A New Tradition
Craig Barnett reflects on whether the best days of Quakerism are ahead of us. This article was originally shared in Craig Barnett’s Substack ‘Quaker Renewal’, and is reposted here with his permission.
This summer I was at the first Yorkshire Quaker Camp. There were over eighty people of all ages, but mostly young families and young adults from all over Yorkshire.
One of the exciting things about being there from the beginning is the opportunity to create new traditions, as we experimented with ways of doing things that could be carried over next year, and might eventually be passed on to future generations. We were able to draw on the experience of Quaker camps in other areas of the country that have been running for decades. But starting fresh also encouraged us to be creative; so we turned the children’s meeting into a ‘walking story’ through the woods, and used festival wristbands in various colours to sort people into home groups.
British Quakers seem always to be telling ourselves stories of decline - looking back to the good old days and lamenting our ageing and shrinking meetings. But something new is happening. In Yorkshire, new people have been coming to every Quaker youth event for months, and bringing their friends, so that extra youth residentials have been organised to meet the growing demand. In Sheffield, newcomers are arriving at meeting every week, many of them in their 20s and 30s, and over a dozen young families have started coming regularly in the last couple of years.
What Quaker history and tradition have to offer us is important. They are resources for us to build on in the present. Previous generations of Quakers have left us rich insights, experience and practices to draw on. But they are not models to be imitated or a template to impose on ourselves. Above all, we shouldn’t try to just keep going in the same ways as previous generations, when the Spirit is leading us somewhere new. The inspirational examples of former times are there for us to learn from and to draw encouragement to discern our leadings now.
The first generation of Quakers were acutely aware of the importance of avoiding imitation. They emphasised that the Quaker way is not copying the past, but keeping a fresh responsiveness to the guidance of God in the present;
“That no footsteps may be left for those that shall come after, or to walk by example, but that all may be directed and left to the truth, in it to live and walk and by it to be guided, that none may look back at us, nor have an eye behind them, but that all may look forward waiting in the Spirit for the revelation of those glorious things which are to be made manifest to them.”
(General Meeting at Skipton, 1659)
We are not just inheritors of a tradition, but also creators of new traditions for the future. We still have glorious things to look forward to. Could we imagine that the best days of the Quaker movement might not be behind us, but still to come?
Craig Barnett is a Quaker writer from Sheffield in the UK, and the author of The Guided Life (2019).
