Simpler Meetings: Starting on Simpler Roles

Do you have too many tasks and not enough time? Are you interested in ways that Quaker roles can be done differently? This informative session will offer alternative possibilities, fresh ideas and inspiration.

Through looking at examples, discussing alternative approaches and sharing experiences, you will feel more confident to find ways to begin considering simpler roles in your own context.

The Simpler Meetings Series 2025 allows for a communal space to learn and reflect about doing things differently that can help to re-energise your Quaker Meeting as a worshipful community. The series, including this session (originally called ‘Simpler Ways for Quaker Roles’), was launched in 2021 and is open to all. It explores how simplifying Quaker Meetings can “release Friends’ energy to follow our leading” (Britain Yearly Meeting 2023, Minute 17).

This Starting on Simpler Roles session is the basis for ‘Simpler Roles – Revisited’.

If you have not been to a Simpler Meetings session before, we encourage you to attend the ‘Starting’ sessions: 1,3,5 and 7. If you have already been to sessions in the past, and want to reflect, share your experiences of trying new approaches and hear from others, then the ‘Revisited’ sessions 2, 4 and 6 are for you.

The Simpler Meetings series for 2025 consists of the following sessions and throughout you can pick and choose to come to any or all of the 7 individually bookable sessions:
1. Starting With Fundamentals
2. Simpler Roles Revisited
3. Starting on Simpler Roles
4. Small Quaker Meetings Revisited
5. Starting on Small Quaker Meetings
6. Meeting Without a Meeting House Revisited
7. Starting on Meeting Without a Meeting House

Join Jonathan Carmichael, who worked on the Simpler Meetings Project for Britain Yearly Meeting in 2018-2021, Alistair Fuller, Quaker Life’s Team Lead for Community, and other experienced staff from Woodbrooke and BYM for a lively mixture of ideas, a few challenges, group discussion and Q&A exploring one of modern Quakerism’s recurring issues.