BDRC Update December 2025

Introduction

Earlier this year (2025) we finished the initial drafting of all the 30 or so discrete major topics to be included as core material in the new book of discipline. We have provisionally structured them in accordance with our vision below of a tree – with spiritual roots nourishing a strong trunk of faith and experience from which grow branches of living communities that can worship, witness and work together. The detail and layout of this tree structure might change as we complete the editing of the whole book.

Our Quaker Way

In the committee's discernment to find a working title to share with you, we became clear that this book is a description of Our Quaker Way. That this title distinguishes our understanding of there being other Quaker ways and that we are a community of seekers and fellow travellers, with a shared understanding of a spiritual discipline that we can describe as Our Quaker Way.

The full working title and subtitle is “Our Quaker Way the spiritual discipline of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain"

Structure

We offer you the working title, and the description of the structure, in the same way that we will be offering you the draft text in late 2026. These are living drafts. We have listened and thought and discerned together as a committee. We are not saying that we've got it right; we're offering in love what we hope will be acceptable for you to work with us on. We will need you to read, reflect and respond to us, for us to be able together to find the way forward to our new book.

We gave you a glimpse of the structure last year, and we've shared it with you now so that you can take it away and reflect on it. It is still a work in progress: things are changing as we work on editing our draft content. Not every heading on the twigs here will reflect a chapter in the draft we will be sharing in 2026. But it shows you the topics that we are covering and our current thinking about how they are grouped together.

We came up with the image of the tree when we were looking for a non-linear way to visualise how the different parts of the book fit together. You can see the link between our working title for the book as a whole, and our titles for the main parts of the book. We have the roots of our history, the trunk which is our experience of the spirit: Our Quaker Spirituality and Worship, and then the branches growing from that are how our experience and understanding are expressed in Our Quaker Community, Our Quaker Faith in Action and Our Quaker Life Journeys. And at the top, because our faith and practice, like a tree, is always growing: where are we going?

Next steps

We'll be developing some reading materials to go alongside the draft publication – pathways of reading if you can't read it all, questions for reflection and session plans for discussion groups. We will be working with Woodbrooke to develop and deliver these.

We're also working on our plan for receiving responses. We want to understand what's working in the new book and where we could do better. And we want this to be a manageable and constructive process that will help us to take forward our work to 2030. We'll be working with the Agenda Planning Committee, so that we can be sure that your responses will help us to prepare for the July 2027 Yearly Meeting sessions. That's when we'll have time to reflect and respond together and to discern what we need to do next.

So, January – July 2027. Make space in your diary. You'll need time to read. And make space in your meeting's calendar of events and your Area Meeting agenda. We know that six months isn't very long for this process, so we're hoping that giving you advance notice will help to make it manageable.

If you want to get in touch with BDRC, please email them or visit the website for more information.