Proud Quakers
On 3 July I joined twenty-five or so others on the Pride London parade marching (and sometimes dancing!) behind the beautiful Quaker banner designed by Caroline Jariwala. While I had been to Pride in previous years, this time was special.
In the course of a long, curling route through central London, we passed many thousands of spectators. Many of them seemed aware of Friend’s decision to conduct same-sex marriages – we were consistently greeted with cheers, shouts of ‘thank you’, ‘well done the Quakers’ and so on. At one point, a group of heavily tattooed men saw our arrival, stopped singing, put down their beer cans, looked me in the eye and quietly applauded. While I acknowledged them, I remembered the depth of our worship in York last summer, the moving vocal ministry, the tender clerking, my own silent prayers and the transforming, life-affirming, power of a gathered Meeting.

I then cried a few tears, for I was indeed a ‘Proud Quaker’.
Nick Rendle


We would like to share our experience of outreach at Pride London on Saturday 3 July. London Quakers had a successful stall at Pride 2009 and hoped to repeat this, particularly in light of Yearly Meeting’s 2009 decision on same-sex marriage and subsequent work on Waheed Alli’s Equality Bill amendment. Pride were unable to confirm a stall for us this year, but things were chaotic on the day, and we visited the Leicester Square site with our materials, in the hope of finding a free stall.

We were generously offered space at the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement’s (LGCM) stall. The people on the stall were members of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), an evangelical church whose website says it has ‘a primary ministry in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities, providing the safe environment of an accepting congregation where people can find God’s salvation, personal support, spiritual growth and guidance toward health and wholeness’. The stall had information from a wide range of Christian organisations supporting gay and lesbian Christians.

We had never heard of LGCM or MCC, and would not necessarily have decided to place ourselves here, but quickly decided that a way had been opened. It was an entirely positive experience: we were made welcome. Their press officer was on the stall and spoke warmly of Britain Yearly Meeting’s work on the Equality Bill, mentioning that We Are But Witnesses had been published in full in their magazine All God’s Children, and showing us the half page ‘Let’s get a few things straight about gay marriage’ ad placed by Quaker Peace & Social Witness in their current edition. We had several interesting conversations and exchanges of information and views with our co-stallers and others who came up to the stall.

At the same time, one of us stood in the sun of Trafalgar Square with a Quaker banner and some leaflets, and engaged with a large number of interested passers-by. The day felt like a true experience of what can happen if one opens up to the Spirit. We came away with a sense of pride in what is unique about Quakers and at the same time a greater sense of the power of coming together in love across the perceived divides.
Hock and Julia Lim

Pedantry?
David Keating (2 July) should not think himself pedantic for merely righting what was clearly wrong. Pedantic means being rigid about silly shibboleths like never splitting an infinitive or ending a sentence with a preposition. It may be unreasonable to expect everyone to know how to conjugate verbs in seventeenth-century style, but those who don’t should steer clear of such choppy waters in the first place. A worse example than ‘What we canst say’ – worse because less ephemeral than the pages of the Friend – occurs on a war memorial in the Isle of Wight (I forget where, but did photograph it) that includes the line ‘Their name shall liveth for ever more’. More sadly, the first line carved on the tombstone of James Bulger, which I recently saw on the television news, begins ‘Not a day goes by that we think of you and cry…’ The intended sense was evidently ‘Not a day goes by but we think of you and cry…’ It seems more tragic than unfortunate that whoever drafted the text wrote the exact opposite of what they meant to say.

Reverting to the Friend, I ground my teeth at a heading in the post-Yearly Meeting Q-Eye page, where a photo of two similar and easily mistaken Friends was barbarously headed ‘Who is Whom?’ You don’t need to know that ‘to be’ takes a complement, not a direct object, to recognise intuitively that that should have read ‘Who is Who?’, or, more fluently, ‘Who’s Who?’

