Meeting for Sufferings: Your Area, your Meeting
Time was devoted to the relationship between Area Meetings and Meeting for Sufferings on 4-6 December
Meeting for Sufferings was held over the weekend of 4 to 6 December at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, a change from its normal Saturday meeting in London.
Much time at Sufferings was devoted to considering the challenges and opportunities facing Area Meetings today. This was included in the agenda following the ‘Meeting for Sufferings Roadshows’, which saw the clerks and members of the arrangement group travel around Britain to visit Area Meetings.
Friends heard that there are seventy-one Area Meetings in Britain. The smallest, Wensleydale and Swaledale, has just over seventy members and attenders, while the largest, Central England, has more than eight hundred. Some Area Meetings have just two or three Local Meetings, while a number of others have between thirteen and sixteen. The range of geographical spreads is just as wide. Resources vary, with some Area Meetings coping with buildings that have become a burden.
The paper presented to Sufferings said: ‘In all the ‘Meeting for Sufferings’ Roadshows’ participants told us it was hard to engage people for whom the Local Meeting is all that matters. Our religious structures can’t survive if the majority favour congregationalism.’
It stressed that ‘when Friends don’t feel fully engaged with their Area Meeting – to which members belong – this also raises questions about the nature of membership. In the twenty-first century, are Quakers more focused on the individual than on creating a covenant with the worshipping community to which we belong?’
For two sessions at Sufferings participants joined ‘home groups’, where they were encouraged to share their concerns and experiences with neighbouring Area Meetings. These were noted and collated, and two Friends later presented a summary.
Poor attendance was one of the concerns expressed by the home groups. This is often caused by transport difficulties, aging Members, family commitments or Area Meeting being perceived as an inappropriate place for children. Workload was another concern, with Friends sharing difficulties, in particular, in finding clerks. The Quaker business method and the frequency of Area Meetings were also seen as a burden by some Friends, while the lack of clarity around the purpose of Area Meeting deterred potential new participants.
Friends were keen to review the processes around Area Meeting. They wanted to reconsider how the routine work is carried out, to rethink the frequency of Area Meetings and to look at devoting time to particular themes. A number of home groups had discussed ‘the Northumbria model’, and Friends were keen to look at new ways of working, such as sharing roles or making better use of IT.
The main point, Sufferings heard, was that it must be made very clear ‘how important Area Meeting is, why it is important and what it is connected to’. Friends agreed that more teaching is needed.
A Friend spoke of the lingering ‘distrust of the whole concept of trustees’. He added: ‘Area Meetings need to recognise that these are people giving their time voluntarily.’ Another Friend asked that the term ‘congregationalism’ be replaced with ‘parochialism’, explaining that congregationalism is as old as Quakerism, and works well.
‘Area Meeting is an important place in the structure of the Society. We should be feeling a desperate need for Area Meetings,’ said a Friend. She spoke of her concern that some Friends view work such as business, property and repairs as ‘not spiritual’. The Friend added: ‘It is not outside spiritual practice. Every day is special – every job is special.’
The fragility of the link between Local and Area Meetings is echoed by that between Area Meetings and Sufferings, a Friend said. He called on these links to be made more robust.
A Friend said she was ‘bothered’ by the description of Area Meeting business as ‘boring’, while another said that she had noted a ‘very negative mood around Area Meetings’. Her Area Meeting works very well, she added, being ‘as much to do with fellowship as with business’.
