Goodbye London Quakers – Hello – What?

Submitted by Fred Ashmore – Clerk to London Quakers

At the Close of the JLAM meeting of 13th June, London Quakers (LQ) will hold its final AGM after 15 years of serving The Quakers of London and lay itself down. The London Quakers Steering Group hope that Quakers in London will take over everything that London Quakers has been doing. Of course, the recruitment of Josh Selfe as our local Development Worker has been a huge vitaliser for all of us in London and the Being Quaker courses he has created are a great resource, long needed. QiL has decided
to appoint two Friends to look after interfaith and interchurch work, which is another aspect of the LQ work that will otherwise be missed.

At present the Arrangements Committee are looking after the website and issuing The Quill which replaces (rather better) the monthly LQ mailings that shared news, announcements and events. We don’t yet have settled arrangements for handling
the miscellaneous queries that come in through the website and facebook and email of the Clerk of London Quakers (We‘ve had rather surprising requests, and suggestions believe me). In future staff will help with that but they will need to know who to go to for decisions.

The most important thing that LQ Steering Group hopes as it lays itself down is that there will be a group to help create, organise and support community events for Quakers in London. You can’t dump this on Josh Selfe. It’s got to be us, Friends. There have been regular events for the past decade. Supporting older Friends,
Housing Inequality, gender diversity, Refugee matters, Death and Dying, Assisted Dying. Someone made these happen. Who will do that for the next decade? We hope to pull together a thriving community of Quakers in London. We hope to cater
for varied interests and groups. But none of it just happens.

Over to you QiL!

Fred Ashmore