Meeting for Sufferings: Yearly Meeting minutes sent for action
Britain Yearly Meeting 2015 minutes have been sent to Meeting for Sufferings
Minutes from Britain Yearly Meeting 2015 have been sent to Meeting for Sufferings for action.
The first of these was minute 25: Responding to social inequality and injustice: housing as a tested concern. The second was Minute 36: Living out our faith in the world – are we ready to meet the challenge? This minute is now being labelled ‘The Call to Equality’. The third is 32a: Proposed amendments to Quaker faith & practice (Qf&p). Minutes 25 and 36 prompted the most discussion.
In responding to the call to equality one Friend said that he had been brought to a realisation that he did not want to harm the earth or anything on it. The references to ‘global warming leading to climate change’ made him realise that we had to ‘get to grips with the depth of that… reordering how we live and relate to the planet and everything on it’.
Another Friend, responding to minute 25, said: ‘When Friends were asked to challenge slavery it was so embedded that they couldn’t imagine how to tackle it… We are all complicit’ in the housing problem. If we can ‘raise our awareness of how our relationship to housing can change’ it would be spiritually enriching.
A Friend said: ‘We hear of the privilege of so many Quakers, in our education and our wealth. At present I am off sick and living on benefits and it is all right… it is enough.’
‘Since 7 May [the general election] I have realised I know very little about the facts of poverty in my area… I agree that we need to find out what’s going on and inform ourselves before we are able to do anything about it,’ commented another Friend.
One Friend, who is a councillor in her local borough, described the desperation of the people she spoke to in her surgeries: ‘Families are being put on the street.’ The borough has a ‘declared policy of getting rid of social housing’. She pleaded: ‘Please, can we do something about this as individuals and as a church?’
Yet another Friend had been reading about John Woolman and reminded us of his ‘gentle noncombative’ way of confronting slave-owners. He said that today ‘the equivalent great social evil is wealth and possessions’.
A Friend who had taught social policy said that the Victorians recognised the interconnectedness of social conditions and social ills. They provided clean water, education and worked towards health services. Now such services are being ‘systematically dismantled’.
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