Category Archives: 2023 07 July

2023 07 July

Churches Together in Central Oxford

Richard Seebohm

Our group met at the Methodist Church on 9 May.

The Convenor, Jon Keyworth, is seeking to arrange a social event. As in previous years, this will be held in our Meeting House garden in the afternoon of 9 July.

The Night Shelter has been less pressured than in the past, with 10 beds on offer, because there were successive occasions of two sub-zero nights, which allowed the City Council to activate its statutory ‘Severe Weather Emergency Protocol’. This aims to provide beds for all street sleepers.

The Night Shelter and the ‘Living Room’ scheme (now opening 5 days a week and not 4) have been run for a number of years by Mary Gurr (Anglican) as Chaplain to the Homeless. She would like to retire and is seeking a successor. The `Gatehouse’ project offering showers and food every day of the week is still in action. These services are part financed by CTCO, including insurance and payment of expenses. (Their serious need for volunteers to provide the services in person has come up at earlier CTCO meetings.)

CTCO is seeking a new treasurer. Colin Saunders (Unitarian) has similarly served for a long time and urgently seeks a successor. Each member church contributes £10 each year. Friends are not among the late payers, so I assume that regular arrangements exist.

A CTCO leaflet listing churches and service times is to be renewed from scratch later in the year with wider coverage; our timings will need to be checked. CTCO has signed up to a GDPR (personal data) document. Perhaps it should be filed at Forty-Three.

This year’s interfaith Friendship Walk will be at 5.45 for 6pm on Thursday 15 June. The Oxford Festival of Light is the name given to a religious moment when the city’s Christmas lights are switched on in early November. This time it may well be inter-faith.

The next meeting of CTCO will be Thursday 14 September at 43 St Giles.Our main agenda item was a presentation of the work of Oxford Street Pastors. Two speakers with their uniforms and kit were with us. They are one of the 230 separate charities run by the Ascension Trust. This has other Christian functions and is partly funded by the UK Government.

The idea is for teams of 3 or 4 pastors to operate from 10pm to 4am on Saturdays and some Fridays, in partnership with taxis, police, club managers, bus drivers etc., to provide night safety, particularly for women. Members, with good physical ability, should be in good standing with their church but not as preachers. One shift per month is the norm. Oxford badly needs more volunteers and at present can only patrol about three nights a month.

They have back packs to handle all manner of problems, ranging from flipflops for women prevented by alcohol from managing their high heels, to phone chargers, water and glasses, protein bars, and much more. They do not accept payments.

We are all asked whether our communities can offer volunteers. There is about a month of training, some residential, plus shifts as observers. I have documentation.

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 531 • July 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

2023 07 July

Would You Like to be Interviewed by our Sunflowers?

Madeleine Reeves

As Friends will know, we have a vibrant Children’s Meeting which meets at 11am on Sunday, with the older of those children (preschoolers and older) meeting as Sunflowers where there are regular stories, songs, and craft activities before they join the main 11am Meeting for Worship.

We are keen for our Sunflowers to have the chance to learn from and interview Friends in the wider Meeting about their experience of living out the Testimonies, of being a Quaker. This does not have to be in some grand or ‘weighty’ way! We are keen to hear about the things you might do to (say) grow your own vegetables… show welcome to refugees… recycle… take a stand on issues you care about…. The list could go on!

The children love to see, touch, try out. Maybe there is something that you could ‘bring and show’ that speaks to your faith? A banner that you made for a campaign? The tools you use to grow some vegetables? A song that makes you laugh or think?

If the prospect of chatting to a group of children about your faith feels daunting, please come and speak to one of the members of the Children & Young People’s Committee or the regular volunteers.
The session would be facilitated by one of the regular volunteers who know the children, so you would not be on your own, and we would find a way to include a conversation with you as part of a children’s meeting alongside a relevant story, song or activity which we would organise.

In short, we see this as a chance for you and the Sunflowers to get to know each other in a quieter way, beyond the usual coffee-time busy-ness! We would particularly welcome Friends who regularly attend the 9.30 Sunday Meeting or the Monday Young Friends, who may have fewer opportunities to get to know the children in our midst than those who regularly attend the 11am Meeting.
We would love to hear from you!

Madeleine.Reeves@compas.ox.ac.uk

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 531 • July 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

2023 07 July, Charity Appeal

Monthly Appeal July 2023

Making EMDR and Energy Therapies more Accessible in Oxford

Sandra Figgess

“I am kinder to myself and more understanding of myself. I felt cared about as a human being for the first time.”
“I feel a lot more resilient; I have a lot more ability to self-soothe and cope in healthier ways, I felt quite empowered.”
“I have a real sense of power and autonomy over my own life and that feels very freeing. MEET in Oxford is amazing, it has been nothing short of life changing.”
“The service is excellent, brilliant – I would recommend it to anyone with trauma. MEET has the expertise to help people deal with their trauma.”

– MEET Clients at end of therapy.

MEET in Oxford was founded in 2014 by three members of Oxford Meeting who offered two innovative forms of trauma focused therapy (EMDR and Energy Psychotherapy) at very low cost, using rooms at 43 St Giles which were offered to us free of cost by the Meeting. You can find out more about MEET and the therapies we offer on our website

https://www.meetinoxford.org/

Since then, we first expanded our therapy team by recruiting other Oxford based fully qualified therapists willing to work pro bono in exchange for the opportunity to develop their confidence in using these new therapies.

