‘We need to keep that long view.’ Photo: by Michael Preston of BYM
On the record, part two: Paul Parker, interviewed by Joseph Jones
‘I don’t think my job’s about being comfortable.’
At the end of the last conversation we were talking about how gathered your Meetings with BYM trustees were, and how to get Friends to trust decisions that were made there. The Friend attends Meeting for Sufferings to help with communications. What if we attended trustee Meetings, too?
BYM trustees have been talking about how to communicate better. One of the things they’ve started doing is writing a note with their papers, which gives a bit more of a flavour and background to the decision rather than just a minute. I do think in the twenty-first century communication has moved on beyond writing minutes and reporting them back to Area Meetings. Most Friends aren’t at Area Meeting to hear the Sufferings report anyway. Even if they are, the person reporting inevitably sees it through a particular lens because of their own interests. So it’s a very imperfect channel of communication. We write minutes because in the seventeenth century there wasn’t access to other communication channels; there also were lower levels of literacy, so we reported verbally. We’ve got to be much more creative about how we use email, social media and video to really bring to life the story of what goes on in different places in the Society. That could happen at the local level with Area Meetings but also things like trustees and Sufferings. There are lots of Friends on the bench who have no idea what happens at Meeting for Sufferings and what I’m wary of is creating a group of people who feel entitled to more information than everybody else. We should be making sure that anybody who wants to can hear about the work that goes on nationally in their name. It belongs to all Quakers not just the ones who get approached for appointment to Meeting for Sufferings. Meetings for Sufferings is not a very representative group actually. The people who come are called representatives but they’re nominated from quite a small pool of people: those who’ve got time to attend five weekend Meetings a year; who can travel to London; who are able to spend a whole day taking part in the Meeting. It’s been interesting that in the last eighteen months since Sufferings has shifted online, the kind of people who’ve been able to serve on it has changed a bit. You need there to be groups of people who take responsibility for legal stuff and compliance – we need trustees or something very like it – but I’m wondering whether there are ways to really open up some of the other processes so they’re much more transparent, and potentially much more participative than they are at the moment. There are some really interesting opportunities just now to make that shift.
That would be a big shift – we’re not even allowed to record Meeting for Sufferings to make sure our notes are accurate! Could you flesh out how it’s been for trustees over the last year or two, which have been exceptional in lots of ways: having to close down Friends House, redundancies both Covid-related and strategic, plus the accusations of racism…
I can only say how it was for me but I was incredibly grateful that trustees were there. At the beginning of the pandemic a lot of decisions had to be taken very quickly. It just would not have been possible to do that if we’d been working with a body like Sufferings. We needed a small group of people who could be brought together fast and take decisions quickly. There was a great deal of trust in both directions: they had to trust that I was making a good call on things, and there was a lot of trust in them from senior management that they would help us to do what was going to be in the best interest of the organisation, and to keep a bigger picture. At times like that staff get very caught up in trying to keep the show on the road, and it was really invaluable to have trustees saying ‘We want the organisation to be here in ten years’ time, or 100 years’ time, and these are the things it needs to be able to do’. They could see that we were going to need to make some changes in order to get the organisation stable and to keep looking at that longer view. Trustees help you look at the arc of history rather than get swept along by events. It was also enormously helpful that we’d worked so hard with Meeting for Sufferings to agree the strategic priorities, which we’d had in place for about a year when the pandemic started. That meant that we were clear what the organisation was for and what it needed to be able to do, and we were already committed to making some changes. The pandemic accelerated some of those changes and slowed other things down, but we were clear on the direction of travel. This is a 350-year-old organisation; other charities could pivot during the pandemic and start providing completely different services from what they provided before, but we’re not going to do that, it’s not what we’re about. We need to keep that long view. In a century’s time, whatever shape things are by then, Britain Yearly Meeting is still going to be needed.
How about the things that we’ve had to respond to institutionally that couldn’t have been predicted? The accusations of racism must have been difficult.
