Breaking the Old Rules

Creating Space for Quaker Revival

That’s how I felt when things changed for us as a Quaker meeting . . . but not at first. First, there was just fear.

When I was young, I danced ballet. It’s a beautiful and precise art form, requiring years of strict discipline to form the careful grace of ballerinas. As we danced, we were accompanied by a military-esque bark of orders from the teacher: “Backs straight!” “Feet pointed!” “Arms curved!” “Heads up!” “Heads up, Catriona!!!” My clumsiness and rugby-player legs were never destined for greatness in this area, but there was always a moment during class that I loved: when our teacher had to fiddle about finding the next CD, often needing to pop back to the car to find it. Suddenly, there was all this space: a huge empty floor with no music, no set dance to perform, and no rules. The girls would chat, but I would dance and feel free for the first time. I could dance for the joy of it and make something new, liberated from all the tight restrictions demanded of the craft.

Let me back up a bit.

I come from Bethnal Green Local Meeting (local meetings are known as monthly meetings elsewhere), a small meeting with a lengthy yet fragile history in East London in the United Kingdom. Our lineage can be traced all the way back to 1655, and yet we have not had a meetinghouse since 1935, when our eighteenth-century structure was declared unsafe and demolished. Despite this, we have persisted by renting various community spaces throughout the years. At least twice, our numbers have dwindled down to one: in the 1940s (as shared in section 18.14 of our yearly meeting’s Faith and Practice, during a period in which we were called Ratcliff Meeting) and more recently in the 2010s. No matter how thin it has become at times, our meeting has an unbroken thread spanning centuries.

A couple of years ago, we faced a new fragility in the life of our meeting. Three members of our very small leadership team, who had upheld the meeting for many years, announced they planned to retire to different parts of the country, with no clear replacements to take their place. The team had been senior in age and experience, whilst many of the rest of us were younger or newer to Quakers, or both. There was an empty space, threatening to remain unfilled and take the meeting with it. Fear arose, as well as a sense of loss. The ballet teachers hadn’t just gone for a break, they had left the building! And it was up to us now to find a way to fill it.

We would need a new approach.

There was an empty space, threatening to remain unfilled and take the meeting with it. Fear arose, as well as a sense of loss. The ballet teachers hadn’t just gone for a break, they had left the building! And it was up to us now to find a way to fill it.

Like the slow scattering of the old team, it happened organically. We had one member who was happy to take over one of the pastoral care roles, with transition support and a caveat: she couldn’t take on the email portion of the role, having already committed to doing so with other community organizations. Like many younger people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, life was busy with work and other commitments.

Setting this boundary created an important knock-on effect of sorts: without another successor to share the pastoral care role, the team came up with a new long-term solution. They approached another attender and me, asking us to take over the emails. This was breaking the old rules, as it was neither an official role nor were either of us members (or intending to become members for our own reasons, despite having attended a relatively long time). But, as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

We said yes. Had either of us been approached to take on the role alone, we would have declined it due to too many other pressures in our lives. It works really well. We swap over each week, and when work, illness, or life in general gets in the way, we can manage it together so that the work still gets done without creating undue burden or stress.

With this success under our belts, we suggested that the meeting welcome others to volunteer in pairs. It worked, and soon we had a full roster of people happy to host the meeting together and, more crucially, to handle the tea and biscuits. (We are a British meeting, after all.) This not only filled the roles needed but strengthened the relationships between the pairs, thereby strengthening our meeting as a whole.

Once again, this created an important knock-on effect. By this time, we had a new elder, bringing us almost to the size of the old team, with two elders and one pastoral care person. (As a small meeting that rents, we don’t have a clerk.) However, in practice, our leadership had expanded greatly, to include the emails team and several members and attenders volunteering to open the meetinghouse before worship. Many more of us were involved in running the meeting than before. By asking less of us, there became many more of us. This created more sustainability in our meeting, and by sharing tasks rather than roles, we moved closer towards simplicity. A culture of shared responsibility within the meeting began to take root, a sense that it wasn’t run by a few but owned and upheld by all of us.

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Bethnal Green Local Meeting worship space, set up and empty (top), then filled with Friends (bottom). Photos courtesy of the author.

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So we had filled the space with people. Now what would we do with it?

