The making of a minute: Jane Mace, part of the eldership team, reflects on Yearly Meeting Gathering

‘This process of collective composition will always be the fascination of the Quaker approach to decision-making.’

This year’s Yearly Meeting (YM)was unlike any before it, yet it was completely grounded in all the old principles. As a Gathering, there was much more going on than in the standard YM programme – and while non-residential in one sense, Friends were very much residential, just in our own homes, separate.

I was fortunate to be able to participate in all eleven plenary sessions, and to join in a good few others. To relive the experience for this article I had my notes, the two issues of the Friend that covered the event (August 6 & 13), and the minutes available online.1

These minutes, in total, were forty-seven in number, of which three were major: the product of the plenary sessions. This article focusses on just one of these, and the process of its production – because, for me, that process of collective composition will always be the fascination of the Quaker approach to decision-making. 

Quaker minute-writing on this scale has five phases: 

First there is a preface on the topic in the form of insights from another Friend or Meeting. Second, a reframing of the problem or question to be considered. Third a summary of our work on the topic so far. Offering this summary to the Meeting, the clerk might say: ‘The matter is before you, Friends’. This is the time for the fourth, central phase, when Friends exercise worship, discernment and ministry. We listen to the clerk reading drafts of their minute, and there is a to-and-fro between further contributions from the Meeting and redrafts of the minute from the clerking table. The aim is to enable meaning to grow and for ideas to be clarified. This continues until phase five when, after one more reading of one more draft, the Meeting accepts it. (It is good enough. There is unity).

We are familiar with this, Friends. It’s how we do things. To help you imagine (or recall) how it felt to be part of that process in the Gathering of some 513 Friends on Zoom, I offer this short poem: 

Together, unmasked, muted before our screens.
remembering to name ourselves in worship,
we look around at the seated rows of others.

It’s not the old way, for certain. It’s another route,
but the old way persists. We try to obey,
allowing the proper pause after spoken endings.

‘Follow the guidance’ says the screen. ‘If clerks
need to work on a minute, please
do not raise your hand.’  But still, each time
some cannot resist. 

This is the story of the making of Minute 17 from this year’s YM proceedings. It relates to one of the three big topics of the event: ‘Anti-racism – our Quaker journey’. The process it entailed is that which needed the ‘guidance’ quoted in the last verse. The hand we had to raise was a symbol on our Zoom profiles, raised with the click of a button to indicate our wish to be called by the clerk. It was an electronic version of our practice of standing up to wait for the clerk’s call for individuals to speak. At this YMG, the guidance was not always easy for some Friends to remember. Hands were up on many screens while clerks still had their heads bent on the drafting work.

The process for working on this particular minute went like this: Phase one: after a reading from Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s most recent epistle, there was a contribution from two invited speakers from Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. Then a member of the Agenda Committee introduced a background to the topic, reminding us of Meeting for Sufferings’ 1988 ‘Statement of intent on racism’.

Phase two: the clerk restated the challenge expressed in the epistle from 2020 Britain Yearly Meeting, which had led to this item being on our agenda. As she put it, tackling systemic racism was now a ‘spiritual imperative to which we are called to commit’.

Phase three: before this plenary session, there had been three workshops on the theme, which included accounts of ‘doing our anti-racist work’ and a lecture on white privilege and racism. In offering a draft summary of this preparative work to the meeting, the clerk then said: ‘That minute is before you, Friends. Are we ready to commit?’.

Then came phase four.  Bear in mind that over five hundred Friends were present at this session. We had started at 2.30 and were due to close at 4pm. By now it was past four o’clock. In answer to the clerk, contributions from four Friends were called in turn. The clerk then offered back a development of the draft minute. One by one, we heard five more contributions. After a pause, while we upheld her doing some more writing, she read another amended draft, and asked: ‘Is this acceptable now?’ More hands went up on individual screens. This time the assistant clerk addressed the Meeting: ‘Please test your ministry before putting up your hand to speak. We are running out of time.’ The clerk allowed just one last contribution, paused, wrote, looked up, read out the result and asked: ‘Is that acceptable?’. 

We had reached phase five.

Some other time I’d love to share with you the use made of those ten contributions in the finished draft.  For now, I just want to celebrate the extraordinary care given in our disciplines to this way of collective, worshipful authorship, and invite you to read the published result as if you were hearing it, as we did, read aloud to us by the clerk that day. You can do this with the finished minute whole, online1, or try it out on this extract:

‘Around our Yearly Meeting Friends have been hearing and acting on a call to tackle systemic racial injustice… Our testimonies to equality and truth demand that we engage in a drive towards real change, turning our declared intentions into reality…

‘Preparatory events at this Gathering have given us time to reflect on Quaker responses to racism… As a Religious Society we are still failing to live up to our Testimony on Equality and we have been deeply moved by honest ministry about these failings. There is white privilege in our community, and there is work to do…

‘We declare our commitment to becoming an actively anti-racist faith community. We are still wrestling with what this means for us. We have work to do and will return to this.’
For me, the experience of living through the making of this minute took my breath away. Hearing the clerk read the words aloud made me feel the ‘declaration’ had come not from us, but through us. Meeting over, I had to leave the room and the laptop, go out of the house where this virtual gathering had taken place, and stride up the hill for some air.

This discipline of collective authorship always raises questions in my mind – and even more so when it comes to our practice of composing and reading an Epistle. To do this, Yearly Meeting appoints a committee which produces a draft text to be read out for acceptance at the last session of proceedings. It is sent out to our national community of Friends and other Yearly Meetings in the weeks that follow. This year, Friends at the Gathering submitted no less than ninety contributions to the Epistle committee as they worked to produce it. The resulting text is not short. As you read it, I invite you to imagine the voices that came together in its creation. The question it gives me is this: what place does my understanding of God have in its production? 2

1 Available at https://quaker.org.uk/ym
2 For the full text of the Epistle, see the Friend, 13 August

Jane is the author of God and Decision-making: A Quaker approach.

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Comments

If someone stands to amend a minute in the Large Meeting House, it is easy to sense the atmosphere of the rest of the meeting, that we hope the minute is acceptable. It is much harder on Zoom, where those who raise their hands are put to the top of the first screen and of the participants’ list, and the small videos shown with the speaker view.

By Abigail Maxwell on 2nd September 2021 - 9:42

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