The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
A few Friends from Wandsworth and Wimbledon met recently to share our responses to the conflict in Gaza. It had been much on our minds but, wary of causing unintentional offence or hurt, and not knowing quite what to say, most of us had avoided the subject. Trusting our worship-sharing process, however, it was good to share something personal.
It is proper that most of the money donated to helping refugees and asylum seekers benefits them directly; but this means there is little provision for the needs of those who provide that help. They are often isolated, stressed, and suffering from unfeeling and shifting official policies. They are sometimes close to burnout. From 2017, Quaker Peace & Social Witness arranged a series of three retreats at Charney Manor for them, drawing on money from the Elizabeth Brown Legacy. We were asked to lead these programmes. The money was used up, but the needs and demand continued, so we decided in faith to arrange another one last year, which was fully booked and funded by individuals and two trusts. Participants came from projects in France, Greece and Britain; some had been asylum seekers themselves. Here is one typical response:
All I can offer you for your grief is my inadequacy for the task of relating to it.
Some Quakers have little knowledge of biblical criticism. So how should we read the Bible? It is a collection of books that say many different, often contradictory, things.
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM)’s peace education team piloted a three-day sustainable model for peer mediation training last month.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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