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.
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Friends often refer to their Quaker ‘faith’, but what is meant by this can vary. We have theists, nontheists, universalists, pantheists, Christians, pagans, Buddhists, agnostics, and more. We’re rather proud that we are open to all these identities. It’s part of how we define ourselves as Quakers.
Growing up as a teenager in the 1980s, there was a film that my Quaker mother particularly liked. The film was Witness, the 1985 feature directed by Peter Weir, about an Amish child who witnesses a murder when travelling with his mother to New York.
As a result of a declining membership, Britain Yearly Meeting has found itself in a difficult financial position. The means of addressing this problem have thus far been predominantly businesslike. It is suggested that the way forward is: to hire our rooms at Friends House to big companies and establishment bodies; to close as many unprofitable Meeting houses as possible; and to cut central staff. There is even speculation that, ultimately, Friends House must be sold. To me, all of this feels misguided – and conceding our spaces to non-Quaker businesses seems to fly in the face of our values. I am certain that some cuts, economies and efficiencies are needed, but the long-term solution has to be an increase in membership, with an emphasis on gaining young Friends.
This summer I watched the television programmes commemorating the D-Day landings of the second world war. Alongside the slaughter of thousands of soldiers on both sides, I watched the story of the historic town of Caen, only ‘liberated’ by being bombed to rubble. Inland, German cities like Hamburg and Dresden were being obliterated, in the belief that this would reduce the fighting morale of surviving Germans.
Back in the summer, a conference was held at Northumbria University on the subject of ‘Protesting War in the Twentieth Century’. Three of the papers were given by Quakers and featured Quaker subjects.
In Christian spaces, ‘the Word’ is mentioned often. This might mean the Bible, or Jesus himself, or the ‘good news’ of the gospel. To me, though, the words spoken in the church were rarely good. I grew up in the 2000s, and the church’s view on homosexuality was largely negative. From out-and-out discrimination to ‘just so long as they don’t do it in front of me’, it was clearly there. For people that preached love, it didn’t feel very loving.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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