This is where my excitement kicked in, that old sense of there being all this glorious space waiting to become something new, to be created or recreated afresh. We had room to play or experiment with how things could be different, not knowing where we were going but excited to find out.

I wasn’t approached to manage the email list at random. I have a background in charity communications, so I was full of ideas about how things could be done differently. I simplified several emails a week into one weekly e-newsletter, which also had key information for newcomers, so no one would be left in the dark. I prioritized friendly, welcoming language, in contrast to a more formal, business-like approach that we had before. I started an Instagram account to help people find us (especially younger people) and a WhatsApp group that helped us to connect outside the weekly meeting. These ideas were based on professional experience, but more importantly, the ideas were based on the needs and wants I had when I was a newcomer to meeting.

That’s the great thing about opening up to more people: our individual strengths can shine much more brightly in service to the meeting. For example, in our past, we arranged spiritual discussions on more traditional Quaker topics such as the testimonies, usually led by the team. However, as the sense of the collective took root, we had people come forward to speak on the relationship between spirituality and subjects of key importance in their own lives. We had an artist who spoke on spirituality and art and a teacher who spoke on spirituality and education. Other topics included language, love, artificial intelligence, and sexuality. These topics felt like a more relatable route for participants to speak deeply on their personal experiences of spirituality.

More people stepped into the space and set up community events. A keen history buff took us on a day trip to a Quaker meetinghouse from the 1600s. A nature lover took us on a forest walk; a book lover set up a book swap; and an activist took us to protests. A community organizer helped set up reading groups with meals that moved between one another’s homes, showing the trust that has grown between our members and attenders.

From our monthly visit to the pub for Sunday roast dinner to our organizing meetings, everyone is always and explicitly welcome. Any one of us is welcome to step into and take up space. And each time someone does, the relationships between members and the meeting as a whole grow stronger.

In this last year or two—through all these changes—our meeting has gone from strength to strength. At a time when most British meetings are aging and declining in numbers, our meeting has not only grown but grown younger, with an average age in the 30s. When I began attending in the mid 2010s, there were around four to five people a week on average. Now we have quadrupled to more than 20 week after week; we keep running out of chairs and have people sitting on the floor! We are now moving to a bigger venue to accommodate us all, literally and figuratively creating even more space for us to grow.

I am so grateful that space opened up for us. Without it, we may have never known what we wereB11E65 capable of or how different things could look. It is a joy to watch our community grow and take shape in ways that I could have never imagined.

This is the story that I wanted to tell about the revival of our meeting. I wondered if there are any lessons that can be learned from it?

For me, I believe that revivals, like revolutions, can be cast as an overthrow or rejection of the old order in favour of a new, oppositional state. But it need not be so violent. So much of change is built in community and care, in a groundswell that brings people together in a process that is mutually created, as we have found. Each one of us has a relationship with the meeting and a relationship with every other member, which is greater than the sum of our parts, making something new that can be gently guided but never mandated. In lieu of a rejection of what has come before, space is needed in order to facilitate this new way of being, of growth.

For us, this space was created by happenstance. There have been other cases where younger people have created their own space, such as a group of Quakers in Portland, Maine, in the United States, who set up a second meeting for Millennials and Gen Z. It would be wonderful to see older generations encourage new spaces led by younger people (and those young in spirit and experience), rather than inviting them to fit into preexisting structures that may no longer fit the shape of us.

Given long enough, even with the best of intentions, all guidance and leadership can become dry and brittle—unyielding. Our intergenerational relationships strengthen the Quaker community, and yet there will always be differences between generations that can become top-heavy, weighted in favour of those who have been long established: unbalanced and inflexible, unknowingly alienating.

No matter how they come into being, creating and filling space in this way takes bravery from all generations. We must maintain faith amidst the uncertainty that the space might or might not be filled. We must have the confidence to fill it and have the belief that what will grow will be of service to the whole of Quakers. Opposition can instill a lack of confidence that younger people need to thrive. Support for and confidence in the new ideas of younger people can be the greatest gift that older people can give to ensure that Quakers blossom long into the future.

I am so grateful that space opened up for us. Without it, we may have never known what we were capable of or how different things could look. It is a joy to watch our community grow and take shape in ways that I could have never imagined.

We are still dancing in this new space, excited to discover who we will become.