I attended today’s late ‘supplementary’ session of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) - www.quaker.org.uk/ym - which is effectively the AGM of Quakers in Britain. This year, BYM took place as usual in April but - unusually - there was an extra day added on, which was today.
2022 audited accounts still not ready
The main reason for holding today’s late supplementary meeting was because fully audited accounts were not ready by the scheduled BYM date in late April. With many apologies and a reassurance that nothing funny was going on, the BYM trustees announced today that the accounts were still not ready but they would be ready in time for the Charity Commission deadline on 31 October. The question arises, why wasn’t today’s supplementary meeting scheduled for a date when fully audited accounts would be ready?
Tabular statement of men and women and ‘other’
The other main item on today's agenda was the ‘tabular
statement’, which is Quakerspeak for the annual statistical report of how
many Quakers and attenders and children there currently are in Quaker meetings all
around the country. The headline is that membership sadly continues to decline,
as does membership of most other churches in Britain (evangelical Christian ones
being broadly the exception). Quaker membership in 2022 was 11,491 (a decrease of 337
from 11,828 in 2021), and the number of recorded adult attenders was 6,262 (a
decrease of 217 from 6,479 in 2021).
Following the presentation of the tabular statement by Paul
Parker, the Recording Clerk, I was able to ask a question. I referred to the
table on page 6, which is the one that breaks the totals down into categories of
age and sex and whether someone is a member or attender.
In 2015, a third category was added to the tabular statement
next to the columns for men and women, namely the ‘other’ column. Looking down
this column I noted that it is mainly populated by zeroes, ones, twos or threes,
which gives the impression that it is a rather arbitrary hit-and-miss affair. Only
in one instance is there a figure of 20 or more: Essex and Sussex Area has 20
‘other’ attenders (along with one ‘other’ member). I am, by the way, based in
Essex and I have no idea who they are.
I believe that the data in the 2022 tabular statement (and
the other seven since 2015) demonstrate that the experiment in recording people
in the ‘other’ category has led to misleading, incomplete and inaccurate data. I
suggested to the Britain Yearly Meeting session that gender and sex are two
different things and it is time to stop conflating them, and that BYM would do
well to go back to classifying people as men and women on the basis of their
sex and also include an extra new category of gender so that people can
categorise themselves as various different genders as well if they wish.
Paul Parker, the Recording Clerk, responded thus:
“With respect to the ‘other’ column, we heard a very clear call a few years ago that there were Friends who did not identify as either men or women and, after some consultation, we decided that the best way to reflect that was to have a column called ‘other’. I know some membership clerks have found it difficult to gather the information, as to what to put in there and I think at this sort of early stage of it, it is to be expected those numbers will be both low and possibly not 100 per cent accurate. I think it is very important also to stress that this Yearly Meeting made a minute in 2021, about welcoming and affirming transgender and gender non-conforming people. I know from talking to people about the tabular statement how important it is to them that this column exists as a way for them to be seen in our statistics. There is an explanation about that on page 4 of the document.”
Then there was ministry from Anne Wade of London West Meeting
who said: “I hope we can include Robbie's point that it would be more truthful
to include both sex and gender in the tabular statements in future.”
But nothing came of this, as I will now explain.
The ‘Quaker Business Method’ which is employed at BYM and
other Quaker Meetings for Business for Worship is that the matters are decided
(or ‘discerned’ in Quakerspeak) not by a vote but by the clerk (Quakerspeak for
the person who is chairing the meeting) recording the spirit of the meeting: this
is a kind of consensus that takes account of people’s views and especially the strength
of those views. So it's not one person : one vote. It is the spirit of the
meeting as guided by God and as interpreted by the clerk, based on what has
been said in ministry and how strongly those views have been expressed and
agreed or disagreed with. When the clerk feels that he or she has got the sense
of the meeting on an issue, he or she drafts and presents a Minute for approval
by the meeting on the spot.
In small Quaker Meetings for Business for Worship (like the
ones I have attended in Colchester with about a dozen other Quakers), I believe
it’s possible and likely that the clerk can indeed give everyone who wants to
speak the chance to be heard and then accurately discern the sense of the
meeting - without of course taking a vote.
But in a meeting like the BYM today, it's anyone’s guess whether
the clerk can truly discern any such thing. There were 240 Friends present on Zoom
and over 100 more in the large meeting room at Friends House in Euston Road. On
each matter for discernment there was only a limited time for a handful of
people to give their ‘ministry’ (Quakerspeak for arguments for or against).
The clerking and minuting at BYM today were in the hands of
the Clerk, Adwoa Burnley of East Scotland AM, and her Assistant Clerks, Fred
Langridge of Sheffield & Balby AM and Mary Aiston of Kingston &
Wandsworth AM. I think they - and probably all the other BYM clerks before them
- have an impossible task.
I never before been to such a big Quaker business meeting as BYM. What
I noticed was that sometimes when someone spoke in ministry on a point the
minute was amended in line with what they said and sometimes it wasn't. From my
perspective in the Zoom room, I could not tell if a particular ministry had the
support of the general multitude or not. Nobody on Zoom was using their Reaction
tools to express a view on a piece of ministry either way. I suspect that many
of them did not know how to use their Reaction tools. Or maybe Zoom Reaction tools
are Unquakerly.
