Letters - 27 September 2024
From members and attenders to the Quaker Tapestry
Members and attenders
I have recently, very reluctantly, agreed to have my name put forward to become a trustee of my Area Meeting.
I had previously made a firm decision that I would not agree to join any committee ever again – not just Quaker committees, but any sort. I feel I’ve ‘done that/been there’.
But there was a very real danger that our Area Meeting would become illegal if there were not enough trustees to fulfil the Charity Commission’s regulations. This would mean that all our Meeting houses would have to close. I felt I couldn’t let that happen.
I simply cannot understand why the Religious Society of Friends insists that trustees must be ‘in membership’. Why this discrimination against attenders?
Like so many Area Meetings we have very many fully committed attenders. They have their own reasons for not wishing to become a ‘member’ but they are as committed to Quakers as those in membership.
Who are we (members) to doubt their commitment? Why are we so ‘suspicious’ of their reasons?
We are supposed to be a tolerant organisation – can we not tolerate different opinions on this matter while making a pragmatic decision to allow attenders to become trustees?
I am baffled.
Kim Hope
Spiritual commitment
I thank Matt Rosen for his article of the 6 September.
In doctoral research I completed this year (see http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/...) eleven out of twelve of those I interviewed in depth would, I think, agree with Matt Rosen’s argument.
Given the profound spiritual commitment of many Quakers, I also had to ask why the Society is in numerical decline. The annual Tabular Statement indicates attenders stop attending and members give up their membership.
My answer was because of internal secularisation within the Society in relation to its religious culture, its governance and its promotion.
That is a defensive response to societal pressures to conform to a secular way of thinking, and to the hegemony of a form of materialistic scientific thinking in Britain and advanced capitalist societies in ways of understanding the world, and, especially, ourselves.
John Shinebourne
