A rainbow over the Blue Idol Meeting House. Photo: Courtesy of Richard Hewitt and Chrissie McGinn.
‘We’ve judged our year to be successful and learned a lot. Several events have sold out.’
Restoration works: Richard Hewitt & Chrissie McGinn
Friends returned to the Blue Idol, our seventeenth-century Meeting house, in the summer of 2015, following two years of major restoration work. The Blue Idol was established by William Penn in West Sussex. The work was expensive and we had much discussion about whether the money should be put to better use. We decided to go ahead but agreed that we should use the building for more than our small Meeting for Worship. We want to share our story to help other Meetings explore ways to engage their local communities.
English Heritage, which gave us a substantial sum, said that it wanted the building open to the public for forty days a year, plus our usual Sundays. We meet this obligation by having open days every Friday, when a couple of Friends are on hand to talk about the Blue Idol and William Penn, and to answer questions on Quakers. These have been very popular – on one occasion we had forty visitors! Last year we celebrated the tercentenary of the death of William Penn with a number of events. This helped us discover what we could manage with the limited space in our rather isolated Meeting house.
We were invited by Horsham District Council to take part in the Horsham Year of Culture. We held events throughout the summer based on Quaker testimonies. We started with ‘simplicity’ in April and ended in September with ‘hospitality’ which, although not a Quaker testimony, is a value that our Meeting holds dear.
The plan was to have different events each month to appeal to different people. For instance, we held a Sustainability Fair in June. More than a hundred people came, in spite of the rain, and the Bernardi Music Group put on a concert with readings to highlight how music sustains us. We looked at ‘equality’ with a workshop creating collages, and explored ‘peace’ with an afternoon of poetry, prose and performance, where people read poems and sung songs from around the world. To think about ‘truth’ we enquired about integrity, asking a local politician, a GP, a managing director and a social media consultant to talk about integrity in their professional lives. ‘Simplicity’ was tackled in a similar way but, instead of a panel, we used three dialogue pairs to explore how taking a more simple approach had affected people’s lives.
We’ve judged our year to be successful and learned a lot. Several events have sold out, and we’ve had to turn people away. We’ve had a good mix of people from the local community as well as Quakers from other Meetings. One of the keys to this success has been our attempt to give everyone who comes a spiritual experience, with silence. During the poetry event there was no applause but several minutes of silence. We found that these pauses for reflection set a tone, and mirrored our worship.
In Quaker Week we explored how our testimonies are an expression of our humanity, our connection with each other and to the Divine. We didn’t charge for events but asked for a donation and this seemed to work well – everything was open to all.
