Letters - 31 January 2025
From a lament to Goma and M23
Lament of the ‘but’
Oh George Fox, what hast thou done?
Swarthmoor local Friends have been glad of your legacy through the ages since. But you butted us with your add-on of ‘but you should worship at Swarthmoor Hall as long as you can’. We thought it was nothing to worry about.
Latterly we have been remiss with this ‘but’.
The hall is still there, eight minutes’ walk from your Meeting house, and it is owned and well looked after by Yearly Meeting Friends. We could now, again, worship there if we chose to.
But what of your legacy if we follow the letter of your instruction? We have always taken heed as we were advised by Balby Friends, and now we are torn with ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’. If we follow your ‘but’ in the letter, would we sell your Meeting house and worship at the hall?
If we did, would this kill our Meeting?
If we see the spirit behind your words, would it give life to us and the Hall?
Dare we sell it?
Our stewardship is being tested as your grand old Meeting house is in great need of tender loving care and updating. But we are timid Friends and there are so few of us now, sitting in our tiny circle in the middle of your huge Meeting room. Gobbling up electricity to stop the shivers in the cold every midweek and first day, and we can imagine the lamentation across the Quaker world if we did sell George Fox’s Meeting House.
Oh, what canst we do?
Answers on a postcard to: George Fox’s Meeting House, Meeting House Lane, Ulverston, Cumbria LA12 7JE.
William Shaw
Managerialism
I worked in Friends House, our central offices, for about twenty years, including several years as a senior staff member. I retired about eighteen years ago.
When I began there I knew about Quaker practice, but I had no management qualifications.
So for many years I stumbled along, not really sure what I was doing, learning how to run a department on the job. I had never planned or argued for a budget, and I needed lots of guidance on personnel matters; I wasn’t really sure what I was doing, and I made lots of wrong decisions. Some of my colleagues had come from other fields such as industry or local government, and had lots of experience, so I learned from them; others, like me, were amateurs.
Fortunately for the department, I took several courses set up by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and the Open University – it was such a relief to voice my unspoken worries, to hear how to solve them, and to find that other charitable organisations had the same concerns and difficulties. One of our dangerous myths is that we are so totally unique that no other body is like us, so we cannot learn from anybody else. I also read a lot, and learned from others. One vivid memory is a planning day with the central committee – I had a vague plan, but thirty minutes in, I was floundering. Then a committee member with wide management experience and skill sized up the situation, asked if she could take over, stepped in and ran it all – much to everyone’s relief, not least mine! (She later became the director of Woodbrooke.)
I recall an incident from the time when we were developing from a loose conglomeration of committees in the same building, to a more coherent set-up. The then recording clerk, who had come from much more clarity in the world of manufacturing, met regularly with each departmental general secretary for an ‘informal advisory conversation’. He stuck faithfully to this guideline, but one day as he and I finished an inconclusive and unsatisfactory meeting, he said sadly ‘Oh, if I could only manage you!’
I realised that management was not a dirty word, it is a set of thought-out tools, a complex human skill like cooking, operating a combine harvester, nursing or any other skill. So I am concerned when I read that Friends distrust the word ‘management’ when it’s used about the way we live and work together in our Yearly Meeting. Yes, we can be amateurs, we can just muddle along, wasting Quaker time and resources – or we can gladly accept and use the considered body of formulated knowledge and experience of working with people to get something done, which is actually all that management is.
Beth Allen
