Letters - 04 April 2014
From membership to William Penn School
Membership
The polarisation between Martin Phinn’s iconoclastic view (7 March) and Elaine Miles’ rather harsh judgment (21 March) reflects the question Margaret Heathfield posed in her 1994 Swarthmore Lecture Being Together: are we a movement or a church? The faithful, long-term attender is a helpful reminder to the rest of us that we are a movement. But, we are also a church and, as Elaine points out, to maintain our corporate being requires commitment, as much about identity as financial.
In the days of persecution attending Meeting was sufficient evidence of commitment but, even then, the movement that became the Religious Society of Friends only survived because George Fox established a system of governance. It is good to slim down or adapt our practice, but we cannot escape the truth that being a church means we have a corporate presence in the world. That may involve compromises but without it we would not be able, for example, to own Meeting houses, and much of what we do in the world as Quakers would also not be possible.
Whether to hold assets or to witness as a body, it is necessary to know who ‘we’ are, and that implies recognising as members those who take the responsibility for that identity. We are right to explore new ways of recognising membership, but whatever process we use must, surely, include testing both commitment and an understanding of what that commitment is.
Roger Sturge
David Hitchin (14 March) argued that applying for membership was really just a formality and that applications are rarely rejected. Perhaps, but doesn’t that prove my point, that the application process is really now just a piece of pointless red tape? Why are Quakers so attached to bureaucracy and procedure?
In her letter Elaine Miles argued that membership equates to commitment. I disagree because I haven’t observed a clear relationship between membership and commitment – some attenders do a lot to help, while some members do very little.
In any case, the underlying problem is not the distinction between member and attender but the archaic and unnecessary process of application and approval for membership, given that there are no criteria for membership and no need for a vetting process in the modern Quakers.
Martin Phinn
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