News from Nottingham (and Watford)

posted by Rhiannon

(Happy Birthday, Tony! I hope Kathy made sure you got your favourite biscuits on Sunday.)

It's nice to be back in Watford, though I miss Nottingham and especially Beeston; but at least I get to see my Watford friends (and Friends). Exciting things are afoot in Watford's plans for National Quaker Week, but I don't expect you to care so much about those as about Nottingham's plans-- and that's really why I am here.

I come to bring you a little news of Quaker Quest. You may remember Nigel visiting us at Beeston, and you may even have known that I went to be meeting at Nottingham's Meeting House on the last Wednesday of term, to find out more about Quaker Quest. Nottingham hope to start running Quaker Quest on the Wednesday of National Quaker Week.

If you haven't heard of it, the website is http://www.quakerquest.org/ . If you can't be bothered to read that, the basic idea is to run a repeating series of weekly meetings for enquirers, or Questers; at each, there is food to break the ice, a panel of three speakers who each give their personal experience of some Quaker topic, time for discussion, and a brief Meeting for Worship.

As you can imagine, this sort of outreach requires not only speakers, co-ordinators, and welcomers, but help with food, publicity, etc. If anyone is willing to help, has ideas about how we could reach people in Beeston-- anything from putting leaflets through doors upwards-- I'm sure it would be welcome.

See also http://www.nottsfriends.org/ where there is some more information about our cycle of Quaker Quest events.

Furthermore, what will Beeston Meeting do for Quaker Week? It could be as simple as resolving to each wear our Quaker badges all week and be ready to answer questions, or perhaps each try and invite someone to come to Meeting on one of the two Sundays. Every little helps, as we used to say before Tesco's pinched it.