Other matters?
Simon Risley reflects on what wasn’t considered at Yearly Meeting
I do not think I was the only person to have found the Yearly Meeting agenda a trifle surprising. Apart from the necessary business of Yearly Meeting (appointments, trustee and committee reports, Epistles and so forth), there was really only one item under consideration: the revision of our Book of Discipline.
This is a ‘once in a generation’ job and one could reasonably expect it to go relatively smoothly. Granted, it wasn’t just the usual patching but a much more full-scale matter. However, why did this subject occupy almost the whole of Yearly Meeting? A Friend whom I greatly respect told me that she thought that it was considered ‘very deeply and prayerfully’. It was. Nonetheless, my question still stands: does it take almost the entire duration of Yearly Meeting to consider such a matter deeply and prayerfully to the exclusion of other pressing business?
And what could that other pressing business possibly be? Let me take you back to the longest item on the agenda at Meeting for Sufferings held on 7 April at Friends House in London: the report from the Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) Sustainability Group – involving some of the most impassioned language that I have ever heard at Sufferings. There was a recommendation, not taken up, that the Sustainability Group appointed by Sufferings be laid down.
Laurie Michaelis, a member of the BYM Sustainability Group, told us that, following from ‘Minute 36 Our Canterbury commitment’, made at Yearly Meeting Gathering at Canterbury in 2011, climate change is ‘…the biggest thing that we’ve ever had to deal with – and why are we recommending that the Group be laid down?’
The Group’s clerk, Lis Burch, who was clerk of Yearly Meeting at Canterbury in 2011, castigated the lack of staff and financial support for such groups, explaining: ‘Our main problem is that we sit outside the central structures – and this is outrageous! Our organisation and its structures outrank working groups!’ Then, referring to the several failed attempts to set up effective mechanisms to address sustainability over the last seven years, she added: ‘It’s shocking that the staff and structures seem unable to get beyond preliminary exploration of what is a commitment of Britain Yearly Meeting and the whole Society.’
She then explained: ‘Many of the problems that we have are in our structures – and we need to review them. If over seven years we cannot meet our commitments due to our structures, then we need to have a very good look at those structures. If you try something five times and fail, then there’s something profoundly wrong with the structure!’
The fact that it was a former Yearly Meeting clerk who said all of the above might, in itself, give us pause for thought that the real elephant in the room is the viability of our current ways of working. So, why was this not addressed at all at Yearly Meeting? No talk of sustainability. Not a whisper as to whether the way our committees work is any longer fit for purpose. It could be argued that this matter was too recent to include in BYM documentation; or that the agenda had been prepared long before Meeting for Sufferings in April; or that such a serious matter merits more lengthy consideration.
But I don’t buy it. Apart from an entirely nominal sliver of ‘as led’ at the tail end of the last session, there was no opportunity for this matter to be raised at all. Moreover, given the flexibility to alter the agenda during session, I believe – had the will been there – that time could perfectly well have been made to do so: even if only for this whole matter to be laid down as a marker for next Yearly Meeting; or for Sufferings to consider in the interim. But nothing happened. Not so much as a peep. Such subjects are difficult and sometimes extremely painful, but we should at least steel ourselves to raise them.
Though, perhaps, I shouldn’t worry. There are Friends who certainly will.
