Quaker Renewal

My book Quaker Renewal (published by The Friend in 2017) is now out of print. I have reproduced some sections from it here. 

Introduction

 

"Renewal of the Society waits for the choice of each Friend: Am I willing to risk the disturbing, transfiguring presence of the Spirit in my life? To obey it? To expect ‘the Cross’ and dark days as I discover and nurture who I am before God? When we choose to live the spiritual life the Quaker Way, these are the experiences we are committing ourselves to, whatever words we put upon them. If significant numbers of us are not interested in, or willing to live by these experiences, the hoped-for renewal of our meetings cannot occur. But if our collective spiritual power gathers strength it will infect other Friends and newcomers. Ministry will become more grounded in the Spirit and individuals will be inspired by the Spirit to serve our meetings as nurturers, prophets and conservers."

Ursula Jane O’Shea, "Living the Way: Quaker spirituality and community"

There are good reasons why long-lived religious movements need to be continually renewed. As formal structures and bureaucracies develop, members’ energy is increasingly drawn into perpetuating the organisation, rather than serving the original spiritual mission of the community. The organisation’s culture and structures soon become closely geared to the interests of its most influential members. These structures eventually push increasing numbers of spiritually seeking members to the edges of the community, or even out of it altogether. 

This is very much the situation I see in large parts of Britain Yearly Meeting. As a Friend in one struggling Meeting asked after a talk on ‘vibrant Meetings’: ‘We already have too much to do. Are we supposed to be vibrant now as well?’

We currently have an organisational culture and structures that suit a dwindling group of members in many scattered, mostly very tiny Meetings. A wider group of attenders come to Meeting semi-regularly to recharge their batteries on a Sunday morning, but are deterred from getting more involved by the onerous demands of administration or the absence of real spiritual vitality. Most of the newcomers who occasionally turn up to try a Quaker Meeting on Sunday never come back, or attend for only a short time before drifting off to look for something more spiritually nourishing. Yet we rarely ask ourselves what it is that might be missing from our worship and our community.

In large part, British Quakers are asleep; but we are stirring. A growing number of voices are asking whether the way we have come to ‘do Quakerism’ over the last few decades really serves the needs of our communities or the leadings of the Spirit. Many Meetings have confronted their settled opposition to ‘proselytising’, and started to actively encourage new attenders to our Meetings. Some Friends are even starting to question the hardened liberal dogmas that have outlawed the teaching of Quaker spirituality and the ministry of leadership in our communities.

These fitful stirrings have not yet reached a critical threshold of awakening. We may be at a crucial point in our story as British Quakers. Will we toss and turn, only to roll over and go back to sleep? Or will we come awake at last, while we still have enough energy and hope to renew our Society and ourselves, to realise the unique possibilities of a renewed Quaker way for our times?

We have been here before. At the very end of the nineteenth century the ‘Quaker Renaissance’ movement introduced the era of liberal Quakerism. This renewed form of the Quaker way unleashed a new wave of spiritual vigour and social engagement. It contributed to the heroic achievements of Friends during the twentieth century, from conscientious objection, to the Kindertransport, humanitarian relief and anti-war movements.

We need a new kind of ‘Quaker Renaissance’ today that takes seriously the potential of the Quaker way to connect us with the source of life and power that can renew our lives, build up loving communities and heal the wounds of the world.

The short essays in this collection are attempts to point towards some areas where I see potential for new life and creativity in Quaker spirituality and practice. Essential to realising these possibilities is a willingness to share our questions, insights and frustrations with each other, without evading the risks of mutual challenge and vulnerability. This is not easy; it can create discomfort and conflict, but we cannot be a religious community without it.

These essays necessarily include judgements about our current Quaker culture that will not be shared by other Friends whose experience and temperament are very different to mine. This is just as it should be. I don’t want to argue that my suggestions should be accepted by everyone. If they stimulate some reflection and conversation about the possibilities of a more life-giving Quaker way for our time, they will have served their purpose.

The Quaker way

Over recent years many Friends have diagnosed a crisis in Britain Yearly Meeting. They have warned us of a continuing decline in membership, and of intractable conflicts over religious belief and language. These concerns are important, but I believe that both are actually symptoms of a more fundamental crisis of spiritual vitality.

