Once again, Quaker Week is here. This is a week
that Quakers in Britain designate for Outreach, Friends House sets a
theme, and all individual Quakers and Meetings are encouraged to run
activities to help raise the profile of Quakers, inform and interest
the general public, and just generally be “out there” more.
Outreach is a difficult topic for British Quakers.
One of the first things I learned about Quakers could be summarised
as “we do not proselytise”. Of course, I learned that in the
context of liberal Quakers. Evangelical and pastoral branches of the
world Quaker family are quite keen on proselytisation, especially (as
you might expect) the evangelical branch. But liberal Quaker,
especially the sort here in Britain, just don't go out and tell
people they should be Quakers.
Yet, obviously thing we have something worth
finding out about, and thus surely worth sharing. Anecdotally, it
seems that those convinced in adulthood are growing, as a proportion
of our Yearly Meeting, compared to those raised among Quakers. I'm
sure someone has figures on that, but I don't have them to hand; in
any case, that is the impression I, and others I know, have been
getting over the last decade or so, at least in terms of people who
are actively involved in Quaker goings-on. When you add our dwindling
numbers and ageing demographics, it becomes clear that we would be
both selfish and foolish not to try to share this wonderful thing we
have found.
So we have “outreach”. Like so many words, it
has its own peculiar Quaker meaning. It encompasses public presence,
public education, and that fine line between seeming like we don't
care whether people come and telling people they ought to come to our
Meetings. The question always seems to be “how much can we do to
interest and excite people without it seeming like we're
proselytising?”
Some hold that our best outreach is just doing
stuff in the world – “letting our lives speak”, if you prefer
the Quaker cliché. Certainly, our involvement in matters of national
debate can increase our profile, such as, in recent years, our
support for equal marriage – particularly allowing religious
marriages without regard to sex or gender among those faiths who,
like ours, support marriage equality on religious grounds. Some
attention was stumbled into during the Occupy demonstrations in
London, as well. And of course, there's a near-continuous level of
awareness-raising by our activities around peace and disarmament –
at least among people who spend their time on such things.
In my Meeting, we have two major areas of social
action – support for refugees and asylum seekers, and a living wage
campaign. Both important areas that most Friends are glad to support.
They aren't things that are terribly visible to the public at large,
however, and our Quaker ethics also restrain us from shouting from
the rooftops about what we are doing; we don't do it for recognition,
we do it because it needs to be done. Equal marriage required us to
be loud and public to be effective; economic justice ends up being
loud when there's a lot of amplification, like there was around the
Occupy movement.
Now, I don't mean to say we shouldn't do these
things – we do them regardless of the role they can play in
outreach, because we try to do what love requires of us. Love
requires that we support the idea of a living wage, that we support
the idea that desperate people who've fled war and persecution are
welcomed and treated like human beings. Nor I am saying they don't
have a role in letting the world know what Quakers stand for,
something of who we are and what we do. They are, however, quite poor
at letting people know that we exist, and especially at giving them
the opportunity to learn more about us.
So, social action has an outreach role, but I am
very much of the opinion that we also need outreach qua
outreach – activities whose sole focus is outreach. It runs the
risk of looking more like proselytisation, certainly. It also means
that when it doesn't “work” you have achieved, it seems, nothing.
Organise an outreach event that has no-one but Quakers turn up, and
you have wasted your time. Do some social action and no-one but the
beneficiaries, or those being campaigned, hear about it, and you've
still done something for those beneficiaries, or at least you'd hope
so. Thus there's an emotional hump to overcome, especially for anyone
who's tried to organise outreach before and it fallen rather flat.
And so, we return
to Quaker Week. Area and Local Meetings across Great Britain are
organising things to mark the week, and hopefully to do some
outreach. Exhibitions, talks, public Meetings for Worship, all sorts.
Here, we are having Friends in the Meeting House for drop-ins across
the week, every weekday afternoon and Friday evening. Hopefully,
people who are curious (and have seen some of our promotional
material – no money spent except on paper and toner/ink, and the
odd bit of laminating) will roll on up, and we'll be able to offer
them tea and cake (if we have enough volunteers baking cakes), and
have a chat with them. Show them some displays, offer them some
leaflets and pamphlets, be informative, and generally try to make
Quakerism sound as interesting and attractive as we can without it
sounding like we're trying to persuade them to be a Quaker. It's a
fine line to walk.
Of course, as I
mentioned at the start of this post, Quaker Week has a theme. This
year, it's “in turbulent times: be a Quaker”. Sounding slightly
imperative, I suspect some are uncomfortable about the way it might
be read as telling people they should be Quakers. I don't think
that's the intention. Rather, it's to highlight the advantages of
being a Quaker, or indeed in Quakers existing, in turbulent times –
an appropriate message, given that we are certainly in turbulent
times now. So we will be highlighting our actions in the world,
especially those that are particularly topical, those that are most
of-the-moment. We also hope that people might get a message about how
reassuring and strengthening Quaker practices can be, how we draw
strength from our community. I rather imagine we'll be too bashful to
actually make that connection very often, though.
