Interview: Paul Parker
In the first of a two-part interview, the recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting talks to the Friend about his faith, life and work
How did you come to Quakerism? I came to Quakerism as a young teenager. I was brought up in a family with a Methodist mother and a very determinedly atheist father. I was taken to Sunday school every Sunday by my mother. I became increasingly uncomfortable with being told what to believe. So, as a twelve or thirteen year old, I started going to different churches – looking to see if what I was searching for existed.
Quakerism ‘spoke to your condition’?
I ended up with the Quakers because the Quakers asked me what I thought and that struck me as a different approach. They told me what they thought as well but they didn’t all say the same thing. That appealed to me. It was about exploring and not suggesting the answers. And I have been going ever since. My mother has become a Friend, too.
How would you describe your faith?
Is it possible to describe your faith? I think we all wrestle with that. I wrestle with what I mean by ‘God’. It is a word that I increasingly find I can use and I increasingly realise that everyone I speak to has had to make their own compromises in terms of what they understand by it. I find myself very far from using it to describe something that is a figure or a person of any kind.
God is something else?
For me, it is very much something that is an internal sense of rightness. I have been led to explore the background to it. If you look across humanity we share a sense of rightness and wrongness that extends from something within us. So, I recognise ‘that of God in everyone’ in that sense. One of the essential things for me about Quakerism is that it is OK to be exploring and it is OK to be uncertain.
What, for you, are the essential elements of Quakerism?
I extend my understanding of Quakerism from ‘there is that of God in everyone’. There is, therefore, a fundamental equality built into Quakerism that leads us not to treat any one person as more valuable than any other person. For me it goes back to equality more than anything else. All the other areas of traditional Quaker testimony I find very much interconnect with that. Silence is not essential to everyone’s Quakerism but it is essential to mine.
What of your life outside Quakerism?
I live in Saffron Walden with my wife, who is an anchor in the world of sanity, and I do have some spare time but not a lot. I grew up in a very musical household. I walk in the countryside and I am a linguist. I stopped teaching languages last year. Travelling in the countries where I speak the language is something that I enjoy, particularly camping in France and Germany.
For sixteen years you were a teacher and an assistant headteacher in a secondary school in Hertfordshire. Do you miss working with young people?
No, and I did expect to. I think that one of the things that I have tried to do, more than some predecessors, is to reach out more to younger Friends. So I will be working with the young people’s programme at Yearly Meeting (YM) at a session.
If we are sharing the future of YM – which I hope I will be – then we have to involve young people with that and not to keep people at arm’s length, which is often how it is felt. That is a significant thing to be doing.
You mention younger Friends being kept at arm’s length. Do you feel this is an issue in the Society?
We know that many young people do not go to Meetings on a Sunday morning – because Meetings tell us that all the time – and we know that younger people – which, in Quaker terms, means people under fifty-five – are underrepresented in national structures. So there is a danger that people look at that and think: ‘Well, that’s not for me then, because there is nobody else like me there’. So, we have to ask ourselves why that is. And one of the things that I want to say to young Friends is: you have to tell your Meetings what it is you need so that they can adjust the way that they work. What would we have to do to enable you to come to Meeting more often? This might mean having the Meeting at a different time or having a shorter Meeting. And I do not think we ask ourselves these challenging questions enough.
Looking back on your first year as recording clerk, what was a highlight?
One of the highlights of the past year has been going out to visit Meetings. Every time that I have done it I have learnt things and heard all sorts of things and felt – that it is worth doing.
For a great many Friends, centrally managed work is something that happens somewhere else. Friends House can be a very distant part of what goes on for them. A great many Friends do not know very much about BYM’s work and it doesn’t feature in their day-to-day Quakerism very highly at the moment, rightly or wrongly.
How much is that of concern to you?
I understand that there are people for whom Quakerism is that space on Sunday for reflection and worship and to connect with your local community. There is nothing wrong with that. When I then go and say that Quakers, through their corporate discernment at all sorts of different levels, have been called to do ‘this and this and this’, people on the whole are very fascinated by that and intrigued and are keen to hear more about it. I think it is interesting that both the main topics at this year’s YM – ‘economic justice and sustainability’ and ‘What it means to be a Quaker today’ – actually arose from minutes from Area Meetings that were sent to YM’s Agenda Committee.
Is it a matter of changing the processes or making the processes better understood?
It is a bit of both. Take advocacy – if you want it to happen faster, which the modern world requires, then it cannot always refer back to Meeting for Sufferings. So it affects the way we do things.
There have always been tensions among Friends about where authority lies. I am clear that it lies with the Meeting and sometimes it comes upwards and sometimes it comes downwards.
There is a perception, in some quarters, that Quakerism in Britain can sometimes be more ‘top down’ than ‘bottom up’. Is that a misunderstanding?