Throughout our history, Quakers have faced the challenge of continually renewing our spiritual life and shared practice. Every generation has had to rediscover the Quaker way anew. We all need to confront our own spiritual inertia and find the depth of reality in our own experience. Since most Quakers now join as older adults, we also have to learn the Quaker way as a ‘second language’. This requires us to avoid projecting onto the Quaker community the assumptions, hurts or disappointments we have received from other traditions.

These challenges have become especially acute in recent years. For several decades we have neglected to explicitly teach core Quaker practices to newcomers, with the result that many Meetings have little experience of gathered worship, Spirit-led discernment or lives rooted in responsiveness to divine leadings. These are the substance of the Quaker path. Without them we are too often left with the forms of ‘Quakerliness’ without the experiential substance, and inevitably we fall into disputes over words.

In the absence of any shared understanding of core Quaker practices such as Meetings for Worship and for Business, we increasingly encounter chronic disagreements about how to live the Quaker way together. A shared understanding does not mean identical beliefs, but it does rely on a common language for communicating our experiences, explicit teaching and learning, and a continual conversation about the meaning and purpose of our core practices. In the absence of these a Quaker Meeting can become simply a neutral space for the sharing of ideas from other religious traditions or secular ideologies.

Thankfully, there are signs of awakening. Some Meetings are experimenting with new or rediscovered forms of outreach, worship and teaching. They are encouraging the sharing of spiritual experience, instead of evading the risks of encounter by focusing solely on the safer topics of shared political and ethical values.

What this highlights to me is that the rediscovery of our Quaker tradition as a living way of spiritual practice is in our own hands. If we want a deeper experience of community, and a renewed spiritual depth of worship and testimony, we need to take courage. We have to create opportunities for conversations about the meaning of our Quaker practices with each other and throughout the Religious Society of Friends. We can encourage each other to take the Quaker way seriously as a path of spiritual practice to learn about, to discuss with each other, and above all to work at, allowing it to change us and the world around us. 

Centre and boundary

Most of us are understandably wary of drawing boundaries around what counts as being a Quaker, as any boundary risks excluding someone. Yet the absence of any shared understanding of the Quaker way is experienced as an obstacle to communication and to community in many of our Meetings. It becomes ever harder to explain to newcomers what the Quaker Meeting is for, and to resolve our own practical disagreements, as our concern to include everyone makes it increasingly difficult to find a common basis for Quaker identity.

Some Friends have tried to define the boundaries of Quaker identity by identifying certain core Quaker beliefs, such as ‘that of God in everyone’. Others point to a list of testimonies, which are often interpreted as ‘shared values’ rather than Spirit-led actions. For some, there is no specific teaching or content to the Quaker way at all. For these Friends, the Quaker Meeting is simply an accepting space for people to explore their own values and pursue their own private spiritual journeys.

I believe that a more fruitful way to look at what it means to be a Quaker is to focus not on the ‘boundary’ but on the ‘centre’ of the Quaker way. For me, the centre of our tradition is not beliefs or values, but a small number of distinctive Quaker practices for worship, discernment and testimony. Foremost among these are the Meeting for Worship and the Meeting for Worship for Business.

Quaker practices have never been static. Meetings for Worship have changed a great deal since the seventeenth century, when they could last for three hours and contain lengthy Biblical sermons. New practices also emerge over time – including worship sharing, Meetings for Clearness and Experiment with Light – and they are always subject to adaptation and reinterpretation. But it is through our participation in these practices, including in discussions about their meaning, that we take part in the Quaker way.

All of our Quaker practices are grounded in spiritual discernment. They require us to develop the capacity for attentive listening to divine leadings and to restrain our natural impulses towards self-assertion and defensiveness. Discernment is a form of perception – a practice of insight into a depth of reality that we can trust to guide us, as individuals and as communities.

All of our practices rely on a shared trust that there is a reliable source of guidance to be found, which is not simply a projection of our own wishes and values. This inner attitude of trust does not assume any particular theology; it is compatible with many kinds of religious belief and even with a thorough-going agnosticism. All that is essential is our practical willingness to listen for and to follow the leadings of the ‘Inward Guide’.

The ‘centre’ of the Quaker way is to participate fully in the core Quaker practices that create the possibility of shared experiences and common understandings. This includes a commitment to continuing growth in appreciating the depths of possibility of these practices, in dialogue with other Friends throughout our Yearly Meeting and beyond.

