Meeting for Sufferings: ‘A visionary and prophetic body’
Meeting for Sufferings considered its role and function on 4 October
Representatives of Meeting for Sufferings (MfS), who had travelled to London from every corner of Britain to meet in the George Fox Room at Friends House on Saturday 4 October, were able to take a rare opportunity to look in a mirror.
The main question on the agenda was: What is the role and function of Meeting for Sufferings?
The clerk, Ethel Livermore, explained that the agenda was arranged to allow space to ‘step back’ from the normal procedure and give Sufferings time to think about ‘what we are doing and how we are doing it’.
Anne Ullathorne, convenor of the Meeting for Sufferings Arrangements Group, talked about the work of the Group over the past year. She explained that it had looked at a range of subjects, such as the Terms of Reference of the body, how ‘things get on the agenda’, planning agendas that allowed ‘movement of the spirit within the gathered worship’, the need for long-term strategies, the challenge for MfS to be ‘visionary and prophetic’ and the ambition to be more proactive than reactive.
