Photo: Mukhuyu Meeting on World Quaker Day.
Quaker Week hailed ‘a success’
Over seventy events were held worldwide to mark World Quaker Day on 5th October
The influential physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell unveiled a plaque in Bradford on Avon to mark the site of a former Quaker building on World Quaker Day.
Jointly organised by Bradford on Avon Quakers, and the Bradford on Avon Preservation Trust, the plaque can be found on the wall of Westbury House. ‘In 1718 a Quaker Meeting House was built here with an adjoining burial ground,’ the text reads. ‘The last burial was in 1803. The Meeting House was closed at the end of the 18th century and was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the car park. The current Quaker Meeting House is now in Whiteheads Lane.’
The occasion on 5 October was one of many events held across the world to mark this year’s Quaker Week with the theme of ‘Love your neighbour’. Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) hailed the week as a ‘success’, and said it had received reports of around seventy global events. Highlights included gatherings in Paris of Friends from across Europe and the Middle East, to talk about ‘peace and service’; and one in Accra, of Friends from across Africa, to celebrate one hundred years of Ghana’s Hill House Meeting.
Friends from four US Meetings also met in Richmond, Indiana, to sing and worship in English and Spanish. Meanwhile, Esther Mombo, FWCC clerk, spoke at an international Meeting hosted in Australia.
‘Various groups organised screenings of the recently released documentary made about the last World Plenary Meeting, called Living Ubuntu. Others literally invited their neighbours, near and far,’ FWCC said on its website. ‘The Quaker group from Malmö in Sweden journeyed all the way to Copenhagen in Denmark to worship with their international neighbours. Quakers in Whanganui, Aotearoa (New Zealand) welcomed their neighbours from four other churches on the same street.’
FWCC said that it had also heard about ‘various acts of service and compassion, including tree-planting, clean-ups, donations of food and essential supplies to underprivileged people including in shelters and prisons, visits to neighbours who are sick or in hospital and solidarity with migrants including through fundraising’.
Creative endeavours included: a podcast launched by the Silver Wattle Quaker Centre in Lake George; a Quaker hymn contest in Spanish (organised by FWCC’s Section of the Americas); and a song performance celebrating seventy-five years of the European Convention on Human Rights. Meanwhile children in Seoni Malwa enjoyed drama activities to mark the day.
‘The day was also significant for the amount of social media shared,’ said FWCC. This included five short videos with Young Adult Friends talking about what ‘Love Your Neighbour’ means to them, and six made by Britain Yearly Meeting.
Overall, FWCC heard reports from: Aotearoa, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Denmark, France, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Malta, Mexico, Peru, The Philippines, Uganda, UK, Ukraine, the US and Zimbabwe.
The winner of the World Quaker Day hymns-in-Spanish contest was Sandra Elizabeth Espinoza with a song called ‘Seeking the Truth’. The winner was announced at a global online Worship Meeting, held by FWCC’s Section of the Americas on 11 October.