If we focused on a commitment to Quaker practices as the centre of the Quaker way, perhaps we wouldn’t need to worry so much about the boundaries. There is nothing exclusive about Quaker practices. Anyone can begin to explore them in an experimental spirit, starting right where we are. There are no preconditions, beyond the simple willingness to encounter a source of guidance beyond our conscious intentions, values and attitudes – allowing it to lead us into a wider, more generous and Spirit-filled life. 

A shared language

One of the ways that contemporary Quaker practice has become impoverished is by the loss of a shared spiritual language. We have come to assume that the only way we can communicate at all is by trying to ‘translate’ each other’s words into some other terms that are meaningful for us. This may work when our experiences are similar enough that we are ‘just using different words to talk about the same thing’. But it doesn’t help us to hear and to take seriously Friends whose experience is significantly different to our own. By translating their words into our own preferred language, we sidestep the reality of difference, instead of allowing ourselves to be challenged and enriched by it.

The absence of a shared language can also be an obstacle when we want to produce collective statements, such as minutes or outreach materials. If we try to include only words that no one will object to, we are left with an increasingly restricted vocabulary that is ever more dominated by the bureaucratic language of the wider culture.

There is an alternative. We could choose to cultivate a contemporary Quaker language that is rich enough to express the full diversity of our varied experiences. There is an extraordinarily creative spiritual vocabulary to draw upon in the writings of Quakers throughout our history. A contemporary language would also be continually open to whatever images, words and symbols arise from our current experience of Quaker practices. A shared Quaker language would include multiple images and metaphors that reflect the multifaceted nature of spiritual reality. 

Quaker practices open us to the possibility of encounter with a reality that may be experienced as personal and impersonal, masculine, feminine, immanent, transcendent or otherwise. So, words and symbols such as ‘God’, ‘the Guide’ or ‘Inward Christ’ might be recognised as valid ways of expressing the personal nature of some of our experiences – such as a sense of loving presence and guidance. At the same time, and without contradiction, such a language would also include impersonal images such as ‘Light’, ‘Energy’ or ‘Oneness’, which can point to experiences of illumination, empowerment and interrelationship.

A shared language would involve accepting all of these images as valid, but none of them as sufficient in themselves. It would be rich enough to enable everyone to express the depth and variety of our personal experiences. At the same time its diversity would point towards the inexpressible nature of spiritual reality, which is always beyond our capacity to fully name, identify or control. By acknowledging the validity of numerous ways of encountering spiritual reality, it would also create space for change and growth in our religious understanding, so we might be less inclined to rely on narrow theologically-defined identities. Instead of defending our own concepts and images, and trying to exclude those used by other Friends, we might recognise a wide range of experiences, images and symbols as equally important for expressing the full range of Quaker experience.

Many of us also draw insight and inspiration from other religious traditions, and would continue to make use of other spiritual languages as well. But a sufficiently rich Quaker language would not depend on importing concepts from other traditions. It would be broad and subtle enough to communicate the breadth and depth of Quaker experience with each other and with the wider world – including the varied insights and commitments that arise from our shared Quaker practices and their practical expression in our lives. 

Worship 

If the Quaker way has something unique to offer the world, perhaps it is the experience of a Gathered Meeting for Worship. This is what Gerald Hewitson has described as: 

…a Meeting where the silence is as soft as velvet, as deep as a still pool; a silence where words emerge, only to deepen and enrich that rich silence, and where Presence is as palpable and soft as the skin of a peach; where the membrane separating this moment in time and eternity is filament-fine. 

 Journey into life, Swarthmore Lecture 2013 

Gathered worship is the living power of the Quaker way, with an amazing capacity to heal, renew and transform our lives and communities. This depth of worship is a rare occurrence in some of our Meetings because the disciplines of listening and speaking that enable and sustain it are not being practised.

Worship is a movement of the whole being towards a spiritual reality that is ultimately mysterious. It requires the commitment of our whole selves – mind, heart, body and will – to something greater than our own values, thoughts and preferences.

It is easy to keep ourselves at the centre, making worship into another activity of the conscious mind. The discipline of listening requires us to let go of our need to be in control. It asks us to open ourselves to a wordless encounter with the inward source of life and power – a sense of ‘Presence’ beyond thoughts and concepts. In that place we become receptive to the ‘promptings of love and truth’ that may arise to teach us, and that might require us to offer spoken ministry. 

The discipline of speaking means discerning whether our intention to offer spoken ministry is a response to a specific leading of the Spirit. It asks us to relinquish the natural urge to speak from the needs of the ego. We have to learn to speak only when our message arises from the deeper place of responsiveness to spiritual reality. When we minister from this place our simplest words have a special power to draw others into awareness, to encourage, to console or to challenge.

