Thought for the Week: After Quaker Week
What happens when Quaker Week stops? Are we ready to keep going for the other fifty-one?
Quaker Week is over. Phew. This has been the sixth. Quakers all over the country have been thinking creatively, putting up posters, throwing open their Meeting houses, hosting talks, proffering cups of tea and speaking at Quaker Quests. Seven years ago, when the idea of an annual ten-day outreach spree was first mooted, I was doubtful. I thought the enthusiasm would be short-lived. I was wrong. It has been an upbeat and enduring success.
I offer one caveat. For many, Quaker Week and Quaker Outreach have become synonymous, because one is now the time to do the other. So, if we plan an annual outreach project, it is natural that we begin to see the work as something to start and stop. Like running a bath, we turn the tap on and we turn it off. We do our outreach; it draws to a close; we say, ‘phew’; and we relax.
I hope that, after the ‘phew’, we’ll still summon the energy to ensure that people know where we are – and, crucially, who we are – all the year round. When I first became an attender in the early nineties, I was told time and again that ‘Quakers never do outreach, because when people are ready for us, they find us’. Such joyful discoveries still happen, of course, but in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Quakers should stop relying on them. People are unlikely to find us because these days, we have got lost.
Three statistics haunt me. Firstly: when Quaker Quest commissioned research into public perceptions of Quakers (a representative sample of 1,000 adults living in Britain), fifty-one per cent of eighteen to thirty-four year-olds didn’t get past the first question – they had never heard the word ‘Quaker’, so they were unable to continue the survey. Secondly: of the all-age sample who did recognise us, forty per cent did not associate us in their minds with peacemaking. Thirdly: from that same representative sample, fifty-two per cent believed we were ‘an orthodox religious group who interpret religion in a very strict way’. I find those figures sad.
I also find them unsurprising. For the first fifty years of our existence, Quakers spoke up and spoke out. Every week was Quaker Week. Every day was Quaker Day. Since about 1700, however, we have been characterised by a quiet inwardness. If many people think we are a closed group, it is because, by and large, we are. We come out of ourselves for our outreach efforts, but then we return to our default position of speaking mostly to each other. This is a ‘sheep dip’ approach to outreach that would have surprised our seventeenth century predecessors, who made colossal strides in helping others to understand Quakerism. Our work, like theirs, needs continuity. I believe that we should stop thinking about outreach as a project and replace it with a constant openness, a readiness to talk, an utter transparency.
Quaker Week events teach us how to communicate. The more of them we do, the more we learn. Changed perceptions of Quakers will only follow when we use our newly-discovered articulacy every day. Unlike other religious groups, we don’t appoint PR people. That is because, just as we are all the priests, we are also all the spokespersons: talking fluently, answering reasonable questions with authority (‘What exactly happens in a Quaker Meeting?’, ‘Are Quakers Christian?’, ‘Do I have to be a pacifist?’) and easing our Religious Society back into the national consciousness. When that becomes a reality, outreach will be such a commonplace affair that we’ll forget to call it outreach.
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