Meeting for Sufferings: Revision of Quaker faith & practice
Revision of Quaker faith & practice was discussed at Meeting for Sufferings
Friends agreed to begin the process of a revision of Quaker faith & practice at Meeting for Sufferings, which was held at Friends House on Saturday 1 February. In the past year there has been a wide-ranging consultation about a possible revision. It was launched in June 2013 and closed at the end of November. A large number of Meetings responded and the Church Government Advisory Group was asked to prepare a digest of responses to inform Meeting for Sufferings’ further discernment.
Paul Parker, recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting, spoke to Friends about the subject. He mentioned the wide variety of understanding among Friends and said ‘we need to go tenderly and carefully into the future’. He linked the response with the discussion of ‘What it means to be a Quaker today’ which, he said, was enlightening, stimulating and challenging. He also talked of the ‘creative tensions that exist among us’.
Paul Parker reminded Friends that the process of revision generally took a decade – so the final results of a revision would not appear until the 2020s.
He offered a number of scenarios for Meeting for Sufferings to consider, from beginning immediately to deferring the decision, and asked: Is it time to start to talk to Yearly Meeting?
A Friend said that every week there were people who wanted to know more about Quakers. More and more Friends were not ‘birth-right’ Quakers but ‘convinced’ Friends. He felt that ‘we should get on with’ a revision.
The sense of Quakerism as a dynamic faith was strongly expressed. A Friend supported the decision to go ahead with a revision and stressed the need to make creative use of new media. He said: ‘let’s go forward with a smile, with joy and with a sense of adventure’. The process of revision, Meeting for Sufferings was reminded, was an educational exercise for many involved.
A Friend from the north of England felt that ‘we need to move forward tenderly and in love’. There is a need to recognise, she explained, that for some individuals there were real challenges at a personal level. She said that implementing sustainability, for example, posed difficulties for some.
A ‘rolling revision process’, a Friend argued, ‘might better meet our needs’ and be a worthwhile approach. This idea, however, worried one Friend, who said: ‘The last thing we need is to be some kind of Wikipedia and lose what we have had for 350 years.’
A Friend praised Quaker faith & practice as a ‘wonderful tapestry of experience’ and inspired ‘leadings’.
‘The process of choosing passages’, a Friend said, will require ‘quite deep and difficult discernment’ and he urged Friends not to set a time limit to the process of revision.
Friends agreed to proceed with a revision to be taken forward by the Church Government Advisory Group.
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