Where the disciplines of listening and speaking are not practised the Meeting for Worship can no longer function. Although the outward form may appear the same, such a Meeting has become something else. In these Meetings, spoken ministry tends toward political discussion or summaries of radio and television programmes. Friends tend to tolerate each other’s messages in a spirit of generous forbearance, rather than embracing them as words with the power to speak to our hearts.

Elders have a particular responsibility for reminding Friends of the disciplines involved in Quaker worship. In practice, elders’ willingness to do this is severely undermined by the insistence of many Friends that worship and ministry are purely subjective and not subject to community standards.

For many years we have tried to avoid conflict within our Meetings by evading mutual accountability for the quality of our worship. We have not expected new Friends and attenders to learn the disciplines of Quaker worship. Instead, we have encouraged each other to reinterpret the practice of worship wherever it conflicts with our own preferences and assumptions.

Weekly Meeting for Worship cannot support the whole weight of our spiritual lives on its own. If our daily life is so hectic and overstretched that we come to Meeting with minds filled with jangling thoughts all clamouring for attention, we will miss the possibility of gathered worship. This is a struggle for many in a society that constantly pushes us into overwork, over-stimulation and over-consumption. If we truly want to open ourselves to the possibilities of worship, we also need to make regular space in our daily lives for stillness and reflection, ‘to set aside times of quiet for openness to the Holy Spirit… to find the inward source of our strength’ (Advices & queries 3).

If a Quaker community is to exist as something beyond a social club for like-minded people, it needs to be rooted in an authentic experience of worship. A gathered Quaker Meeting has the power to heal, transform, embolden, to make us more sensitive and more aware. It is the life-giving sap that is needed for vital, outward-looking communities.

One of the greatest qualities of the Quaker way of worship is its utter simplicity. It needs no special building, no specially-qualified clergy or guru, no holy objects or texts. It is open to everyone on a basis of complete equality, without distinction of gender, sexuality or background. Quaker worship does not require special techniques or great natural ability, but it does demand our self-discipline and self-surrender:

Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion.  

Isaac Penington, 1661 

 The gift of leadership 

It is often claimed that Quakers don’t have leaders, but this is not quite true. In a Quaker Meeting leadership is shared among Friends holding many roles – including clerks, elders, overseers, nominations, children’s and outreach committees, among others, and it is also practised more informally by those who minister to the community in many different ways. All of these Friends need to exercise the gift of leadership.

Leadership is a form of service to the community. It enables things to happen by taking responsibility for supporting, enabling and encouraging others, and it is essential for any group to function. The tasks of leadership are not usually highly visible or dramatic. They include motivating, encouraging, thanking and welcoming, making sure that information is shared and clear arrangements are made, helping the group to stay on-topic and summing up the outcomes of discussions. It is also a function of leadership to remind the group of ‘right ordering’ (the Quaker community’s agreed processes) and to discourage the most vocal individuals from dominating a group.

Good leaders support and enable others’ gifts and leadings (including others’ potential for leadership) instead of suppressing everyone else’s initiative. The Quaker approach to church government, which early Friends called ‘Gospel Order’, is a way of recognising and distributing leadership, while keeping it accountable to the community as a whole. 

In a Quaker Meeting authority means being ‘authorised’ by the community to exercise accountable leadership. But there are many Friends today who see every suggestion of leadership as authoritarianism. Many of us have experienced groups where authority has been abused or monopolised. Some who have been hurt by the misuse of authority in other contexts come to a Quaker Meeting expecting it to be a ‘leaderless group’ where ‘everyone is equal’. The testimony to equality is sometimes mistaken for a belief that everyone is the same, instead of recognising the equal value of our very different gifts and experiences.

This suspicion of leadership has contributed to a Quaker culture that often serves to squash individual initiative, responsibility and enthusiasm. Those in leadership roles may be accused of being hierarchical when they try to fulfil the responsibilities given them by the Meeting as a whole. This creates a strong temptation to be timid about exercising leadership, for fear of provoking Friends who don’t accept the authority of elders or other appointed roles.

Part of the challenge for those who hold leadership responsibilities is to be faithful to the authority entrusted to them by the Meeting, even at the risk of being criticised or resented. Sometimes this may mean challenging Friends who insist on getting their own way in opposition to the discernment of the whole community. This, too, as difficult and sometimes painful as it is, is an essential form of service – helping to prevent the community from being bullied by its most aggressive members.