Whenever you’ve got something like that, particularly around employment, you’re limited in what you can talk about because of the need for confidentiality. That made it harder to respond than it would have been if I was responding as an individual. That said, it is really important that we are accountable – that people can point things out, that scrutiny can happen, that questions can be asked. Things will change as a result of that – things are changing as a result of what happened. We’re working hard on diversity issues to make sure we have a good understanding of what the issues are, and we’re doing some action planning around changing. There are all sorts of parallels between the sorts of equalities issues that crop up in BYM as a workplace and the sorts of things that people experience at Quaker Meetings. One of the interesting challenges is how you marry those two, so that what we learn about how good practice in the workplace can translate into what good practice might look like in a Quaker Meeting. I’ve got much more control over what happens in the workplace, and a set of things we can do as an employer which you can’t necessarily do in a Quaker Meeting because Meetings are responsible for their own ways of doing things.
It seems to me that BYM the church has made itself move partly because of what it saw happening in BYM the charity. That’s a good outcome but it’s not a comfortable position for you be in.
I don’t think my job’s about being comfortable. Friends pay me a pretty good salary to wrestle with some difficult stuff on their behalf. I’ve learned a massive amount about my own assumptions, my own biases, my own behaviours that are problematic for some people. That’s a result of those allegations but also from questions and conversations I’ve had with Friends – remembering the Yearly Meeting epistle which quoted a Friend who’d said ‘This isn’t the experience I was promised’. I’ve had all sorts of correspondence and conversations with people about that: what did she mean, what did that mean in their Meeting, did she mean them? This issue is never going to go away; it’s not something where you can do a piece of work and you’ve solved it. Racism is so deeply embedded in everything, particularly in countries like ours with its colonial history, and in a Society like ours with that history around sugar and chocolate. Of course it’s there, so what matters is the constant commitment to work at it and to change and to learn and to try to do better. The appetite to do that seems to be there in the Society now and I think that’s healthy and helpful. Have we wrestled with it enough? No, nowhere near. It’s a huge amount of work to do. Any organisation which can field in its national representative body 100 people with as little diversity as we’ve got, it’s got a deep deep issue and you don’t crack that in a year, or in a decade even. We’ve got to slog away on that for ages together – be prepared to do some radical stuff. If stereotypically highly-educated, middle-class, middle-aged Quakers find our structures hard to access, what hope is there of making them more inclusive to a more diverse group? So the need for change is far more than just tinkering with who gets to receive the minutes of what. It’s about a whole culture of equality.
When we started taking about these things as a Society there was an element of defensiveness there – a kind of defensiveness that is actually a wilful engagement in conflict – but we seem to be moving on. On organisations though, some readers are interested in the way we’re put together as Quakers in Britain. Quaker Peace & Social Witness, and our parliamentary engagement work, are all part of the same central charity. That’s quite different to, say, the US, where they have their Yearly Meetings but American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation are separated out. Have you reflected on those differences and strengths and weaknesses?
I have. We’re a very different Quaker community here from the US, in a range of ways. We’re broadly a single tradition, whereas in the US you’ve got multiple ones, and quite a lot of difficulty in finding a common place to talk to each other. We’re very focused on trying to reach unity here. Excepting the odd splinter, this Yearly Meeting hasn’t split. In the US it’s still happening. Our instinct in this Yearly Meeting is to try to remain together. That’s led us to keep on working on issues like same-sex relationships, which split a number of American Meetings. We spent fifty years working on it until we got to a point of unity. Our culture of minuting, and the minutes we write, reflects that. But I also think it’s a real strength of our Yearly Meeting that the witness work is embedded in the Yearly Meeting structures. It’s part of who we are. We’re very clear that, if you’re a Quaker, this work is in your name and we are all engaged with it. Occasionally I ask myself if QPSW would flourish if it was an independent organisation, because it kind of was originally – the old Friends Service Council was quite independent. But I don’t think you can separate witness and worship in that way. For me it’s integral to being a Quaker: we receive those promptings of love and truth in our hearts and we are therefore guided to change the world to try and match that vision. Our church takes that work and offers it to the world as our gift.
One particular thing Friends have talked to us about is the shift in resourcing towards local development workers. QPSW staff are drawn from all kinds of traditions, which is one way we stay open to new light. That won’t be true of the LDWs.
