body, told Meeting for Sufferings on 24 November. This report was a legacy project produced in partnership with Woodbrooke.
‘Lots and lots of challenges lie ahead,’ Stephanie Grant said. A number of Friends ‘are quite concerned about any dropping of Christian-based God language’ arising from the revision of Quaker faith & practice (Qf&p), and how this might impact on relations with other faiths.
Stephanie Grant said that the survey conducted as part of The Changing Faith in Britain indicated that ‘many are coming into Quakerism from Christian traditions… or from a period of nothingness’.
She continued: ‘We kind of hoped some would be coming from somewhere we’d never heard of, but if didn’t quite work out that way.’
Referring to the recent announcement that Britain Yearly Meeting will not invest any of its centrally-managed funds in companies profiting from ‘the occupation of Palestine’, she said: ‘The Board of Deputies [of British Jews] are not happy about this…
‘We want to go on talking to them’. The hope is for ‘an open and frank discussion’.
On ‘dropping God language’, a Friend said: ‘It reads as if we have already decided to do this, but this is absolutely not… the primary purpose of [Qf&p] revision.’
Stephanie Grant said: ‘We know we haven’t made a decision. People who read what was in the press – mostly wrong – may have a different impression.’ It was important, she added, to ‘find a language with which to reach people’.
A Friend involved with an interfaith group said: ‘It often seems to me that we feel able to say things that others think but don’t say.’
This Friend thought that Quakers’ relationship with ‘the Church of England in particular helps them to express more openness about God language’.
The Friend added that the Church of England ‘is seeing us as a key catalyst in moving things forward – a positive force to help transition other groups’.
