Justine and Khosi are in there somewhere. Click on the image to see a bigger version of it if you want to try to spot them.
Hint: Khosi is wearing his traditional Lesotho grass hat.
CSAYM Co-Clerk Justine Limpitlaw and Young Friends Co-Clerk Khosi Sekoere are attending the World Plenary Meeting in Peru as representatives of C&SAYM. Though they are out of email contact, Friends from the British Yearly Meeting were kind enough to share the news below with us.
Dear Friends,
We’re writing to you from Pisak, Peru in the Sacred Valley, surrounded by the towering Andes. This is the stunning location for the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) International Representatives Meeting. About 350 Friends are gathered here, from Bolivia to Russia, from New Zealand to Ghana, to consider the theme “Living the Transformation: Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.”
The meeting has been a rich experience so far, with varied worship, base groups and fellowship. Of particular interest are the four consultations being carried out:
– Equipping FWCC (considering how to reform FWCC to better fulfill its purpose of connecting Friends, crossing cultures and changing lives)
– Ministry and leadership (concentrating on how to develop Quaker leaders and generating new ideas for a youth pilgrimage)
– Living ministry communities (focussed on how to create active and vital Quaker communities)
– Sustaining life on Earth (aiming to build on the Kabarak call to develop worldwide Quaker action on environmental, economic and spiritual challenges)
Hopefully these consultations will have specific outcomes that each Yearly meeting can take forward. We look forward to feeding back on our return!
In Friendship,
Ann, Alick, Liz, Huw, Lee and George
(BYM representatives to FWCC)
This was the last JMM Meeting for Worship to be held at Quaker House – from now on we will be nomadic. JMM will be meeting at Wits for the foreseeable future. The specifics of the new location will be posted shortly. Wendy Landau is the key contact in this regard.
FWCC Europe and Middle East Section Peace and Service Consultation
[to go directly to the statement, click here]
from George Thurley
From the 20th to the 22nd of November, 23 Friends from a number of European countries met in Belgium for the Europe and Middle East Section (EMES) Peace and Service Consultation. This is an annual event, which brings together peace and service organisations from across Europe including Quaker Peace & Social Witness, Quaker Council for European Affairs, Quaker United Nations Office, Quaker Service organisations and peace committees of Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands and German Yearly Meetings, Friends House Moscow, Northern Friends Peace Board and Quaker Voluntary Action. The consultation is an opportunity to share information, network, and find ways to work more effectively together. It is also an opportunity for these representatives, many of whom spend their working lives working for Quaker witness, to come back to the spiritual basis of their work, and worship together.
The theme of the gathering for 2015 was “Who is my neighbour?” In the light of the recent attacks in Paris and Beirut, and the wider refugee crisis, this seemed a particularly poignant question, and it served to keep us spiritually grounded as we discussed the issues we faced.
The gathering was unavoidably coloured by the murders in Paris and elsewhere, as well as the unfolding security alert in Brussels. All this was in the forefront of our minds as we discussed the need to build a shared, sustainable security, rather than the mainstream understanding of security as a narrow type of militarised protection. As Diana Francis reminded us in the Swarthmore lecture this year, none of us are safe until all of us are. The plans being developed by a group of Friends to hold a peace vigil at the Eurosatory arms fair in Paris, June 2016 clearly dovetailed with this concern, and the group minuted its hope that Yearly Meetings would support the Friends engaged in organising this.
We had with us a Friend from Nairobi Yearly Meeting, who shared the peace work that is being done in his country and more widely in the Lake Region of Africa by Change Agents for Peace, an inititative originally set up by Norwegian Friends, who are still very closely involved in the work. We heard personal testimonies from Friends who had recently been to Bethlehem and Ramallah to offer training in Alternative to Violence and Neurolinguistic Programming, and from a number of Friends about their experience with the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe: from those active in Croatia, Slovenia and Germany and from some who have been helping in the “Jungle” in Calais.
Friends at the consultation were clear that these issues are all intimately linked – many refugees are fleeing from the sort of violence committed in Paris on Friday the 13th November. We felt it crucial that these murders should not fuel more unnecessary violence, and force more people to make the arduous journey to find in Europe the stability lacking in their own countries. The peace and service consultation issued a statement to this effect, which can be found here:
http://www.fwccemes.org/news/european-quakers-call-for-an-end-to-the-cycle-of-violence
We hope that Yearly meetings will support and promote this statement.
By the end of the weekend the query of our theme had been inverted: who is not my neighbour? Although the challenges are great, we feel sure that we can continue our work cheerfully and courageously, answering and upholding that of God in everyone.
Here is a really good photo of our group at our Quaker retreat this past weekend taken by Justin Ellis with his new snooty camera. Even I look reasonable and am NOT blinking – for a change ! Those of you who attended Meetings here in the past please send me your current postal address as we have cards signed by us we would like to send you soon. We thought of you all !
Love and light,
Helen Vale
The Young Friends Work Camp in Lesotho which was tentatively scheduled for December has been postponed to a date that we’ll determine at YM. YM will be taking place between 27 April – 3 May next year.
The Johannesburg Monthly Meeting Thursday Fellowship had a picnic tea in September.
The 2015 Yearly Meeting approved the establishment of the PJDF, as a subset of ECTF, to encourage peace, justice and development work within C&SAYM.
For more information on the fund, donating and applications for funding, please download the PJDF final forms from the Publications & Resources page.
As the Pope spoke in Philadelphia this weekend: “The Quakers who founded Philadelphia were inspired by a profound evangelical sense of the dignity of each individual and the ideal of a community united by brotherly love. This conviction led them to found a colony which would be a haven of religious freedom and tolerance. That sense of fraternal concern for the dignity of all, especially the weak and the vulnerable, became an essential part of the American spirit.”
Read the whole article on The Morning Call website.
The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker organisation working for policy changes on Capitol Hill, has issued an article on the upcoming Papal visit and address to a joint sitting of Congress on 24 September. The article details a number of areas of world significance that it is anticipated the Pope will address.
