Yearly Meeting 2023: Session 1 - Opening session

4 May 2023 | by Rebecca Hardy, Elinor Smallman, Joseph Jones

‘Whatever we call the divine principle, we know that it’s a living one.’

The 2023 clerking table | Photo: courtesy Mike Pinches for BYM

More than 1,500 Friends had registered to attend Yearly Meeting (YM) 2023, said incoming clerk Adwoa Burnley in its Opening Session (down from almost 2,000 in 2022). It would be the fourth time YM was enabling online attendance, and more than half of those registered intended to join that way. It was unlikely that all those Friends would attend every session, however: on this Friday night, The Light at Friends House was around one-third full.

Everyone present should feel a full part of the Meeting, said Adwoa, but this was going to require discipline, compassion and patience. Whether attending for the first time or the fiftieth, every Friend brought something important. One or two pieces of ministry could make a big difference.

After a period of worship without vocal ministry, the clerks went through some of the practicalities of discipline in a large Meeting. These would be familiar to many, said Adwoa, but 240 Friends were attending YM for the first time. Waiting to give ministry was not like standing in a queue, she reminded them.

Speaking to the Yearly Meeting Agenda Committee (YMAC) report, first assistant clerk Fred Langridge said its members had felt a clear leading towards a focus on truth and integrity. The theme was ‘How can we release our energy to follow the leadings of the spirit? How can our organisation’s structures best support what God calls us to do?’ But the world kept turning, he said, four months on from the writing of the report. YMAC doesn’t direct Friends, the Spirit does: ‘None of us yet knows what happens at Yearly Meeting 2023’.

Members from the eldership team, wearing purple sashes, told Friends they were there to offer ‘a ministry of presence to the whole Meeting’ – it was a ‘joyful endeavour’. ‘Speak as led’, they told Friends, ‘but please be brief’. The pastoral care team were also on hand to offer a ‘listening and loving ear’.

The opening session of YM is often a procedural affair, with approval needed on long lists of committee nominees. But this was important business, said Mary Aiston, second assistant clerk, and was a good opportunity to practice ‘how we do business’. Mercifully, the work was completed with a brisk efficiency. It included the approval of the next clerk to Britain Yearly Meeting trustees: Marisa Johnson, of Cambridgeshire Area Meeting.

This was a good time for Rosie Carnall, co-clerk to the committee working on the revision of our book of discipline, to update the Meeting on its work. Friends are excited by the revision, and attention went up a notch. Rosie reminded Friends that it had asked the committee to be ‘prayerful, joyful, creative and bold’. Members sought to follow that request in everything they did. They hadn’t gone as far as dropping ‘God’ from the book, as had been suggested might be the case in a Guardian article, but they were considering what language best described Quaker faith and practices. In the past, all kinds of terms had been used for ‘the divine principle’, said Rosie: Light, Christ, Seed, or, as Friends were amused to be reminded, ‘the leaven that transforms the lump of humanity.’ ‘What are the words in your heart?’, she asked.

The committee had been asked to first consider the book’s approach to nominations, and marriage. The results have been disseminated among Friends, some of whom have already offered their responses. Rosie was grateful for these, but noted that some were contradictory. How were Friends going to manage this? ‘With your help, we have faith that we can find a way.’

Friends were grateful for the work. In the following worship, one acknowledged the difficulty of finding a common language in a Society that contains a diversity of views. They suggested that George Fox’s advice on the gospels – that to understand them one had to enter the spirit of the people who wrote them – might be pertinent.

‘Whatever we call the divine principle,’ said another, ‘we know that it’s a living one, and that comes through in our faith.’

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