Calling previous members of the Joppa Group 

Were you a member of the Joppa Group? Do you have historic papers about it? An invitation-based roundtable event is being co-convened to mark the 40th anniversary of the group's founding. Paul Weller explains more 

The calendar year 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Joppa Group as an informal “Baptist Group for Christian Witness in a Multi-Faith Society” which was formally inaugurated at the Baptist Assembly in Nottingham in the spring of 1985.

Following the 2010 end of the Group, a formal Baptist Inter-Faith Working Group (IFWG) was established. This took forward aspects of the group’s inheritance, including in some collaborative work with the relevant United Reformed Church committee, which also included Methodist and Salvation Army members.
 

The Joppa executive in 2009 - back row, from left - Rosemary Williams, Edward Williams, Janet Ruddick, Sue Sheppy
Front row, from left - Mark Burleigh, Julie Aylward, Nick Wood
Source - Baptist Times, 21 May, 2009
 

Since 2023, however, the IFWG has not been functioning through formal meetings, although Baptist representation has continued in other appropriate ecumenical and inter-faith fora.

To mark and chart key parts of this anniversary history, and in the light of it potentially to contribute to thinking about how Baptist Christians might best address these matters in the future, an invitation-based Roundtable event is being co-convened by Dr Paul Weller and Dr Nicholas Wood with support from within Baptists Together, but under the auspices of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture at Regent’s Park College, Oxford.

This event will be held at the College in late autumn 2025, and known previous members of the Joppa Group for whom there are current contact details are being invited to it, along with those who have been involved in the IFWG.

Unfortunately, full membership records do not exist of those who belonged to the Joppa Group, although via copies of the Joppa Bulletin and other Joppa papers, it has been possible to reconstruct a list that includes the names of many former members (a number of whom have since, sadly, been deceased), as well as the contact details of some.

Therefore, if anyone reading this was previously a member of the Joppa Group or the IFWG and has not yet received an invitation, but would like to have more information about, and be invited to the Roundtable, please contact one of its co-convenors, Dr. Paul Weller, at paul.weller@regents.ox.ac.uk.

The event will also – and with many thanks to the College’s Angus Library and Archive - mark the accession to its collections of historic documents relating to both the Joppa Group and the IFWG so that these can be identified, collated and preserved before (and especially so with regard to the Joppa Group materials which were generally pre-digital) they might otherwise be lost; and, through this, can be made accessible to future generations of scholars.

Therefore, in addition to the above, if in the attic or elsewhere anyone reading this might have dusty and fragile copies of original Joppa Group documents (eg. bulletins, conference programmes etc), it would be helpful if you could also contact Paul Weller about this, so we can cross check if such might fill what otherwise might end up being a gap in the Archive.
 

Professor Paul Weller is a research fellow in Religion and Society at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and a founding member of the Joppa Group. 

He is also a founding member of the Interfaith Council for the Security of Places of Worship in Europe, and a member of Broadway Baptist Church in Derby