I had even less idea about the feeling in the large meeting
room at Friends House. How the clerks could discern anything from the Zoom room
is beyond my understanding. So either they just based their reading on the large
meeting room or it was a lottery combined with their personal leaning on the
matter in hand.
Anyway, when it came to revising the Minute in the light of Anne
Wade’s comment and mine on sex and gender, Adwoa Burnley said: “We are not
minded to add the thoughts raised on gender as well as sex columns, in the
minute. We recognise that there's
ongoing work following our minute from last year and I hope that is good with
Friends.”
So I thought, oh well, let’s leave it at that – and I
thought everyone else had too … until the closing ministry for the entire day,
which came from Alison Braydon from Wirral in Cheshire who ministered thus:
“I have tried really hard not to stand to say this … it just feels really very important to me to challenge something that was said earlier in our Meeting. We had a very clear Minute about inclusion and welcome for trans and non-binary Friends. Some of the language that I heard earlier I think just needs to be challenged openly. Trans and non-binary Friends are welcome: you are not odd, you are not funny and the categories that make you feel safe are not odd or funny either. …Thank you.”
Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) Sat 1 July 2023
Immediately following BYM there was an ‘open session’ of MfS.
MfS
is effectively the steering group or executive committee of BYM. It has a quaint
old Quakerly name. In terms of power and responsibility, it has been somewhat
displaced by the BYM
board of trustees. That change was wrought by the Charities Act 2011,
which compelled all charities, including Quaker Meetings, to change their
governance and put boards of trustees in charge.
In their Ent-like
way, Quakers have not really got up to speed with this change yet, as you can
tell from viewing the page www.quaker.org.uk/our-organisation/our-structures
which barely mentions the trustees.
Back to today’s MfS, it was an open session, which is unusual,
as most sessions are closed. Like BYM it was blended: in person in the large
meeting room at Friends House and on Zoom. Here is the moment when I mentioned
Sex Matters to Quakers (SMtQ) in the MfS open session:
Robert Card, Clerk:
We are blessed in Yearly Meeting with a wide variety of witness and work. Friends with common interests find ways to collaborate and work together and where formal groups are set up, they can apply to be accepted by the Yearly Meeting as a Quaker Recognised Body - informally a QRB.
That application process comes to us here at Meeting for Sufferings for approval. We have two applications before us, as well as a re-registration of three existing Quaker Recognised Bodies. That is paper 3, pages 12 to 15 of your documents … I will offer you a Draft Minute on this. ‘We agree to register the following two bodies as Quaker Recognised Bodies for period of two years: Friends of Pardshaw Quaker Centre and Peaceworks Zimbabwe PWZ. The following Quaker Recognised Bodies have been reviewed and we agree to renew them: Quaker Bolivia Link, Quaker International Educational Trust and Quaker Rainbow.’ Are those acceptable, Friends?
Robbie from Dorset and South Wilts AM:
I’m concerned to see you will be renewing the Quaker Rainbow QRB. I'm in a group called Sex Matters to Quakers that has been trying to get onto the Meeting for Sufferings agenda for about two years but we have been subject to a whole load of obstacles from people like Michael Booth in terms of giving us ever such a lot of micro scrutiny of our application and I just want to tell you that I find it quite deplorable that you have such double standards for recognising or approving people's applications to be a Quaker Recognised Body.
Robert Card, Clerk:
Friends, I don't think that it is something we can resolve here. But I'm minded to say, if Friends are happy to accept the registration of the bodies already put forward, that we go forward with that and allow that that voice has been heard and we will continue to work on that one outside of the meeting is that acceptable friends.
Meeting: Hope so. (Quakerspeak for 'Yes'.)
Use of pronouns at BYM and MfS
There were about 240 friends in the online BYM Zoom room. We
had all been asked to amend our names to include our local and/or area meeting
name. Many people did so. As far as I could see, only three people amended
their names to include their pronouns. Moreover, two of them were at Woodbrooke
and one of them was a Quaker Life Local Development Officer: in other words,
they all appeared to be paid staff, which suggests that it was office policy rather
than virtue-signalling that made them put their pronouns in.
In the afternoon MfS open session, it was a similar story: roughly
200 in the Zoom room and only two with pronouns: one was a co-clerk of Young
Friends General Meeting and the other was on Quaker Life (another of the
central Quaker committees).
In other words, no-one among the ordinary grass-roots
Quakers was bothering to announce their pronouns.
Annual report and financial statement to 31 December 2021
As the 2022 accounts were not ready, I had a look at the previous
year’s financial statement. Here are a couple of notes.
9b. The number of BYM (full-time equivalent) employees in
2021 was 140 and dropped in 2022 to 106.
9e. Remuneration and benefits received by key management
personnel
The Recording Clerk acts as Chief Executive and earned a
salary of £89,056. Salaries for other key management personnel ranged between
£66,130 and £80,835. They are: Deputy Recording Clerk; Head of Witness and
Worship; Head of Operations; and Head of Finance and Resources. The total
remuneration received by the five key managers was £387k (an increase of £45k
from the 2020 total of £342k, or a thirteen per cent wage rise).
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