Meeting for Sufferings: Living out our faith
Meeting for Sufferings considered work on moving social injustice forward
Britain Yearly Meeting is moving through a three-year arc, ‘Living out our faith’, Meeting for Sufferings clerk Ethel Livermore explained in the papers.
At Yearly Meeting 2015, Sufferings was asked ‘to take the work on social injustice forward, coordinating the work of Local and Area Meetings [AMs] who might wish to become more deeply involved, and encouraging the deep spiritual and intellectual searching that could underpin a “true social order” for our age’.
To focus on this request, the clerks put three questions to Sufferings. These looked at the coordination of Friends’ work, testing concerns and striking a balance between long-term work and responding to external events (this will be revisited at a later date).
As preparation for this discussion, the clerks had circulated a questionnaire on equality work being done by Friends. Forty-eight Area Meetings submitted more than 100 responses. Summaries of these responses were split under separate headings: economic injustice, inequality and welfare benefits, refugees and asylum seekers, sustainability and others. Centrally managed work was added to each list. The clerks had also put together a table of the concerns brought to Sufferings by AMs in recent years.
It was clear that Friends are involved in a wide range of equality-related activities. One Friend pointed out that ‘there are other groups working in the same way’, and asked if, and how, Quakers could work with them. Another Friend pointed out that there are other levels of work being done, by groups such as the Northern Friends Peace Board, for example. He stressed that the use of the word ‘coordinate’ might lead Friends to miss this. His unease over the wording was echoed by a Friend who said: ‘I have difficulties with the word “coordinate”. I’m not sure how London can coordinate all of Britain. I would prefer to use “networking”.’
Several Friends mentioned that their Area Meetings were unable to come up with current examples of equality work. One spoke of the difficulties of ‘getting people to want to do deep spiritual searching’.
Others reported that there is plenty of work going on, but that communication is poor. One Friend said that her AM, while very active, has no contact with its neighbouring AMs. She described this as a ‘structural hiccup’ that is not facilitating coordination, even in the smaller geographical areas.
Another Friend said that, at first glance, his AM didn’t seem to be doing much in terms of equality, but it soon became apparent that ‘Friends are involved with 101 things’.
Several Friends asked whether a website could be developed where they could share news of their activities.
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