Tim Gee

Tim Gee is the General Secretary of Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), which connects Quakers in different countries. He has previously worked for Britain Yearly Meeting, Christian Aid and Amnesty International. He has written four books: Counterpower: Making Change Happen (2011), You Can’t Evict an Idea: What can we learn from Occupy? (2012), Why I am a Pacifist (2018) and Open for Liberation: An activist reads the Bible (2022). He contributes regularly to various publications and has been a voice for Quakers on the BBC. He lives near Oxford, England with his wonderful wife and daughter.

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Sample

I began preparing this lecture two years ago, on my goodbye visit to the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in England. As for many Friends in Britain and beyond, it’s a place that has given me a sense of connection with both my own family history and the wider family of Friends. It also played a major role in the development of the type of Quakerism that helped form my spiritual worldview.

My favourite place there was the library where you could go looking for one thing and end up finding ten others. It hosted the journals of the eminent and not-so-eminent Quakers in whose footsteps we follow. And, in those books—some of them hundreds of years old—it would be common to find annotations from the likes of the Rowntree, or the Cadburys who had helped to found Woodbrooke in the first place.

I was there to look for some of the works of James Backhouse, after whom this lecture series is named. Without much searching, I found what I was looking for, including a summary of his visits to South Africa and Australia, to where I would later travel.

The first thing I noticed in those dense and detailed accounts was that the spiritual and the mundane sat side by side with no real distinction between the two. So, Friends, if you find anything I have to say today mundane, please take it as in the spirit of Backhouse’s writing and search for the profound within it.

The second, closely related, was the way that Backhouse and others saw scripture in almost everything, and could reach for it so easily. That’s consistent with the parts of Quakerism growing fastest today, for example in East Africa or South America.

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