Later, Covid provided us with both challenges and opportunities as therapy over Zoom became possible and we were able to recruit therapists from all over the country, while keeping our client base to Oxfordshire. Fortunately, by this point we had received a one-off unexpected legacy which allowed us to recruit Ana Novacovic as an extremely efficient part time coordinator who developed our website and office systems and has helped to hold together this widely dispersed small charity.

We have good working relationships with other Oxford organisations who refer or signpost clients to us and see us as the go to organisation for trauma therapy in Oxfordshire… which is a big ask for a tiny organisation! The initial legacy will run out shortly and we are needing to find new strands of ongoing income to maintain and develop the service. Ana has just retired, and we are glad to welcome Nicola Holmes Brown, who also works for the Elmore team and already knows well the Oxfordshire voluntary and statutory organisations.

How you can donate to MEET in Oxford:

Click on the Donate Button on our website to make a donation.

Make a payment to our Co-op bank account.

Sort Code 08-92-99
Account Number 65870194

Write a cheque to ‘MEET in Oxford’ and put it in an envelope in the MEET pigeonhole in the lobby of 43 St Giles.

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 531 • July 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

2023 07 July

Travelling in the Ministry

Richard SeeBohm

Liberating Matt Rosen to travel in the ministry reminded me of my own great-great-grandfather Benjamin Seebohm. With consent of his monthly meeting, he set off in 1846 for five years of ministry in the USA. Robert Lindsay was the Friend appointed to accompany and elder him. A relative provided two horses and a carriage.

Docking at Boston, they got to Philadelphia and radiating from there they visited almost every then state of the Union, ranging from Niagara Falls and into Canada then down to slave-owning Virginia. In Philadelphia they were welcomed but only guardedly. They were banned from visiting Friends – for ministry – in their homes. When we went to Arch Street Meeting in the year 2000, they found us the 1847 minute book, stored behind more recent volumes and it said, ‘We welcome our dear Friend Benjamin Seebohm…’ but there must have been more to it, hinted at in his diary. I have an 1847 letter (in photocopy) from a nearby Friend which says,

… The sorrowful accounts we have repeatedly heard of the unchristian treatment of our beloved friends Benjamin Seebohm and Robert Lindsay, have met with in that, once, city of brotherly love, can but excite the tender feeling & near sympathy of many who have never seen their faces …

Of course, American Friends were then deeply split between the Orthodox evangelicals, where Benjamin belonged, and Hicksite, a Quakerism very like ours here today, which he saw as ‘infidel views going far beyond the ordinary length’. He spoke of shared meeting houses with partitions where the ministry of the other party could be heard through the wall.

In their travels they took their horses downriver on steamboats, fitted their carriage with skis when the ground was frozen, and heard of a carriage driven over a frozen river when the ice broke and the carriage and horses vanished into the deep with the women inside – the men had jumped off.

But it was slavery that repeatedly distressed them. The post-independence constitution of 1787, to keep the slave states on board, had postponed the issue for 20 years. In 1807 Congress outlawed slave trading by sea. But no provisions for enforcement were made and internal slavery was up to the states. Pennsylvania had outlawed it in 1780 but with let out clauses.

Our travellers found themselves attending Virginian slave auctions and visiting ‘slave jails’ with up to 30 men, women and children waiting to be sold. They saw them as people, whilst buyers physically examined them as if they were carcasses.

Some dealers claimed to be regretting the financial commitment that kept them to the trade – a working slave was worth 900 dollars. They were told that the stridency of abolitionists deterred a gradual emancipation. Quakers tended to be caught up with Friends inheriting slaves and with problems in keeping freed slaves from being recaptured.

They met settler families emigrating westwards with all their possessions from slave states to free.

In 1851 the travellers came home. They had kept in touch by letter, but home life had not been plain sailing either.

Editors’ Note: Benjamin Seebohm’s original diary of his travels through America is held in the Haverford College Archives, Haverford, Pennsylvania.

Diary, 1846-1847, Volume: 1. Benjamin Seebohm diary, HC.MC-975-01-067. Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections.

https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu//repositories/5/archival_objects/65899 Accessed June 20, 2023.

This Month’s Forty-Three Newsletter Contents

Back to July 2023 Newsletter Main Page

Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 531 • July 2023
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org

2023 07 July

July 2023

Click to Download the July 2023 PDF Version

Travelling in the Ministry
Richard Seebohm

Monthly Appeal July 2023
Sandra Figgess

Would you like to be Interviewed by our Sunflowers?
Madeleine Reeves

We are keen for our Sunflowers to have the chance to learn from and interview Friends in the wider Meeting about their experience of living out the Testimonies, of being a Quaker.

Churches Together in Central Oxford
Richard Seebohm

“What will we Build, You and I Together?”
Matthew Gee

Area Meeting in Oxford on 8th July will be an all-age meeting, with creative activities in the afternoon that will bring together Friends of all ages.

Artweeks 2023
Trio Watson

It was a successful experience for us as artists, and we feel the outreach effect for Oxford Meeting was positive too. Two hundred and sixty people came to visit the Meeting House, most of them for the first time.

Oxford Quaker & Answer
Val Ferguson

If you could do anything, what would you do?

Talk less and listen more.

The Anchor Programme
Heather Walls

We are incredibly fortunate to have worked alongside the Quaker friends over the past several years and feel honoured to have been able to make use of the Beautiful Garden room and the Quaker meeting room…

Living on the Edge – An OxFAP Update
Charles Worth

If you are fleeing from domestic abuse, you can’t take much with you.

Oxford Open Doors Outreach Event
9 and 10 September 2023
The Office

Oxford Preservation Trust has been running Oxford Open Doors for 15 years. An annual weekend where places not always open to the public open to celebrate heritage and culture across all walks of the city’s life.