Meeting for Sufferings: Yearly Meeting 2015
Chris Skidmore spoke to Friends about Yearly Meeting 2015
Chris Skidmore, clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting, reminded Friends that Yearly Meeting 2015 would be held at Friends House from 1 to 4 May 2015. It will open a new chapter in the history of Quakerism in Britain as it will be the first time that Yearly Meeting will be held in the newly refurbished Large Meeting House in Friends House.
Yearly Meeting Gathering in Bath in 2014 had concluded a three-year focus on ‘What it means to be a Quaker today’. Chris said that this would be followed, in the next three years, by looking at how Friends live out their faith in the world today.
Yearly Meeting would be held in the last week of the general election campaign. Chris suggested that Friends might, at that time, be rather ‘weary’ from the media coverage. However, it was important, he said, to discern what Friends should do.
He quoted a phrase of John Woolman: ‘May we look upon our treasure, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try to discover whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions’ and reminded Friends that their role, as Joseph Rowntree once wrote, was ‘not just to find remedies’ but to ‘search out the underlying causes’ of conflict.
Chris raised the subject of an important initiative begun by Friends in response to the 1914-1918 war: ‘Foundations of a True Social Order’. He said: ‘Could we attempt such a task for our time? This is the challenge.’
This year Junior Yearly Meeting will meet alongside Yearly Meeting.
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