Quiet Days – update Mar13

Steve Tilley has run monthly Quiet Days in his north Somerset home for nearly six years. Demand has been so great that a second group is now set to meet in a neighbouring village.

It has taken some while but I have finally found someone else who shares the vision, has a passion for the Quiet Days and a large enough house to accommodate a second group three miles away.

As a result, after Easter, we will be doubling the available space for local Quiet Days by running two a month, one in Nailsea and the other in Backwell. There will be a fortnight's gap between the two, we'll use the same Bible passages at each one and ban people from going to both of them.

This is all in response to escalating demand for the Quiet Days – we have regularly had to turn people away – but we are separating the Days in this way because we want to make them available to more people, not offer more to the same group of people who already attend.

I am licensed to a group of six Anglican churches in the area and I had been thinking about how the ministry could grow because it takes a whole day of my time and I can't do that more than once a month. The leaders of the new group are a couple I know as members of one of those churches; we will stay in close touch so people can go to either session and keep a sense of journey.

The Quiet Days continue to attract three very distinct communities of people:

• about five or six who come every month;
• another 15-20 who turn up two or three times a year;
• those who come once to sample it.

Most of those who come along are already part of a church and Quiet Days offer another way of exploring faith for them but one of our regulars would say that this is most definitely her church. She doesn't go anywhere else.

Our times together are not guided in the way that a retreat is guided but we decided to look at God's Word together so biblical content is at the heart of what we do. We generally read a Book of the Bible, one or two chapters at a time. I do a little bit of putting it into context, making connections with what we looked at in the previous month and the bigger picture of salvation, but we also make sure that people have space and time to share what they have gleaned from the passage themselves.

I think the main gift I'm offering is hospitality and not Bible teaching. That's why finding the right person to expand these Quiet Days has not been easy because we have been looking for someone who wouldn't be concerned or anxious about having strangers wandering around their home. We are building a community of people who want to journey together but it's a slow process.