Meeting for Sufferings: Sustainability Group laid down at MfS
Meeting for Sufferings decided to accept the recommendation to lay down the Britain Yearly Meeting Sustainability Group
Meeting for Sufferings decided to lay down the Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) Sustainability Group on Sunday 25 November.
A series of proposals were put to representatives, which, in addition to the laying down of the Group, included the expectation that sustainability will form a key part of the annual reports from committees to Sufferings, and from Sufferings to Yearly Meeting.
It was also proposed that, within Meeting for Sufferings itself, there will be at least one substantive agenda item a year about sustainability, three Sufferings representatives will be appointed to a Sustainability Monitoring Group, and these Friends will work closely with the Meeting for Sufferings Arrangements Group.
Several pieces of ministry reflected the importance and urgency felt about sustainability locally.
The involvement of the whole Quaker community was emphasised by one Friend: ‘You need to show that you want to hear from Local Meetings and Area Meetings… the root and core of our community.’
Another Friend stressed that: ‘We cannot set targets for anyone else… If we give Friends a vision, they will live up to it. If we give them a target, they will rebel.’
This was echoed by Laurie Michaelis, secretary to the BYM Sustainability Group, who spoke of how Friends ‘don’t want someone to lead them… [but to] empower them’. He also described the ‘growing sense of urgency in our wider society’ and of how ‘this is huge… we need to hold ourselves and each other very tenderly in it’.
Another Friend challenged Sufferings: ‘What will our laying down of the Sustainability Group say to the wider world?’
Lis Burch, clerk of the BYM Sustainability Group, questioned whether this was ‘the time to lay down the only group with sustainability at its core’. However, she said that recent events meant it had become ‘untenable’ for the Group to continue and expressed how ‘dispiriting’ the ‘indecent haste’ to lay it down had been.
She described three key things to address moving forward: firstly, structures that enable work to be carried out, so that groups are appropriately resourced for the tasks they are entrusted with; secondly, there appears to be a ‘diminishing understanding of what a Yearly Meeting concern really is’ and how Friends respond to corporate leadings; and, thirdly, the importance of encouragement, monitoring and support from Meeting for Sufferings.
Lis Burch concluded: ‘I have been changed by this service and I will be watching.’
Friends came to the decision to accept all of the proposed recommendations.
Draft terms of reference for the Sustainability Monitoring Group will be brought to the February Meeting for Sufferings.
Comments
Earlier this year the United Nations issued a report which states that limiting global warming will require “far reaching and unprecidented changes” to human behaviour.The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that it is not impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, “but it will require unprecidented and collective climate action in all areas. There is no time to waste”. He describes the report as an “ear-splitting wake up call”. This article on tinyurl.com/yac8p7tw, from UN News, has links to the original highly technical paper
Earlier this week there was a report from the UN climate change conference of 2018 warning of summer temperatures routinely as much as 5 degrees warmer than at present:5 degrees when scientists consider that the safe limit should be 1.5 degrees
I am therefore horrified that MfS considers this an appropriate time to lay this down. What happened to the Canterbury Commitment?
By RogerP on 1st December 2018 - 19:08
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