Meeting for Sufferings: QCCIR presents revised offerings
A revised paper, to be sent to the World Council of Churches, was presented to Meeting for Sufferings
Further to minute MfS/15/02/11, the Quaker Committee for Christian and Interfaith Relations (QCCIR) brought a revised paper to Meeting for Sufferings. The committee hopes to send it to the World Council of Churches (WCC), and for it to be used as a study text for Meetings. Sufferings was asked to endorse the document.
QCCIR member Nick Clifford spoke to the revised paper, ‘A Spirit-led Church’. He said that there was ‘a concern that this opportunity should not be wasted’.
He added: ‘More distant cousins in other faiths need to understand that Christianity is open to dialogue. This is an important opportunity to act on our instincts for inclusivity.’
He told Sufferings that ‘the generation of this document has been a long journey’, and explained that the paper needed to be set within the context of today’s world. He added: ‘the question now is whether Friends feel this is the voice of British Quakerism.’
In general, Friends responded favourably to the revised paper. One said that he admired how it ‘captures a combination of robustness and conviction’.
A Friend expressed concerns over how he felt other churches were referred to in the document. He suggested: ‘Don’t waste time rubbishing the opposition. Tell us what you have to say. A few places [in the paper] are liable to misreading as cheap shots at other churches’.
Another Friend added that he had looked at the earlier paper and felt that this version is ‘outstanding’.
He said: ‘I very much hope we will use this document. In relation to the challenges of the practices of other churches, some degree of challenge is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is done in the context of love and humanity. I believe this document does do that’.
A Friend described himself as moved on reading the revised paper. His one slight reservation, he said, was that all of the Quaker quotes were from seventeenth-century Friends. ‘It’s a slight pity we couldn’t find something equally moving from later periods,’ he noted.
