‘This is God’s new covenant, a more trusting, more loving, way of living now.’
Reunited kingdom: Keith Archer has a ‘new covenant’ experience
‘If Jeremiah’s new covenant was our dream, we were already living it.’
This May, six friends and I met at the Château de Bossey, near Geneva, home of the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches. Fifty-five years ago (gosh!) we spent five months there as students. There were about sixty of us then, from all over the world, and from most of the world’s main churches – almost every tradition but Quakers! A few years ago, some of us decided to return for a reunion. Many of the original sixty lived far too far away to travel to Switzerland for just a few days. Some others couldn’t be traced, or weren’t interested. Some, sadly, had died. But ten of us agreed to meet in May 2020. Covid intervened, of course, and three people had to drop out through ill health, one at the very last moment. So, this May, just seven of us made it: one from Switzerland, three from Germany, and three (including me) from England. No longer the whole world, but a fair mixture, broadened in scope by the spirits of those distant, long-absent friends. To paraphrase George Fox’s famous words, we were walking cheerfully over the world. By ‘cheerfully’, Fox didn’t mean being carefree; his cheerfulness involved courage too. In view of all those years and the health issues they had brought us, to be there at all required his kind of cheerfulness!
