Holding on to our naivety

Living it out - for all generations.

When I stopped working for SCM a few years ago, I knew that one of the things I would miss most was the events. There’s nothing quite like spending a weekend exploring big ideas, and staying up past my bedtime putting the world to rights with good friends.

So I was delighted at the news that Friends of SCM were to be invited to come and join in this year’s conference. As well as a great opportunity for all of us old boys and girls to catch up with old friends, I knew there would be real benefits to having a group of former SCMers, and supporters of the movement, meeting alongside current students. I’d already seen the idea work at a WSCF conference in Vienna last year. And I know I’m bound to say this because I helped to plan this conference, but I think it worked really well!

A group of nearly 20 Friends of SCM came along to the conference. We joined in some of the excellent students’ programme, and also spent time together discussing how we could support the movement and build a stronger Friends’ network.

It was lovely to see that SCMers of all generations had come along. So Betty, who first joined the movement just after World War II, shared her story and ideas with people who’d graduated in the twenty-first century, and everybody else in between. One of my favourite moments of the weekend was hearing Betty describe the sense of hope that filled the movement with the end of war in Europe. She said she felt that same hope motivating all the other SCMers she’d met down the decades.

I hope that our presence inspired today’s students and reminded them that they are part of a movement with a strong tradition, connected to its roots but also looking forward. I saw many inspiring encounters where people of different generations were genuinely learning from one another.

In practical terms, we came up with a lot of exciting ideas for what we can do as Friends in the future. We’ll be helping SCM staff to do ‘Friendraising’ work to recruit more former SCMers as Friends. We hope we’ll have a Friends’ gathering at the 2011 conference – we’ll be looking to set up a committee of Friends to plan that.

Some of us are also very interested in building a stronger network of Friends. Particularly among the ‘younger’ Friends, many of us have found that there’s nothing out there in the ‘grown-up’ world that offers the vision and community that SCM did when we were part of it. So some of us will be exploring ways we can get together as a network of Friends more often, including possibly on Iona or at Greenbelt.

In all of this, I hope we’ll be inspired by something Rory Dalgliesh, the conference reflector and chaplain, said to the Friends as we gathered on the first night: Just because you’ve got older, you don’t have to abandon the innocent, naive idea that you can change the world and make it a better place!

Liam Purcell is a Friend of SCM. He worked for the movement from 2002 to 2007.

Read another report of the event by Betty Saunders

Back to full conference report.