Re-imagining our Future
Inreach sessions planned by Bury St Edmunds LM elders
January to April 2021
What have we learnt from the pandemic about what is essential to our Quaker way? Our worship? Our community? Our witness?
What might change as we re-imagine the future?
We are offering opportunities to reflect and share. These will be in the Bury St Edmunds Zoom room and all Friends in Ipswich and Diss AM are welcome.
Session one – Advices and Queries number 1 – Thursday 28th January at 4 pm
“Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.” What do the words of Advices and Queries number one mean to us in the current situation?
Session two – Meeting Houses – Thursday 11th February, 2.00-3.30pm
Why do we have Meeting Houses? What do they give us? What do they take away?
Session three – Britain Yearly Meeting – Thursday 25th February, 2.00-3.30pm
Britain Yearly Meeting – What does it do? How has its work been challenged by the COVID crisis? What is my appropriate financial contribution at this time?
Session four – Discernment – Thursday 18th March, 2.00-3.30pm
What do Quakers mean by ‘discernment’? How have our traditional decision-making processes been challenged by Zoom meetings for worship for business?
Session five – Sustainable Meetings – date to be confirmed
What have we learnt from the changes forced by lockdown about how we might make our meetings more sustainable?
Quaker Faith & Practice, p.17
“We are seekers but we are also the holders of a precious heritage of discoveries. We, like every generation, must find the Light and Life again for ourselves. Only what we have valued and truly made our own, not by assertion but by lives of faithful commitment, can we hand on to the future. Even then, we must humbly acknowledge that our vision of the truth will, again and again, be amended.”
From ‘Thoughts on blending physical and online worship’ (compiled by Woodbrooke and Quaker Life)
“The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged how Quakers come together as a worshipping community and live out our values, in ways we have not experienced before. We are a generation called to seek the “Light and Life” in an unprecedented situation ….We have an opportunity now not simply to return to a version of what we did before, but to emerge from our lockdown cocoon in different shapes and colours.”
From Quaker Life Council report to AM, October 2020
“Covid has stripped us down to our foundations. Meeting houses have been shut. We are forced to ask, what are we about? What are our principles? What can we do without now that we are often without walls? We have been cut to our roots, forced to think radically again.”
Questions and comments to Julia (on behalf of BSE LM elders)