I don’t think it’s a case of, if you put more into this, you get less of that. If you put more into local development work you get more of everything, because the principle of it is that it tries to release the energy that is there in Meetings. That might be to engage internally with their own community, or to engage externally with the world around them. What I saw happening in Meetings when I did a lot of visiting was a whole lot of things that were nearly happening but for want of advice or energy, or a bit of connection and networking, never really got off the ground. Lots of Friends were feeling quite thwarted and frustrated, or taking their witness off and doing it in completely unconnected organisations. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, you’ll find Quakers all over the place who are really active in a different organisation, like with food banks. But a local development worker might work with a Meeting to help them think about how they could engage with food poverty if there wasn’t a food bank in their area. So I don’t think we have to nationalise everything and make it part of our central stuff for it to really enrich Quaker witness in the world.
During the riots in 2012 someone came up to me and said ‘What’s Friends House doing about these dreadful riots?’ and I thought, well, that’s the wrong question. It could be ‘What can I do?’ or ‘What can we as a Quaker community do?’ but the idea that you can just outsource Quaker witness to somebody else is fundamentally at odds with our understanding of where witness comes from. But we sometimes get ‘Somebody should do something’ minutes, or an Area Meeting gets totally exercised about something but doesn’t know how to engage with it. In a lot of Meetings there just isn’t the energy or the critical mass, and that’s where I see local development work really helping. Friends need to be helped to see that the energy on some things is in a different place, and that you can work through other organisations.
Take one of our key priorities: creating a sustainable and peaceful world. Yearly Meeting and Meeting for Sufferings are both talking about how anti-racism feeds into that. But it doesn’t necessarily mean we need a new department to work on anti-racism, it means we have to use anti-racism as a lens through which to look. So something works its way into Quaker work because we are listening to what the Yearly Meeting says – it is the opportunity for Friends to come along and guide the work that’s done in their name.
Friends have asked us about just that. You and I can agree that anti-racist work is essential but there are Friends out there who say that the concern for it hasn’t come from Meetings, it’s come top down. To me, it’s the appropriate thing for the recording clerk to say ‘You haven’t thought about this and you need to’. Is there a time when you or the trustees have to say, even if there isn’t a groundswell from Meetings, ‘This is a thing we have to discuss’?
I think anti-racism has been around in the Society as something that Friends have wanted to discuss, so I don’t think it came top down at all. It hasn’t necessarily come up through the official channels of an Area Meeting sending a minute to Meeting for Sufferings, but I’m not sure issues around diversity are going to come through that route because Area Meetings and Meeting for Sufferings aren’t the inclusive bodies they would need to be for that concern to flourish. So we have to listen to a wider body of Friends than just the representative structures when we know those structures are imperfect. I also think the focus on anti-racism was driven by things going on outside the Society – the appalling murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests. You can’t just ignore those things and say, well, we haven’t had an Area Meeting minute about it so we’re not going to discuss it. Quakers want us to be in the world, they want us to be relevant, they want us to respond to the issues that are going on in society. There was a real sense of trying to speak out. But one of the things we came to realise in responding to the Black Lives Matter movement was that as a Society we haven’t got nearly as much to say as we think we have, because the last time any of the senior bodies had talked about racism was decades ago, and that was a bit embarrassing really – certainly for staff, particularly staff with BAME heritage, there was a sense that surely the Quakers, this group we’ve come to work for who are passionate about equality and social justice, surely they’ve got something to say on this? So I don’t think you can just not respond and I was relieved when some of the bodies wanted to have time on their agendas to do that. Yearly Meeting Agenda Committee was very clear that this had to be an issue for Yearly Meeting and they don’t get that from me, they get it from listening to committees and Friends on the bench. The same went for the shift that’s happened from us talking about sustainability – which has been the language we’ve used since 2011 – to the minute we made at YM this year which is about centring the voices of the people most affected by climate change and trying to shift resources and attitudes in the west to support them. So these things kind of simmer along in the Society and every now and again pop out and get agenda time, but they don’t come from nowhere, or from me.
