Yearly Meeting 2023: Session 5 - Looking at Meeting for Sufferings

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

'This ministry seemed to move the Meeting… but not quite to unity.'

As Sunday afternoon’s Session Five opened in worship, one Friend lamented the way people had been talking about committee work in Saturday’s session. ‘One of the things that gave me greatest joy was being on Children and Young People’s Committee… I am really was saddened by the way committees [have become] very onerous, and I hope that in reviewing the committee structure, we can look forward to it with joy.’

Another Friend, who’d been involved with the Extinction Rebellion march on the previous weekend, was, like Australia Yearly Meeting, in search of the Society’s radical roots. She wanted to celebrate the Quakers who had organised to march: ‘We need to really hear the people who are doing things already, and celebrate the people that are doing things already, and build on those things.’

More international Friends were welcomed, and the Meeting then heard an extract from the testimony to the grace of God in the life of Bridget Robson. Bridget ‘had a lot of courage. The word comes from the Latin corps for heart and she was rooted in her heart, her capacity for love’.

The session was due to discuss Meeting for Sufferings (MfS), but first the clerks wanted to address some ‘unease’ over Saturday’s session on central committees. ‘We made mistakes on how we framed the questions… In seeking to avoid directing the Yearly Meeting from the table, which I care so deeply about, we didn’t give you enough information to enable clear discernment.’ More time would be given on Sunday to consider any further guidance for trustees.

Robert Card, clerk to MfS, then gave a report on its year of work. Blended Meetings did allow for good discernment, he said, but perhaps not for community building. Robert talked of the work done in the Society that had reported to MfS, from the book of discipline revision to advocacy in Scotland, but ended with how it had reflected on Ukraine, and how Friends could contribute: ‘We are not necessarily called to be amazing. We are called to be faithful.’

The Meeting then heard from Chris Skidmore, from the group appointed to review MfS. The process had identified ‘concerns, particularly from current and recent members, about the pressure of business, and how this did not help in promoting spirit-led discernment.’ These concerns called for changes, he said, with an emphasis on the relationship between MfS and BYM trustees. Trustees were set up to be accountable to the Yearly Meeting in session, while MfS was tasked with making decisions on behalf of Yearly Meeting between sessions. The review group identified this as a source of friction: the two bodies are both answerable to Yearly Meeting, but there are no lines of clear accountability between them.

There were three ways of dealing with this, said Chris: to move MfS down in the structure, acknowledging that it is most useful as a consultive body to BYM trustees; or to move Meeting for Sufferings up in the structure, to become a continuing Yearly Meeting. Trustees would then be accountable to that continuing Yearly Meeting, and would have to consult it on issues of vision and strategic direction. The alternative to these changes would be to retain the current structure but to seek clarity on the bodies’ relative powers, so that there is no overlap. Did Friends agree that ‘avoidance of friction between BYM trustees and MfS could release energy within our corporate structures’ and allow for more diverse participation?’

Friction could be good, said one Friend, ‘particularly if you do not want to go down a slippery slope.’ Which kind was this?

Caroline Nursey, clerk to BYM trustees said that, while she and Margaret Bryan, outgoing clerk of MfS, had enjoyed working together, they rather felt that they did so against the structures that are there. The friction was of the kind where, if you didn’t keep pouring in oil, something might overheat. She gave the example of the local development worker programme, the expansion of which, she said, had been ‘rapturously’ approved by Mfs in 2019. Yet six months later a new set of Mfs representatives was asking why they hadn’t been consulted.

The answer to the question, then, was simple to one Friend: ‘It sounds as though the friction is really unhelpful, and we want rid of it.’ But another was ‘really scared’ of what was being suggested. She believed that it had not been necessary to grant trustees such responsibilities (‘let me use the word power’) in the first place. ‘I don’t know where we are going but I don’t like it.’ One Friend did not agree with this assessment: ‘The spirit may move in all sorts of ways in the future, but I don’t feel there is any sense that structural change should mean moving away from our practice of spiritual, of collective, discernment, gathered in the spirit.’

Clearly, at that point the clerks could not hear unity, and called for more ministry. One Friend then noted that ‘We do not necessarily have executives in Quakers, we are all the decision makers… Our trustees are the least inclusive group.’ But another Friend, who had been in a key role when trustees were appointed in 2006, talked of the difficulties of managing compliance without them. Another Friend asked whether the friction, or the removal of it, had any potential impact on staff. This led to Paul Parker, recording clerk, offering some reflections. Managing BYM through the pandemic would have been much more difficult without trustees, he said. The parallel structure gave credence to the idea of a separation between the charity, for which trustees were responsible, and the church, for which MfS was responsible. ‘It can be difficult to work out, really, who is supposed to decide what’, he said. Paul then talked about the composition of MfS, which lacked young people, in the context of a desire to increase diversity. ‘To help us be the community we want to be and struggle to be, and to make the difference we want to make, I think we have to find a structure which makes that a bit easier. Because I do not know what else to try Friends, from here.’

This ministry seemed to move the Meeting… but not quite to unity. After a period of silent worship, the clerks agreed to adjourn the matter to Monday morning.

Read the rest of our full coverage of Yearly Meeting here:

You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.