Paul Parker marks ten years with BYM
Recording clerk recalls Quaker landmarks spanning a decade.
Quaker Paul Parker has written about his first decade as recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) in an article on the Quakers in Britain website. Recalling ten Quaker landmarks, starting with the 2011 Canterbury Commitment – when Yearly Meeting committed ‘to become a low-carbon, sustainable community’ – he mentions milestones such as the Sixth World Conference of Friends in 2012 in Kenya, and the opening of The Light in Friends House in 2015.
Describing 2020 as the year Quakers went digital, other key moments include the 2013 decision to become the first church to divest from fossil fuels, and the first same-sex marriages in 2014, ‘built on five years of work to get the law to match Quakers’ 2009 decision’. He also mentions the 2016 Heritage project with Historic England; the 2017 Yearly Meeting Minute at Warwick ‘to examine our own diversity’; the start of revising Quaker faith & practice in 2018; and the first commitment to local development workers in 2019.