However coherent and holistic we try to be, inevitably there’s going to be a some differences between the recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting and Paul Parker the person. When you talked to that person about the riots I’m sure that the response you gave them was not the one you might have given were you free of the role…
Yes, it’s a real tension. I mean, I can’t write personal letters to the Friend. I’ve sometimes considered writing them under a pseudonym but that wouldn’t feel like it had integrity! You know, part of being a Quaker is that we stand by what we say and I’m realistic that my voice will be heard as the voice of Britain Yearly Meeting rather than the voice of Paul Parker from Saffron Walden. That goes beyond Quaker space – I don’t write letters to The Guardian either and I’m acutely conscious that I can only say things publicly that I’ve got some kind of mandate to say from Friends. I’m pretty clear that there’s a whole lot of issues I don’t speak out on because as Quakers we don’t have a position. We don’t have a position for example on abortion, so if there’s a big debate going on among the churches about abortion (which there almost always is) I don’t join in with it because Quakers don’t have a united view on it. Assisted dying would be another example.
I’m very grateful to my own Meeting, which is the one place I can go and be a Quaker on the bench. I can turn up there in my gardening shoes and people don’t think ‘The recording clerk is looking a bit scruffy today’. They just say ‘Hello Paul’ because I always turn up like that. It matters to me that there is a place I can go and be me. I’d miss that if it went because I need to be able to go and worship somewhere. It’s the same for local development workers: they need to have their place where they just get to be an ordinary Quaker again, and not a BYM staff member who’s going to help with everything and has to be an expert on everything.
I’ve never felt I’ve been put in a position where I’ve had to speak publicly on something where I felt personally very conflicted, but that could happen. I could be sent to a meeting with other churches or other organisations to defend the Quaker position and it would be very hard if I didn’t agree with that. But because our processes of reaching unity work, and because I am a participant in those processes, I get to say ‘Quakers want this’ with absolute certainty that I’m speaking for our whole community. That happened with same-sex marriage, where I met people who had to maintain their church’s position even though they personally disagreed. Our process of uniting is an enormously powerful thing that most other organisations don’t have. If you talk to some other churches they’ll say, ‘Well, officially we’re here and there’s a whole bunch of us who really want this but that group over there, they’re against it, and they’re campaigning, and at the moment they’ve got the numbers in the decision-making body’. We don’t have any of those issues because of our business method.
So you don’t have to suffer like our vicar friends who struggle with their church’s official position. But in some ways that might make the tensions worse because you’re expected to be at unity with everything. If Paul Parker is scruffier than the recording clerk, what else might make him different?
I don’t know, because this job kind of takes over your identity, rather. It’s not impossible to imagine a scenario where I think ‘I just can’t stand here and say these things’, and I’m clear that at that point my personal choice has to be to stop doing it. But that hasn’t happened. We talked last time about how working out what I believe has been a constant process of exploration, but I don’t think it’s helpful for me to say very much about where I end up theologically because the Yearly Meeting needs to work out for itself where we want to be. I hope we end up in a position where I get to stay part of it, but ultimately as a community we work this stuff out together and I’m more committed to that than I am to having some kind of individual voice. Our discipline is that you come prepared, and you come prepared to be changed and that’s okay with me. That doesn’t mean I haven’t got principles and beliefs – but the views of people who think what I think do get heard.
It’s probably a psychologically good process for all of us to think past what we personally believe. But what might you write about to the Friend if you could?
I’m not sure there’d be anything terribly shocking. Perhaps, to those Friends who worry about the trustee process, I might want to say ‘Would you just trust people a bit better please?’. Lots of us are conditioned to think that what we think matters, and has to be heard by somebody, but that’s quite a privileged standpoint. Most people in the world… their view matters but it doesn’t get heard. So I do sometimes want to say ‘If you’d stop saying what you think, we might be able to hear what everyone else thinks’, but that’s about process really. With good discipline people understand about holding back and waiting, and recognising that people with whom we disagree have also got an insight that we need to hear. I do worry about us ending up with a kind of Quaker groupthink that isn’t necessarily what we as a group think, but some people are just more confident at speaking within our structures. That’s one of the reasons that I have made it my business to go out and listen to Quakers in Local Meetings, because there are a whole lot of Friends whose voices don’t carry in the current way we do things.
We talked a little bit about resources insofar as it’s been a bad couple of years, but we’ve got a systemic issue too. We’re shrinking and there’s less money available than there once was. How do you see us moving forward with fewer resources, and fewer people? Can you be an optimist about it?