Does it matter? Well, look at it this way. If you don’t write correct English you won’t upset readers who also don’t write correct English, but you run the risk of alienating those who do, and to that extent will fail to get your message across.
There’s a nice anecdote about the first-time successful author who sent his publisher an email reading: ‘What offer for 100,000 words?’ The publisher replied: ‘Which words and in what order?’

Right ordering, Friends, not pedantry; that’s what it’s all about.
David Parlett

Christian discipline?
Ruth Milne ('Christian Discipline?', 25 June) seems to think that modern Quakers are not Christian enough; she says she is ‘inclined to think that “Quakerism” itself has seriously lost its way’. I could not disagree more.

Before I discovered Quakers I would describe myself, if asked about religion, as an early Christian. Jesus showed me an example of how to live – that people can and should have a direct relationship with their God, that we should love and be tolerant towards each other, and that the labels that people carry (race, religion, occupation) are not important, but that how a person lives their life is. The message of Jesus is that God’s love comes before man-made laws.

I believe that Friends’ tolerance, niceness and their effort to see both sides are not and cannot be Quakers’ Achilles’ heel – to me these same things display the essence of Christianity. I believe that in attempting to be tolerant, loving and thoughtful, Friends are walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

Regarding belief in the tenets mentioned in the comment – the ‘miracle of Christ’s conception and birth and the redeeming power of his death on the cross’, I am happy for those people who find that belief in those matters deepens their relationship with their God, but I know of many who find that focusing attention on those things can be a distraction from creating a relationship with their God. Quakers leave each person to decide what helps them with their relationship with God, and that is how it should be.
Manda Bates


Ruth Milne’s article ‘Christian Discipline?’ was like a breath of fresh air in honest Quakerly style.

She highlighted among other matters the alarming intolerance that has emerged at times in Britain Yearly Meeting. This among the very Friends who claim to abhor intolerance themselves. Those who wish to see the Bible banished from our tables; the title ‘Religious’ removed from the title ‘Religious Society…’ (previous letter to the Friend); the word ‘Worship’ removed from ‘Meetings for Worship’ (ditto); the cross removed from publications. How does all this fit with the Quaker concept of inclusiveness?

But this is not about how Christian we are as a Yearly Meeting but something even more fundamental that strikes at the very reason Quakers ever came into existence and why we have any relevance today. The misconception has arisen that a lack of creed equates with a lack of belief. If you take away some form of belief in something beyond the material world what are you left with other than another Humanist Society, composed indeed of some rather ‘nice’ people.
John Gamlin

Britain Yearly Meeting’s 2006 epistle gave Meeting for Sufferings its new and current role. It started with the advice: ‘Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God’. It continued: ‘Now that we have relieved… Meeting for Sufferings of the detailed work of trusteeship, we have freed it to take on a visionary and prophetic role for the life of the Yearly Meeting, to draw our whole community together and to release the synergy we create, to work better for the world.’ It concluded: ‘We leave this Yearly Meeting… with a new sense of direction and a renewed commitment to cooperating with the loving purposes of God.’ During the Yearly Meeting sessions, Meeting for Sufferings was likened to being a crucible.

In his definitive history of early Friends, Beginnings of Quakerism’, WC Braithwaite writes: ‘In identifying religion on the one hand with personal communion with God and on the other with a life of practical righteousness, Friends were closely associating themselves with the spirit of primitive Christianity and with the type of religion that we call prophetic and ‘charismatic’, by contrast with the priestly and institutional type… Quakerism has always been distinctly “prophetic” in character.’

In turn, Meeting for Sufferings minuted: ‘We understand that a crucible is a melting pot. Reactions take place, and something different emerges. Being a crucible means that Meeting for Sufferings should become a vehicle for transformation, of ourselves and of the Society as a whole. There should be room for exciting change. Meeting for Sufferings should offer spiritual leadings. We should seek the leadings of God, and ask how God is working among us.’
This is our mission statement – our collective Christian discipline.
Geoffrey Braithwaite

The letters also appear as comments on individual article pages where appropriate.