The Quill exists because we want to help make Quakers in London feel like one community. A newsletter is one of the oldest and simplest ways a community can hold itself together, sharing thoughts, ideas and events.

We’re looking for contributors, and we’d love to hear from you. Here’s some ideas of ways you could get invovled:

1.Share what your meeting is already doing

Many local meetings have their own newsletters or magazines, full of reflections, news, and stories that rarely travel beyond their own membership. If your meeting produces something like this, we’d be glad to help carry those words to a wider London audience. An article that resonated with your own meeting might speak just as powerfully to Friends across the area – and it costs you nothing extra to share it. If you’ve already written something, or if your newsletter editor would be willing to pass pieces along, please get in touch.

2. Explore your faith in writing

We’re also looking for creative and reflective submissions – pieces that help us think more deeply about what it means to live as a Quaker today. This might be a personal reflection on a meeting for worship, a meditation on a passage of scripture or a Quaker text, a poem, or simply something that’s been sitting with you and feels ready to be shared. There’s no fixed format. What matters is that it comes from an honest place.

Writing for a community like this is itself a form of ministry. It asks us to articulate what we often leave unspoken, and helps us cultivate an important part of a spirit-led Area meeting: to support the spiritual growth of its members.

3. Spread the word about Quaker witness

If your meeting or a Quaker-linked group you’re involved with is doing witness in the world – whether that’s climate action, peace witness, work with refugees, or anything else rooted in Quaker values – The Quill can help you reach a wider circle of Friends who might want to get involved. A short piece about what you’re doing and why, and how others can join or support you, is exactly the kind of thing a community newsletter is for. Wider reach means more hands, more voices, and more momentum.

Why this matters

London is a large and scattered Quaker community. Meetings are spread across the city, and it’s easy for Friends in one part of London to have little sense of what’s happening in another. A newsletter won’t fix that on its own, but it can help. It creates a small, regular point of contact – something to read on a Sunday morning or a Tuesday evening – that reminds us we’re part of something larger than our own meeting.

There’s also something that happens when a community writes to itself. It surfaces voices that might otherwise go unheard. It creates a record. It slows things down enough for reflection.

The Quill works best when it reflects the actual breadth of London Quaker life: different meetings, different concerns, different stages of the journey. That only happens if people contribute to it. At the moment, we’re a small group, and we’d welcome more.

Get in touch

If you’d like to write for The Quill, whether you have something ready or just an idea you’d like to talk through, please contact us at quill@quakersinlondon.org.

We look forward to hearing from you.