In some ways it can feel quite centralised. I wonder, with a large centre in London, whether it is possible to work more regionally so that staff are closer to where Friends are.
I think that if you are in the north of England or Scotland then Friends House is a little dot on the horizon. So things that emanate from Friends House can seem like something distant… and I think it is quite difficult for us to manage that relationship. But at the same time we don’t have the resources to do everything.
What about partnerships?
We have begun a partnership with Woodbrooke about understanding what we mean by a vibrant Meeting. One of the things that I hope will arise from that is that we might look at how we support Friends regionally and have staff that support and work at that level. It is at a very early stage but I would like to see that happen.
It would be much easier for people to relate to centrally managed work if there was someone down the road who they could talk to about it and connect up with it and get involved with it – rather than having to hop on a train and come all the way to London.
What do you feel are the main challenges facing Yearly Meeting today?
One of the challenges is about engagement. It is about making sure that what we are doing is what Friends want us to be doing and if it is – and I think that most of it is – then we need to make sure that Friends take the opportunity to engage with it and they can engage with it in all sorts of ways.
Do you feel all Friends feel a part of the decisions made at BYM?
There is always a balance to strike between those decisions that affect everybody and decisions that, necessarily, have to be delegated to a smaller group. I think that if you look at the reasons we have for coming together and you compare why we might go to an Area Meeting today with why Friends in the seventeenth century were prepared to get on their horse and ride for a day to get to a Business Meeting, I suspect that we are talking about very different things. I would like us to get us back to a place where Business Meetings are about concerns of Friends – and testing those and deciding what we are going to do about it – and about committing ourselves to supporting those things, rather than worrying about the chairs.
What do you feel is distinctive about BYM’s work?
I think an example would be the training of ecumenical accompaniers to go out to the West Bank. That is actually an ecumenical project but if we were not doing it then it would not be happening.
Criminal justice is an issue that we have been involved with over centuries. There are few organisations that stick with something for the long haul.
So what excites and inspires you about Quakerism in Britain today?
What excites me is that we may be at one of those points in the Society’s history where things revitalise and refresh. A good example of a similar period would be around the time of the Manchester conference one hundred years ago – where Friends suddenly seemed to find clarity to move into a different phase. I sense that we are at one of those moments and I want to be there when it happens. We have to be ready for that.
I am less concerned about membership than I am about belonging. If people feel they belong to Quakers then, in lots of ways, that is what matters. We get terribly exercised by trying to draw a line around us – by saying if you are inside the line you are a Quaker and if you are outside the line then you are not. But I think that we are not drawing that line in the same place as we are drawing that line around membership. So we may need to look at the two and ask: ‘Well, where should the line be?’ We are not an ‘anything goes’ organisation. There are some limits, but I am not sure we are terribly clear about where they are.
Do you have any thoughts on where they should be?
I think there is a danger – rather than drawing lines around ourselves – we end up drawing lines between Friends and putting them in different categories. That is counterproductive.
It’s about understanding the things that bring us together and the things that we share and saying ‘these are who we are’ rather than trying to categorise ourselves up into theists and nontheists or Christians and non-Christians or Bible-based Christians and Universalists. We could do that in all sorts of ways. For me that leads us into some kind of ‘credal requirement’ and we don’t do that.
The last financial figures showed a four per cent drop in contributions from Friends in Britain to the work of Friends House – from thirty-two to twenty-eight per cent of total income. Does this concern you?
Of course it does. One of my performance targets is to try and stabilise contributions income. Contributions from Friends in Meetings are one of the ways in which we can measure engagement and judge whether what we are doing is what Friends want us to do. This is complicated by a fact – whether Friends know what we are doing. We need to look at what is going on with contributions and try to understand why it is behaving the way it is. There are some real difficulties about giving. Lots of work that we think is valuable is now being done by other organisations – some of these are things that Quakers used to do and have taken on a life of their own. It can be hard for single Quakers in their household to talk about appropriate levels of giving of time and money.
Looking forward, after your first year, to your second. What are the personal challenges ahead?
One of my personal challenges is to try to make the work of Friends House more responsive and really listen to what Friends want us to do and deliver that better. The other is actually taking the work that the staff of BYM are doing out to where Friends are, talking about it, and getting people as excited about it as I am – building that sense of engagement.
It is a great job and a great privilege to do it. I am very conscious that I am serving Friends doing it. I have always been someone for whom Local Meeting is important and I want to bring that perspective to everything we do. That local group is the key to it. The quality of experience in Local and Area Meeting is what allows the rest of this edifice to exist.
Next week – in the second part of the interview – Paul Parker talks about communications, engagement, the Quaker ‘approach’, the role of the recording clerk and more.
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.