In those periods when the Quaker movement has thrived, there have always been significant numbers of Friends who have practised leadership on behalf of the community. The revitalisation of our Quaker communities relies on encouraging the development and expression of the gift of leadership within our Meetings. Quaker communities, as with all other human groups, need people who are willing to take a share of leadership responsibilities, including the difficult and challenging ones, in order to thrive.

Leaders are not a special kind of people with extraordinary abilities. The principal quality needed for leadership is simply a willingness to embrace some responsibility for the flourishing of the whole community. 

The simplified Meeting 

In too many Quaker Meetings spiritual vitality is being stifled by the excessive demands of church government. Struggling to meet the ever-growing requirements of administration can take up so much of Friends’ time and energy that there is little left over to devote to the practice of the Quaker way itself.

 Bureaucratic overload subverts the ministry of nominations to discern Friends’ gifts and leadings, turning it into a weary necessity of ‘filling jobs’. Committees and roles are readily set up but very rarely laid down, even where they are clearly no longer serving the life of the Spirit. But as long as we keep on devoting most of our energies to simply keeping the structures going, we only postpone the profound changes that are actually needed.

Instead of continually working harder just to keep going, the renewal of our Quaker practice asks us to refocus on what is essential – serving the leadings of the Spirit rather than the demands of property and administration. Quaker organisation is not an end in itself. All of our structures, committees, roles and property exist for just one purpose – to help us to attend to the Inward Guide and to follow it. All other functions are secondary to these, and wherever administrative tasks interfere with Friends’ capacity to practise the Quaker way, they need to be reduced, shared with other Meetings or eliminated altogether. 

Instead of allowing ourselves to become societies for the preservation of historic buildings, we need to recall our vocation as communities of faithful discernment and testimony to divine leadings.

The essential responsibilities of a Quaker Meeting are those that enable our core practices of worship, discernment and testimony. Our Meetings for Worship and for Business are essential for our formation as a community that is responsive to divine guidance. Friends’ leadings need the discernment of the Meeting, so that they can be recognised and supported by the community and lived out as our testimony to the world. For these spiritual practices, we need the service of Friends who, between them, can offer the ministries of clerking and pastoral care that enable our Meetings to be rightly ordered. All other roles and responsibilities, including for legal and financial matters, are entirely secondary.

Perhaps we should support our nominations committees in resisting the pressure to treat Quaker roles as jobs that must be filled. Instead, we could encourage them to concentrate on recognising Friends’ gifts and providing opportunities to exercise them. We might consider adopting a new discipline – of no longer expecting anyone to fulfil more than one significant Quaker responsibility at a time, reducing the number of roles to suit the Friends available. In this way each of us might be able to concentrate on undertaking one Quaker ministry wholeheartedly, instead of continuing to spread ourselves ever more thinly across too many tasks.

Perhaps we also need to discern the particular ministry of our Local or Area Meeting – what are we called to as a local community of Friends? Is it to build an inclusive and caring local community, to offer our testimony by challenging social injustices, to engage in interfaith learning and dialogue, or something else? By focusing on the particular ministry that our Meeting has to offer at this time, and letting go of other responsibilities that have become burdens, we might rediscover the vitality of the ‘concern-orientated life’ described by Thomas Kelly as our lives and our Meetings become simplified by ‘faithfulness to a few concerns’ (Quaker faith & practice 20.36). 

The testimony of a transformed life

One of the most important of the original Quaker insights is that our testimony is what we do. It is not what we say we believe or what we claim to value that matters, but what we say with our life.

Our testimony is all of our actions – a whole way of life that testifies to the reality of our experience of God. If we have encountered spiritual reality and been changed by it we will lead a transformed life, and that is our testimony.

The specific actions of Quaker testimony have always been very varied, and have changed over time in response to different situations. For the first Quakers the most important forms of testimony were plain and truthful speech and the refusal to pay church tithes. Later, Quaker testimony developed in many directions, including opposition to slavery and war, support for refugees and prison reform.

It is only since the 1950s that all of these very diverse kinds of Quaker testimony have been grouped into the familiar lists, such as ‘Simplicity, Truth, Equality and Peace’, simply as a convenient way of explaining and interpreting them.

