Meeting for Sufferings: Mixed reception for the review of the Committee on Clerks
Representatives at Meeting for Sufferings accepted four of the eight recommendations of the review group
ON Sunday 25 November Meeting for Sufferings, which was held at Woodbrooke in Birmingham, received a report from the review group it appointed to look at the work of the Committee on Clerks (ConC) earlier this year. ConC is responsible for nominating names for the clerk and assistant clerk roles for Yearly Meeting (YM), Meeting for Sufferings (MfS), and Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) trustees, as well as the YM treasurer.
Rhiannon Grant, a member of the group, spoke to the report and praised ‘lots of good work’ done within the current system. However, the review highlighted ‘issues around transparency, simplicity, communication, and the unequal distribution of power’ and made eight recommendations.
The first four recommendations were accepted by MfS. These were: the roles ConC is responsible for should ‘no longer be handled by a single body’; BYM trustees should nominate their own clerk and YM treasurer; these appointments should be for three years; and BYM trustees should be able to appoint an assistant clerk directly. The remaining recommendations were that: names for YM clerks should be found by Central Nominations Committee (CNC) and appointed by YM; names for MfS clerks should be found by CNC and appointed by MfS; CNC should have its membership increased; and ConC should be laid down.
A co-clerk of CNC praised the report as being ‘very thoughtful’, but emphasised that YM and MfS clerks are ‘key posts’ and the processes of the nominations committee are very different. He described CNC as a ‘volume producer’ operating under time pressure, with no experience of providing ConC-levels of preparation or support. If the proposed changes took the form of a ConC ‘standing search group’ embedded within CNC, it could help transparency and communication. However, regarding distribution of power, he said ‘I really don’t understand this… nominations committees are powerful’ and asked whether rolling two together would really help. He suggested CNC would need more members and that oversight of the ConC group could lengthen meetings. He also worried that giving more work to CNC might make it harder for Friends to give service to that committee.
A former member of ConC quoted Elsa Dicks, a former recording clerk, who said: ‘Nominations is the holiest thing we do.’ She spoke of how ConC was ‘extremely prayerful and thoughtful’ in searching for Friends who can clerk very large Meetings and undertake such a long period of proposed service, whilst balancing work and family commitments.
One former YM clerk spoke of how valuable the support from ConC had been in discerning the right way forward during difficult times in post. She said that she was ‘not comfortable’ with the arrangements proposed for supporting YM clerks in the report.
Another Friend said that the work done by ConC is ‘quiet’, ‘not well known’ and ‘discreet’. Thinking long-term means that the committee can be looking at Friends in their forties for service at a much later stage. She asked ‘how can we bring on people who can serve’ with the required experience and suggested that ‘courageous appointments’ elsewhere in the Society could widen the pool of such potential Friends.
‘If the Spirit is absent, the work fails. We have to make the space, we have to give the time… for the Spirit to live and flower,’ one Friend ministered. They expressed concern that CNC already has too much to do and that adding more could hurt its ability to fulfil its role.
Rhiannon Grant reassured Friends that these issues had been taken into account. She suggested that in bringing ConC into CNC ‘we might get closer to treating all nominations in that special way’.
MfS minuted that: ‘We are not ready to change the system until we are sure that [CNC] has the capacity to carry out the work.’
Comments
Too many acronyms to be an intelligible article.
By KathQuak on 6th December 2018 - 19:24
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