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Discovering the obvious
Rebellious spirits within an organisation can help to give it a cutting edge against the rest of the world but their critical attention when directed inwards is often regarded as a disturbance of the peace and may be stigmatised as scaremongering. The Society of Friends is endowed with at least its fair share of these suspect characters. I suspect myself to be one of them at times. They (we) can help in the testing, clarifying and refinement of new issues. In less impatient days scruples about changes in policy and practice used to be dignified with the phrase “a stop in the mind”.

Criticism of the new trustee body for centrally managed work and the resulting status of Meeting for Sufferings rumbles on. Much of it seems to me to have revealed an underlying theme; an uneasiness about duality and divisiveness. I want to try to articulate this spectre as clearly as possible.

One form of the anxiety is that the executive (Trustees), while performing a vital and onerous function, will operate somewhat independently from the representative body; both will be accountable only to Yearly Meeting in parallel fashion. A variant of this fear is that the stage may be being set for a revival of the old geographical distrust between 'London' and 'local Friends'. Hence the felt need for a bridge, which it would be convenient if Meeting for Sufferings were somehow to provide.

Furthermore, even though trustees will attend Meeting for Sufferings, a class distinction is likely to exist. Shades of George Orwell's 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others'?

And even further: in offering to a disempowered Meeting for Sufferings the enhanced and distinct role as seeker of vision would we thereby be prising apart faith and works, a possibility deeply antipathetical to Quakerism as we have known it? 'For faith apart from works is dead.' (James 2:26) The death knell, then, equally of Meeting for Sufferings and the 'pre-modernised' Quakerism. Perhaps before long the disintegration of the Society.

Scaremongering? With or without foundation?

Have you ever had the experience of finding something you had lost exactly where it ought to be, where you looked first but didn't see it? Well, on reading again Minute 20 of YM 2006 it doesn't say Trustees will attend Meeting for Sufferings it says they will be members of it.

We have perhaps been mesmerised by the new trustee body to the extent of overlooking the place of trustees within the whole. To borrow the words of Tim Brown (8 September) '...Arriving at the true sense of the Meeting requires the commitment of all those present, as well as sensitive clerking. ....When a decision has been made in a gathered, seeking Meeting for Business, that decision belongs to everyone present and not present, and should be accepted by all.'

I also find inspiration and guidance in the metaphore of the crucible, applied in Min. 20 to the future Meeting for Sufferings. I understand one function of a crucible is to seperate precious metal from dross. Another is that when the ingredients are carefully chosen they become fused into an alloy stronger and more serviceable than the original elements. Meetings for Worship, including those for Business, can and often do cause both of these effects to be wrought upon us.

Hence trustees will not merely be answerable to Meeting for Sufferings, but morally and spiritually an integral part of it and it part of them, whatever the constitutional legalities and pseudo-legalities.

Among its future roles I envisage Meeting for Sufferings as a flagship of
the Quaker business method. If it succeeds in this, fears (both healthy
and unhealthy) will surely recede.

'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be
well.' (Julian of Norwich)

Roger Sanderson, Notts & Derby MM


 


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