Quakers prepare to launch new ‘inreach’ materials
Joe Mugford looks at a programme developed for attenders wanting to learn more about the Society of Friends.
Becoming Friends, a specially developed education programme for new Friends and enquirers, has now successfully completed trial runs in Meetings across the country and is ready to launch in early 2010. It came about as a joint enterprise between Quaker Life of Britain Yearly Meeting and Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre after both had a high level of demand for educational materials from people who were still very new to the Society.
‘It’s about what happens after outreach’, says Helen Rowlands of Woodbrooke; ‘for people who have attended a Meeting and feel a connection, and then want to know how they can become part of the life of the Meeting’. ‘Previously’, says Quaker Life general secretary Richard Summers, ‘new attenders with questions would be told to talk to someone at their own Meeting – but this didn’t guarantee they would find coherent answers to their specific questions’.
As such, Woodbrooke and Quaker Life together tasked Ginny Wall with researching and responding to new Friends’ needs. One of the key moments in her research came when she talked to an attender who by chance lived near an elder and got regular lifts to Sunday meeting with him. ‘She said that fifteen minutes every Sunday was her opportunity to ask all the daft questions she never normally would have asked’, says Ginny. ‘She said “it was like having my own captive elder”, which made me realise we needed a way of giving people “permission” to ask those supposedly daft questions.’
So Becoming Friends was developed: a set of online and printed learning materials in open-ended, interlinked units, designed to be used by Friends in pairs of enquirer and ‘companion’ with more experience of the Society, who would generally have attended a course at Woodbrooke. ‘The companion is not there to teach,’ says Helen Rowlands, ‘but to walk alongside, to discuss and to facilitate interactions with others when they’re needed’.
Trials of the materials took place over five months this year with around fifty people in six Meetings across Britain Yearly Meeting, including both the newest of enquirers and those who’d been attending for a year or two but wanted deeper involvement. ‘Feedback has been almost entirely good’, says Ginny, ‘with even those few who were turned off by the idea of “studying” saying they got an enormous amount from the conversations with the companions. One new Friend said that “instead of just sounding nosey, it gave me a good excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway”, and if anything sums up what Becoming Friends is about, it is that quote.’
Woodbrooke courses for new companions are now taking bookings, and the Becoming Friends programme will begin across the country in January. ‘It’s always been hard for people to know where to start’, says Richard, ‘as we don’t have Catholic catechism classes or the specific techniques of Buddhism. This provides that structure, but in a very Quaker way, very flexible and open to the individual – giving people the opportunity to be authentically themselves as they learn.’
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