Unfortunately, since then we have got into the habit of talking about the Quaker testimonies as though they were a list of principles or values that we are supposed to accept, and then try (and inevitably fail) to ‘live up to’. Testimonies have become ideas in our heads that we have to work out how to apply to real life. This emphasis on a list of values tends to undermine what is most essential about the Quaker way; that it is a way of practice, rooted in experience, not in principles or beliefs. 

Testimony is our faithfulness to the promptings of love and truth in our hearts. It is what fills the heart and flows into action. Testimony is faithful, Spirit-led action that aims to communicate, to challenge and to transform relationships and power structures.

Our corporate testimony is all of those actions that we have discerned together as a Yearly Meeting, including the rejection of violence and the commitments to peace-making, speaking truthfully, refusing to participate in gambling or speculation and becoming a low-carbon community.

These aspects of our life together are not an arbitrary list of rules or principles. Quaker testimony aims to reveal something true about the nature of reality, the world as it really is, not just our personal, subjective values.

By reminding us of the ways in which Friends continue to be led into action, these corporate testimonies can help to sensitise us to areas where the Inward Guide may be nudging us in our own lives. Each of us will be led differently at different times, because we all have our own unique experiences, talents and contribution to offer to the world.

One of the gifts of being in community is that each of us brings something different, and none of us has to try to do everything. We may be led to testify in different ways, but if our leadings are genuine all of our actions will harmonise and complement each other because they all flow from and point towards the same reality.

Through the discernment of the whole community we are helped to see where our own blind spots and resistances are, to become more aware of the areas where we are less inclined to heed the promptings of love and truth in our hearts. The aim is not to be morally perfect, but simply to become more whole, more true to reality and faithful to the way that the Spirit is moving within us, for our own flourishing and for the healing of the world.

Spiritual generosity

For many years, Quakers in Britain have been deeply reluctant to share the riches of the Quaker way with others. We have labelled any attempt to welcome potential new Friends as ‘proselytising’, but as Paul Parker, recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting, has pointed out: ‘There is a big difference between proselytising and not hiding.’

Our long-standing refusal to actively invite newcomers is not just liberal reticence. It is a failure of generosity and of imagination, an inability to imagine that people who are not ‘just like us’ might also find something of value in Quaker practices. 

By refusing to reach out to people beyond our existing social circles, expecting them instead to ‘find us when they are ready’ without any assistance from us, we have become narrowly self-selecting in our social make-up.

The culture of British Quakers is now dominated by the views and experiences of a very restricted social group: largely white, retired and overwhelmingly from the education and health professions. There are many good and valuable things about this subculture, but it is inevitably very limited in its range of experience and perspective on the world.

We have unintentionally backed ourselves into a subcultural ghetto, which both restricts the range of insights available to our ministry and discernment, and also makes it extremely difficult for the vast majority of people in our society not to feel uncomfortably out of place in any of our Meetings.

In recent years, initiatives such as Quaker Quest and national Quaker Week have challenged Friends to overcome this exclusive ‘culture of hiddenness’. Meetings which have done this have often encountered unexpected benefits, as Friends have learned much more about each other, quite apart from the energy and enthusiasm brought by new attenders.

Even those Meetings which have experimented with some form of outreach, however, are not always clear about the reason for doing it. Is it in order to grow as a Meeting, to prevent Quakers in Britain from dying out, or for some other reason?

The Religious Society of Friends is not an end in itself, but a vehicle for nurturing the spiritual practices that can sustain a more fully human life – one that is guided by and surrendered to the ‘principle of life within’. What Quakers in Britain have to share with others is a tradition of spiritual practice that enables us to encounter a source of healing, guidance, meaning and purpose within ourselves, and the quality of the community life that emerges from sharing these practices together.

The motivation for our outreach is spiritual generosity towards all of those people who are experiencing the confusion, meaninglessness and disconnection that are so characteristic of our times. Authentic spiritual practices are remedies for the soul-sickness of a culture that suppresses and distorts our inner lives in order to keep selling us distraction.

The Quaker way offers a path through the modern condition of meaninglessness and isolation by drawing us into the purposes of God, by which our own healing and growth into maturity are brought to participate in the healing of the world.

Spiritual generosity challenges all of us to move outside our comfortable social ghettos and to share the life-giving riches of the Quaker way with people of different cultures, experiences and life-journeys. We need to be willing to enlarge our image of what a Quaker community might look, sound and act like. We need the generosity to reach out to welcome those whose differences can enlarge and enrich our experience of Quaker community, and our insights into the leadings of the Spirit for our times.