Yearly Meeting 2024: Preparation - part fourteen
The Friend’s reports from Yearly Meeting preparation sessions and special interest meetings continues
A Yearly Meeting (YM) preparation session on Building and maintaining our Yearly Meeting community was hosted by Yearly Meeting Agenda Committee and the Group to Review Yearly Meeting, Yearly Meeting Gathering and Meeting for Sufferings (GRYYM).
Seventy-six Friends were welcomed by Ann Kerr, of GRYYM, who also led the section of the Meeting that looked at ‘Continuing work on our structures’, a YM document available online. This outlines a proposal for YM to meet throughout the year, taking over much of the role of Meeting for Sufferings.
Though keen not to overlap with the exploratory sessions planned for YM at the end of July (one of which will be in person and the other online only), Ann and other members of GRYYM opened for questions. Among other things, Friends expressed: concern about Area Meeting (AM) representation in the new proposals; how residential YMs or Yearly Meeting Gatherings would work in the new system; ensuring there is enough time for discernment within the new structure; and the involvement of children and young people.
GRYYM representatives went through the proposed AM representation, and assured Friends that residential YMs would be possible – but only called when YM felt there was a need.
The proposed involvement of children and young people was warmly welcomed.
One Friend highlighted that, if someone is already actively engaged in Quaker work, the new proposals would add four YM Business Meetings to a calendar that already includes eleven Local Business Meetings and four Area Meetings. Lesley Richards, of GRYYM, went on to express the hope that having trustees report to the YM four times a year would improve the understanding of accountability, and simplicity.
Ann Kerr read from Quaker faith & practice 10.11 and 10.03, and shared an image created by Scottish Friends to describe their life together. It had three wings – witness, community, and housekeeping – all bound together in worship.
In breakout rooms Friends considered some questions: What gives you a sense of belonging and strengthens your community? What structures and disciplines help us to achieve this? What does the sense of community contribute to our discernment in a Business Meeting?
One Friend was left ‘a bit befogged’ and struggling to understand why ‘wide reaching measures’ were needed rather than adjustments.
Another reflected that ‘any consideration of changes to structures should have as its purpose the aim of increasing the flow of love, between people, and between groups’.
Finally, one expressed the hope that ‘if the changes are agreed it will make our Yearly Meeting more of a community – [it] will strengthen us… because more of us will be able to join in those decision-making Meetings and discernments’.
Writing by: Lis Burch, a trustee of the Friend; Rebecca Hardy, journalist at the Friend; Imi Hills, a freelancer from West Weald Meeting; Joseph Jones, editor of the Friend; Alastair Reid, a trustee of the Friend; and Elinor Smallman, production manager at the Friend.
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