Meeting for Sufferings: ‘Beyond Vibrancy’
Meeting for Sufferings heard more about the plan to expand the number of local development workers across Britain Yearly Meeting
‘Proceed with caution’ seemed to be the message to Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees in the ‘Support for Meetings – beyond the Vibrancy pilot’ session. The afternoon agenda item explored the recent plans announced for decentralising, for a ‘simpler church’.
‘Proceed with caution’ seemed to be the message to Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees in the ‘Support for Meetings – beyond the Vibrancy pilot’ session. The afternoon agenda item explored the recent plans announced for decentralising, for a ‘simpler church’.
Caroline Nursey, clerk to BYM trustees, spoke to a statement released jointly by BYM trustees and Woodbrooke trustees in June, after they met to discuss the plan to expand the number of local development workers (LDWs).
Emphasising that hard decisions were ‘still up in the air’, she said the motto was: ‘Evolution not revolution, but evolution that moves moderately fast.’ She said: ‘We were conscious we were taking big decisions that had a big effect on people’s lives’, but felt ‘steered’ by the positive responses from Friends and the benefits reported in the independent evaluation report into the Vibrancy Pilot Programme in February.
She said: ‘We went into the meeting with a clear idea of what you thought… It is critical we know from you that this is what the church needs… [and] we felt we were being encouraged to be bold.’ By the end of the meeting, she said the group had agreed to ‘extend and expand the pilot system’, so that LDWs are within reach of every Meeting, and ‘begin to experiment with more regional hubs’.
While certain details had not been decided, such as ‘where the workers are going to be based, whether working from home or gathered in hubs… the same thing is not going to work for everyone’, she acknowledged that, in the short term, costs would go up, as they would be setting up LDWs before restructuring the centre.
Friends responded with a mood of ‘steady as you go’. One Quaker said he hadn’t heard anything about the impact on staff. He said: ‘Having worked for an organisation that did this “big time”… do not underestimate the impact. You need [the] right policies in place… To make it work, you need dedicated staff who will help build a new culture of working. Don’t expect it to be done in five years. It’s taken my organisation nearly nine.’
Another Friend said the phrase LDWs would be ‘within reach of’ amounted to ‘weasel words’. What would this mean for remote parts of Scotland or Wales, such as the Shetland Isles? One Shetland Friend said she was ‘excited’ about the changes but spoke of the difficulty Friends have of communicating with each other on the island, let alone with the wider Area Meeting. She said: ‘People in remote communities embrace simplicity, but have to take on board a new way of living simply with the technology that is available to us.’
Another Friend from Scotland said the general mood from his Area Meeting was ‘mostly positive: nervous but they think it needs to be done’. He added, however: ‘I feel sad about what it means for us. It seems to me to say that something very important is going to change, something I have always been very proud of… [that] we cannot do without “paid pastors”. We do not have large enough, time-committed Meetings to do the job we tell the world we have always done. We take care of business ourselves.’
Caroline Nursey said she disagreed that LDWs were the same as ‘paid pastors’, because they are ‘not going to have someone in each place’. She acknowledged that remote areas such as the Shetland Isles might pose challenges, but pointed to the fact that ‘the Isle of Man said how valuable it was to have workers. I think “within reach of” is going to need work… Getting it right is one of the key challenges’. On the subject of staffing, she agreed ‘it is going to be hard for some staff’, but they are not going to be ‘completely dismantling Friends House’. While it might make sense for some central work to move out of the capital, there is ‘no imperative to push it out of London’. She added: ‘The time to invest is now, while we still have the resources to invest.’
Paul Parker, recording clerk for BYM, pointed out that one in six of BYM staff are not currently based in Friends House, which has allowed an opportunity to see ‘how we relate to [each other] and feel like one organisation’. Costs, such as in IT, have already started to be looked at, ‘to see how we can have as connected a staff as possible’. Large numbers of staff working alone is not the best structure, he said: ‘That’s why we are looking at hubs, clusters and bases.’
One Friend asked about outreach: ‘In thirty years, not many of us are going to be feeling so vibrant. How does the new system propose to address the problem of recruiting new members?’ Caroline Nursey said that if LDWs can support Meetings to be ‘more welcoming and functional’, that helps outreach, ‘because [people] are less likely to go if it’s weird and dysfunctional’, she said.
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