Yearly Meeting 2023: Session 6 - Required business; as led

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

‘We are seeking changes that could reduce friction and release energy within our corporate structures’.

One Friend, in his first YM, said he found himself ‘baffled, and at the same time utterly in love’. | Photo: © Mike Pinches, for BYM

It was clear in Session Six that Friends had been processing overnight. In opening worship, participants recognised that BYM trustees were hard-working and dedicated, and that their service had not always been easy. ‘Trustees are our Friends’ said one, ‘and we are grateful for them’. ‘Great is their contribution’, said another.

One activist Friend, who’d been catching up with other climate activists overnight, said there had been a number of comments about how the YM was navel-gazing. He didn’t believe that was right. In the ‘polycrisis’ of the world – a reference to Rupert Reed’s Salter lecture – what Friends did now had existential implications. If there was to be a human future, Quaker structures needed to be ‘agile, open, conscious’ and ‘able to cope with what comes up’. They were the model used by many activist groups, and perhaps now the learning could go the other way.

The Meeting then heard the testimony to the grace of God as shown in the life of Peter Frank Fox, perhaps the first conscientious objector in South Africa.

The clerk then noted that, because of the extra time needed for discernment on structures, the receipt of the Tabular Statement would have to be moved to the new July session. This was a disappointment to many, who are keen to address the decline in numbers it outlines. But the issue of the relationship between MfS and BYM trustees needed addressing. ‘We have heard that we want to be more sustainable and have structures and approaches that will last us well in to the future’, said Mary Aiston, one of the assistant clerks. ‘These ambitions are difficult to deliver without some change.’ She is a civil servant. ‘We have a term that says, “Can we draft our way out of this?”… what I’m saying this morning, Friends, is, we cannot draft our way out of the friction’.

One Friend restarted the discernment by speaking of our structures as being like a water course, in which small springs – Local Meetings – merged to form a river. But the flow wasn’t running properly, she said, and so wanted change.

A member of MfS, and former clerk to BYM trustees, also had a nature metaphor. Gardeners, she said, spent a lot of time identifying what was wrong with a garden even as visitors were enjoying it. She hoped Friends could take the time to consider successes. Gardens required time, and so did Friends. The most dangerous thing to do was to keep lifting a plant to see if its roots were alright.

Another Friend said too much time was being spent pointing fingers. ‘We need to trust our discernment that we have asked the right people to do that job,’ he said. Then, a former trustee said that trustees’ discernment was ‘very real, very based in the Spirit’, the deepest she had known among Friends.

Someone from the group appointed to review MfS returned to the gardening theme, pointing out that the group had been asked to inspect the roots. They had, and thought some things were wrong. Sometimes gardeners needed to get out the secateurs.

After a shuffle break, Sarah Donaldson, from the same group, was asked to offer some more information about the history of its work. She said it had found ‘widespread’ confusion about what different bodies do, or should be, and how they might be relevant to the life of an individual Quaker.  It also heard that there were significant problems in the flow between these bodies.
Responding, one Friend said ‘I’m bad at change… I hope if I am ready to change, other people can accept the need to.’

Online, one Friend talked about how Area Meetings – once Monthly Meetings – were no longer the central focus of many Friends’ lives. Change is inevitable, she said, ‘But it does not need to be feared.’ While others had been thinking about gardens, she’d been thinking about music. ‘If we practise and practise and practise, and if we know when to come in and when to be silent… we will be making beautiful music.’

Another Friend thought that the conversation raised by last year’s Swarthmore Lecture, about diversity and inclusion, had all but disappeared. If it was to be more than a tick-box exercise, the stirrings in Local Meetings needed to reach BYM. ‘And somehow it is not doing that.’

One minister talked of a sleepless night. He had become clear that MfS ought to be quite different. With this, the clerks suggested they might be hearing unity. Were they right? One Friend, in his first YM, said he found himself ‘baffled, and at the same time utterly in love’. Trustees had said that the current structures were preventing radical action. ‘We should trust them’, he said. It was enough. The minute read: ‘We are seeking changes that could reduce friction and release energy within our corporate structures’.

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