Meeting for Sufferings: Young Friends at MfS
'Friends of working age were often forced to be less connected with Meetings, she said, but the Engaging Young Adult Quakers project could help nominations groups find them.'
In this most recent triennium, MfS reserved four places for adult Friends under the age of thirty-five. Naomi Major, the Engaging Young Adult Quakers project manager, had consulted with young Friends on this experiment and reported back. Feedback was positive, she said, though a buddy system would have improved the move. She had some further recommendations, including a call for Area Meetings (AMs) to appoint one representative or alternate under fifty. There was some concern, she said, that the four non-geographic places could be seen as tokenistic, since they were not linked to any particular Meeting. Friends of working age were often forced to be less connected with Meetings, she said, but the EYAQ project could help nominations groups find them. It could be that some younger Friends would have links with certain AMs despite having to move away for employment, but modern communications methods could resolve that.
A Friend in Sheffield saw no problem with this but worried about the burden of time commitment. MfS had just added two more Meetings, she noted. Could regional sharing of representatives be an option?
Another representative said that young Friends shouldn’t see the four positions as tokenistic, since everyone in the Meeting should have equal value. Losing the direct link between representatives and AMs would spell real challenges, he said.
One Friend, herself over fifty, said she felt like she had just joined a demographic that it was ‘OK to insult’. She was concerned that MfS would be replacing one discrimination with another.
Naomi said that young Friends who came to MfS without a standard role would inevitably feel different about their position. She recalled the time when women could not attend. Young adults weren’t prevented in the same way, she said, but structures themselves could lead to discrimination. She asked Friends to look at the faces on the screens in front of them – a sea of grey – to consider who was being marginalised.
Trying a minute the assistant clerk talked of the difficulties of reconciling the lives of younger people with the workings of the Society. This assumed that the problems lay with the young Friends, said one representative. The minute needed something about ensuring a welcome, she said. The way MfS currently operated could put a young Friend off service, and ‘we need to make sure they feel love and faith… not ego and blame’.
