What are we doing well?
Andrew Backhouse offers a portrait of life in a lively Local Meeting
What are Meetings that are working well doing to help them grow spiritually, numerically, in closeness, or in reaching out to others?
When I worked as a youthwork officer from Friends House I delighted in visiting Quaker Meetings around the country, feeling rooted in the whole Yearly Meeting, meeting dynamic Friends and working with some fantastic Meetings and their teenagers. For the last eleven years I have been involved in different areas and, still, I want to know: what are the growing points for Meetings for us to learn from, because it fires me up too. What are all those fantastic Friends and their Meetings up to? Who can one Meeting learn from about its options for replacing its current Meeting house? Who can help another Meeting that is shrinking in size? Quaker Life and Woodbrooke can provide people to help, but when do we read about what can be done?
Background
My Meeting is Wilmslow, part of East Cheshire Area Meeting. It has about twenty people every Sunday, with nearer thirty when children are present.
The Meeting has grown a bit over the past ten years, with people moving in and new members/attenders, including a few from Quaker Quest. Children’s Meeting happens fortnightly and a shared lunch and discussion/talk happens monthly. It is in an old stable block attached to the historic Meeting house, which was refurbished about fifteen years ago.
What’s going well?
We have such a wide resource in many ways. So, in the spirit of learning from each other, I asked my Meeting what those present felt it was doing well. Where did we need to develop and how might we tackle the issues?
It was quite a surprise to be told by our newest attender that our website feels simple and welcoming, as were the people at Meeting. New people have an assumption that we have all been here forever – yet many of us have joined or moved here in the last ten years. The new people have been pleased to hear that and to learn why we have come.
We have a small, regular, home group. This is liked by those who go; for many in the Meeting there is the closeness of a caring community/family. After Meeting we have a short time for sharing what was not quite ready for ministry. There is also news of Friends, or from the children, and this is very popular.
Shared lunches were also identified as working well. It is one of my favourite things. When I was growing up I was taken to Monthly Meeting Teas (no activity for children at Area Meetings then), so I grew up thinking that was what was important for Friends.
What could we improve?
I was impressed that an elder identified that we are not good at sharing our needs – we are so full of helping others in some ways, without identifying our own issues, such as loneliness. If we could do that sharing more we might be in a better position to help others in the wider community.
We can be great on a Sunday, or for the home group on Mondays, but how do we carry community to the other days of the week? Do we give time to talk more to people at a deeper level? How do we get more younger people involved?
How do we respond to issues like sustainability and climate change? Some of us are active in Transition Wilmslow, a local action group, but how do we work as a group?
Outreach, telling people we are here, is not something we are that good at. People have to be looking hard to find us. Where will we be in ten years time?
Sharing ideas
So how are we going to tackle the things above? What is your Meeting doing that we ought to hear to help us all? Some of the things we discussed included:
- We think this year we need to have more meals in homes, including safari suppers with different courses in different homes. One Friend is offering to organise a bowling trip to draw in the teenagers, too.
- We will try and run some regular creative listening groups, and perhaps a ‘Hearts and Minds’ group annually, as well as use Leicester Meeting’s ‘My Life, My Faith’ method.
- Singing together is good when we do it – can we copy Sutton Meeting’s hymns before Meeting, or other singing after Meeting? What do people find works best?
- The ecumenical agenda joins us with others on sustainability and asylum seekers. We need to look at that more to see where there is a particular project to work on.
How do we find people to do the above? A nice thought was an elder saying it helped to have things suggested to people directly that they are able to do. This could be much better than appealing across the board. What else has worked for you?
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