Winchester Quaker Meeting House from the garden Photo: John Hall
Reaching Out: Questing Hampshire and Islands
Geoff Pilliner describes how one Area Meeting put Quaker Quest into practice
It was the time when a leading Quaker academic, Ben Pink Dandelion, suggested that the Religious Society of Friends might not last beyond 2035. It was the year when our Area Meeting treasurer pointed out that we had budgeted £1,200 each year for outreach and it had not been spent. And Marilyn Cox went to a conference about Quaker Quest. For most members of Hampshire and Islands Area Meeting even Marilyn’s enthusiastic report produced little impact – but for two or three of us, it started something. Area Meeting formed an Outreach Committee. We met. Marilyn’s enthusiasm was infectious and we decided to spend some of Area Meeting’s money on a Quaker Quest.
An Area Meeting Quest
If a Local Meeting decides to do Quaker Quest, it has a base for it and people committed to it. How does an Area Meeting committee set about organising a Quaker Quest when the Local Meeting hadn’t thought of it? With difficulty! How would you react if some Area Meeting Friends came along with an idea of what your Meeting should be doing in your city using your resources? But we found there were one or two in that Meeting who responded to our enthusiasm and, steadily, the rest of the Meeting (most of them, at least!) came on board.
Organising Quaker Quests at Area Meeting level has some strengths. You can draw on the whole Area Meeting for presenters and helpers. You can have a more substantial budget. You have access to expertise from a wide area. And there will be people in other Meetings who are keen to support you. We have now organised Quaker Quests in five of our Meetings and more are being planned. Increasingly, Meetings are willing to be involved as they have seen the results elsewhere.
Those results? No Quaker Quest in this area has had less than twenty-five Questers – our largest number was fifty-six. Not all Questers become members, of course, and often you don’t know whether Quaker Quest or other factors have led people to become involved and join the Society. Quaker Quest is not a recruiting campaign. It is about letting Britain know that we still exist and have something valuable to offer. However, we did gain five to ten new faces each time. And there is another impact of Quaker Quest that if anything is more important: its value for inreach is immense.
Attracting attention
How do you get fifty-six people – almost all complete strangers – to come to a series of meetings about Quakerism? How does a solar panel installer sell their products? You advertise. You use as much blanket advertising as you can afford. We printed 25,000 leaflets for Winchester Quaker Quest. It was nearly 40,000 for Jersey. Quakers are very shy about pushing leaflets through letterboxes (I’ve done it – it is no big deal), so you get someone else to do it. For the first Quaker Quest we used a free paper (not successful). Next time we tried using all the places that might carry leaflets (not very successful).
When we tried Royal Mail Door-2-Door leaflet distribution, we wondered how we were going to seat everyone who came. It is costly, but effective, and the feedback was that people felt they had received a personal invitation. But this had something to do with the leaflets as well. The inherited wisdom on advertising leaflets is to get your message in as few words as you can in a bright and attractive format. One Quaker challenged this, saying we needed to give as much information as possible so that people could read about us even if they did not come. Never mind the wisdom: he was right.
There are other ways of advertising. Newspaper adverts only worked well where, as on the Isle of Wight, there is one local paper that everyone reads. We put an advert on a railway station – never again! We found a bus company that accepted adverts (free!), which was excellent. I never thought I would be party to placing banners across the High Street, but they worked well. Local radio should be effective – but no-one ever seemed to have heard our plugs. But what about parish magazines? We offered an advert or a short article to around forty parish or village magazines in the Alton area. Virtually all of them took the article, and only one charged a fee. And they were certainly read.
Questing meetings
What do you provide for all these Questers? We used the Quaker Quest Guide as our pattern and followed it slavishly for our first Quaker Quest. As time has gone on, we have adjusted the number and themes of meetings, but we have not changed the basic pattern. It works.
We have emphasised to presenters that they are talking about their own spiritual life and experience – and this has clearly impressed our visitors (and other members of their own Meetings!). We have impressed upon our presenters the need for a strict discipline – six to eight minutes, no waffle, fully and well prepared, coordinated with their co-presenters – and compulsory attendance at a training session some weeks beforehand. And don’t forget the food! We have provided a ‘Monthly Meeting tea’, or better, for people to sample before the meetings – and encouraged them at the end not to waste what is left (most of it, in fact). Going on afterwards is not popular with Friends, who are ready to go home, but Questers want to talk to Quakers, one-to-one, after hearing something during the evening that has interested them.
This is very demanding for everyone involved, of course – it is bound to be. Planning needs to be started six to nine months beforehand. There should be enough people at each evening to deal with fifty Questers and all that is involved. And you have not finished when the last Quaker Quest is wound up. There needs to be an effective, planned and organised series of follow-up meetings, probably weekly to begin with, to fill in all the gaps that there will be for the sustained enquirers. One Meeting called their follow-up ‘Quaker Questions’ – and it was a good description.
Where do we go from here?
So what now? We have ‘done’ the bigger Meetings, so what about the small Meetings with a Sunday attendance in single figures? We are currently developing a version of Quaker Quest that uses perhaps two meetings and supplements this with a (free) DVD. It looks promising, but we have yet to try it out in practice. What about Meetings repeating their Quaker Quest after a few years? We feel that, once they have done it, Meetings are much better able to arrange their own events but there is always the expertise (and maybe money as well) from Area Meeting to draw on. What about other forms of outreach? If we are to prove Ben Pink Dandelion’s predictions wrong, we will not be able to depend on Quaker Quest alone – but it is a start and we are making progress.
This is the second article in a five part series.
