How they trust one another!
Laurie Michaelis offers a personal reflection on Britain Yearly Meeting
At Yearly Meeting in 2005 proposals to restructure our governance met impassioned opposition from some weighty Friends. They feared that appointing small groups of trustees for Britain Yearly Meeting and for Area Meetings would result in an unQuakerly concentration of power.
Over the following years, as the proposals were implemented, there was continuing discontent. Some Friends thought decisions were being taken behind closed doors, with financial gain taking precedence over religious purposes. Meanwhile, trustees often felt under attack for doing the difficult task they had been appointed to by Yearly Meeting.
This year the restructuring is complete, with the new, smaller Meeting for Sufferings in place. Our Yearly Meeting agenda was well designed as an opportunity to settle into the new forms. Roy Stephenson’s introduction on ‘Trust in the Spirit’ set the tone: our Business Meetings are primarily about growing spiritual community, not achieving results. The Yearly Meeting felt spacious and relaxed, and I felt that we did grow our spiritual community this year. With frequent reminders from the Yearly Meeting clerk about the discipline of our business method, we were exceptionally well behaved. Most Friends were alert to the Yearly Meeting choreography, standing only when the clerk looked up for contributions. And he rewarded us with humour, skilfully crafted minutes and sessions that finished on time.
One of the most wonderful aspects of Quaker spiritual practice is the effort to ‘see with God’s eyes’ in which all views, all contributions, are part of a beautiful whole. Roy also said: ‘we must move away from our common presupposition that different views are opposed views’. And I don’t think growing spiritual community is opposed to achieving results. If we are healthy as a spiritual community we will also be taking action, achieving results, doing God’s work in the world.
In doing that work we need mutual trust and that needs to rest in a foundation of mutual love, truth, openness and active empowerment. Yes, we need to trust our appointees to do our work and make day-to-day choices. We also need to empower them with love and truth. That includes affirming and thanking them. It also includes scrutinising their decisions, pointing out the details they may have missed and offering them perspectives they may not have seen. And they need to empower the Meeting – not just by telling us what they have decided but by sharing their responsibilities with us, involving us and trusting us.
As our clerk said on Monday morning, 27 May, it was an inward-looking Yearly Meeting. Concerns about the world found their place mostly in the many special interest meetings and other groups. Ministry in open worship voiced a concern about Britain Yearly Meeting’s (BYM’s) investments in fossil fuel industries. During the consideration of the trustees’ report the Yearly Meeting treasurer explained how ethical issues are addressed in BYM’s investments; and the policy is available on the website. In a later special interest meeting one Friend asked when Quakers would give up our addiction to capitalism.
I wasn’t at Ed Mayo’s Salter Lecture on the cooperative movement, but many Friends enthused to me about it afterwards. One felt that Quakers should be promoting coops. So, I listened online – this, the Swarthmore Lecture and most Yearly Meeting session introductions are available on the BYM website. Ed Mayo described cooperatives as the boats in which we raise sails to catch the winds of change. He mentioned some of the key roles Quakers have played in the cooperative movement, and some of the ways coops such as Suma Wholefoods are now experimenting with inclusive governance.
But we know how often, in the past, structural changes have failed to deliver promised benefits. George Orwell’s Animal Farm speaks to the way cultural values and forms of relationship persist. What matters most is the way we relate to each other within the structures: that we seek to see one another and listen to one another with God’s eyes and ears, that we are open to one another in truth and love and that we actively seek to empower one another. This is Gospel Order. This is the key to the Kingdom.