I was talking to a group of senior staff from a whole range of Quaker organisations the other day and the question came up about whether you have to be an optimist to lead a Quaker organisation. We all said yes, which was interesting. I am an optimist, and I am optimistic. I think Quakerism has got something really important and distinctive that matters, and there are people out there who need it. If we choose to do it, we can flourish and grow and include more people and transform people’s lives. It’s possible for that to happen. We need more Friends to believe that too, because we get preoccupied with numbers. The Tabular Statement is what it is: it’s been coasting gradually downwards for the last two or three decades – not at a huge rate, but you can’t lose one and a half percent a year every year forever. Eventually you get below a critical mass and things go wrong. But if we spend all our time talking about that… nobody wants to join a society which has decided it’s declining. So let’s not talk about decline; let’s not talk about how things end; let’s talk about what it would mean to give more people what I got. My life has been changed beyond all recognition by being a Quaker, in all sorts of ways. It would be incredibly selfish of me not to offer that experience to as many other people as possible. So as a Society we have to be visionary. If this is a transformative thing, then we’ve got to make sure it’s there for everybody who needs it. Of course you’ve got to look at all the obstacles, which can be hard graft and a bit depressing, but we’ve got to keep our eye on what George Fox and his colleagues saw: that you could be changed by this, transformed by it. We’ve got to hang on to that. I’m excited about the possibilities.
The pandemic has hit Meetings hard – it’s particularly hit traditional forms of Meeting hard – but out of it are coming all sorts of interesting things. Some of the local development workers set up a daily epilogue with a group of Friends who’ve been meeting ever since – daily, because what they’ve discovered is that they need a spiritual practice which involves a daily bit of inspiration and to worship together with other Quakers. We didn’t know that group of people was out there, and now we’ve got a new form of Quaker Meeting. What else is there like that? What other things are going to emerge online? What other things are going to emerge in this kind of funny hybrid space that we’re all exploring? What other things can happen in smaller groups? Non-geographically what’s going to happen? Nobody said Quaker Meeting has to stay the same all the time. If you went to a Quaker Meeting in the seventeenth century… bits of it are similar to now but a lot of it is different.
Is there anything you wish I’d asked you?
I’m not sure I’ve put across what a privilege it is to be asked by Quakers to do this work. It’s a heavy burden as well, but to be trusted to do this is an extraordinary feeling. The sense of support and upholding that comes from Friends is an extraordinary experience. Despite the difficult things we’ve talked about, the overwhelming experience is one of support. That’s a generous thing for a community to give to somebody.
Comments
I’m a bit confused as to what you are actually saying about the 1.5% decline every year as you then go onto say we shouldn’t talk about it. What will this look like in 10 or 15 years ? How do see our regional operations going ? Are you looking at the merging of small Meeting Houses to reduce overheads etc. Or, are you talking about changing some ways we operate to try to attract new members ? Thank you.
By davecartwright687@gmail.com on 28th February 2022 - 18:02
Quakers are so fortunate that Paul has been our clerk. I cannot read enough of his ideas and proposals for Quakers. Paul alerts Quakers again and again to our decline and Quakers must respond to this alarm. Of our only growing group of Quakers - Young Adult Quakers - Paul has said elsewhere that they Young Adult Quakers never stay with Quakers - an opportunity lost for Quakers everywhere. One new direction is simplicity - it took me years to realise how right this is - and that it is possible to have simplicity without loosing all the goodness of our output of social action and peace making. Britain Yearly Meeting faces the dilemma - do Quakers lead or wait for ideas from the ground level of local meetings. The dilemma is solved a more simpler Quakers with cohesion of all quaker bodies which because the output is simpler, avoids creating complexity and conflicts of interest, and still welcomes our independence all through Quakers. Britain Yearly Meeting should ask every Quaker body for a plan of simplification within twelve months, reflect and lock the best into guidance for the future. This issue should be big at every Yearly meeting until it is solved, not to do so, will be an opportunity lost. Paul is right - with our faith group “finding God in ourselves and those around us, committed to equality and peace” we should go Whoosh. I think we, Quakers everywhere are holding Britain Yearly Meeting back. We need to be open, equal and peaceful with ourselves as well as with the world. Quakers the alarm bell is ringing, Britain Yearly Meeting please respond. Some leadership that delivers cohesion leads to more delivery and effectiveness and if simplified will retain independence for all simplified bodies. best wishes David Fish Rugby and Coventry local meetings
By davidfishcf@msn.com on 15th March 2022 - 8:27
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