Yearly Meeting Gathering 2009

At a Yearly Meeting Gathering held in York from 25th July to 1st August 2009

“Our life is love and peace and tenderness, and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another, but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand”.
Isaac Penington

Dealing tenderly with one another is to trust each other, to listen first, is to return to the centring place offered by silence, and to know at all times that it is through working together that way will open. In Yearly Meeting Gathering, as we have worked together, we have been grounded in our worship as a community. Making time for stillness lays the foundation on which all else has been built.

At this Gathering we have had the opportunity to seek God’s will together. This collective dimension to our decision-making is unique and precious. Our business process rests on the belief that the gathered meeting is upheld by those who are not present, and that decisions taken reflect the discernment of the Society of Friends as a whole.

Nearing the end of this Yearly Meeting Gathering 2009, we hope we have created a diverse and varied community of all ages, a community which has upheld and affirmed Friends in their concerns, which has been engaged corporately and individually in creating community, and creating connections, as well as the business of the Yearly Meeting.

Though you may be sad to leave tomorrow, we hope you will be glad you came, and will take the spirit of the Gathering with you. The community we have created at Yearly Meeting Gathering is of necessity a transient one, but the connections created here can live on as we return to our daily lives and our local meetings, small and large.

We acknowledge that our community has experienced tensions and frustrations as well as joys and enrichment. We may not all have felt included, heard or looked after. Some of us will have found the week overwhelming, exhausting, or dispiriting, or not have had our expectations met. But, as a spiritual community, we know that learning is a path, and not a possession. For us, this event has been a step along our pathway, living and learning together, in and from this rich community.

Here at this event, we have all been called to serve, and serve willingly. Between us, we have had all the gifts that this service has required. We have woven the threads of the Yearly Meeting Gathering, with humour, felicity and grace. We have had times of laughter, lightness and relaxation, as we have faced the challenges and opportunities of the event.

There has been much wisdom, humour and compassion in this Gathering, and what have emerged are ways for us to live together in community. As we leave the Yearly Meeting Gathering, we take these experiences with us.

Paul Parker & Lizz Roe, co-clerks

Quakers in Britain today concluded a long and profound process of discernment about the way forward for Quaker marriage and approach to same sex partnerships.

The minute recording the decision is as follows:

Minute 25, Britain Yearly Meeting 31 July 2009

Further to minute 17, a session was held on Tuesday afternoon at which speakers shared personal experiences of the celebration and recognition of their committed relationships. These Friends had felt upheld by their meetings in these relationships but regretted that whereas there was a clear, visible path to celebration and recognition for opposite sex couples, the options available for couples of the same sex were not clear and could vary widely between meetings. Friends who feel theirs to be an ordinary and private rather than an exotic and public relationship have had to be visible pioneers to get their relationship acknowledged and recorded.

This open sharing of personal experience has moved us  and added to our clear sense that, 22 years after the prospect was first raised at Meeting for Sufferings we are being led to treat same sex committed relationships in the same way as opposite sex marriages, reaffirming our central insight that marriage is the Lord’s work and we are but witnesses. The question of legal recognition by the state is secondary.

We therefore ask Meeting for Sufferings to take steps to put this leading into practice and to arrange for a draft revision of the relevant sections of Quaker faith and practice, so that same sex marriages can be prepared, celebrated, witnessed, recorded and reported to the state, as opposite sex marriages are. We also ask Meeting for Sufferings to engage with our governments to seek a change in the relevant laws so that same sex marriages notified in this way can be recognised as legally valid, without further process, in the same way as opposite sex marriages celebrated in our meetings. We will not at this time require our registering officers to act contrary to the law, but understand that the law does not preclude them from playing a central role in the celebration and recording of same sex marriages.

We have heard dissenting voices during the threshing process which has led to us this decision, and we have been reminded of the need for tenderness to those who are not with us who will find this change difficult. We also need to remember, including in our revision of Quaker faith and practice, those Friends who live singly, whether or not by choice.

We will need to explain our decision to other Christian bodies, other faith communities, and, indeed to other Yearly Meetings, and pray for a continuing loving dialogue, even with those who might disagree strongly with what we affirm as our discernment of God’s will for us at this time.

Following the decision, Martin Ward, clerk of Quakers Yearly Meeting said: “This minute is the result of a long period of consultation and what we call “threshing” in our local meetings, culminating in two gathered sessions of our Yearly Meeting. At these sessions, according to practice, we heard ministry arising out of silent worship which led us to discern the will of God for the Religious Society and record it in this minute.”

Britain Yearly Meeting – the organisational body of Quakers in Britain

Yearly Meeting in Session – the annual general meeting of the organisation, at which all members are entitled to attend – similar to the Church of England General Synod

Meeting for Sufferings – the interim executive committee of the Yearly Meeting, empowered to act and take decisions in between Yearly Meetings, and also do detailed work in smaller sub-committees

Clerk – the chairperson of a Quaker business meeting, who senses the will of the meeting and records that will in a minute.

Ministry – Quaker meetings for worship and for decision making are based on silence, out of which spoken ministry is offered by participants as they feel moved to.

Quaker faith and practice – the constitutional ‘governing document’ for Quakers in Britain containing procedures for such as Marriages and Funerals, the explanations of the organisation’s structure, and statements on faith.

Other background information

Quakers are known formally as The Religious Society of Friends.

Quakers were given the right to conduct marriages in England and Wales in 1753, but case law before that recognised the validity of Quaker marriages.

Quakers began to call for a sexual morality based on the worth of relationships in 1963 with the publication of ‘Towards a Quaker view of Sex’. Since then, Quakers have developed through tolerance to widespread acceptance of same sex partnerships, particularly since the formation of the now Quaker Lesbian and Gay Fellowship in 1973. Meeting for Sufferings minuted appreciation of gay and lesbian Quakers’ contribution in 1988.

There was no formal stage of ‘recognising’ same sex partnerships nationally as Quaker procedures allowed it to happen: there was nothing against it. The first meetings for commitment were in 1996. Since then, around twenty local meetings have celebrated same sex relationships through an official meeting for commitment.

Following the Civil Partnership Act of December 2005, same sex couples in England, Wales and Scotland, who share Quaker beliefs may opt for a blessing or commitment ceremony after entering a civil partnership.

The Civil Partnership Act allows same sex partnerships to be registered as civil partnerships in law, but such registrations cannot take place in the context of religious worship. Civil partnership is not recognised as marriage, although registered civil partners share almost the same legal rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples.

The total number of civil partnerships formed in the UK since the Civil Partnership Act came in December 2005 is 26,787. (Office for National Statistics)

More news from British Quakers at quaker.org.uk/news-releases

Quakers today will consider asking government to change the law to treat same sex partnerships in the same way as straight marriages.

For more information and for interviews contact Anne van Staveren on 07958 009 703
and see www.quaker.org.uk/partner

• Gerry Millar went on the Coast & Cliffs Walk
• Clare Scott Booth on the mid-point of the Gathering
• Les Hereward prepared for the committed relationships consideration session, as did stagbeetle63
• Gil Skidmore reflects on the management of and participation in large gatherings
• A few reactions to the Swarthmore Lecture
• Miranda Chadkirk interviews simon gray, Hank, and another Friend
• John Ironside took pictures of his home group
• William Heath has a confession to make…

• stagbeetle63 sends a postcard from York and has been experiencing generosity & grace
• Jez Smith compares the Gathering with both Big Brother and Centre Parcs!
• Swarthmore Lecture reviewed
• Colin Billett lets his hair down
• Gerry Millar likes the York wildlife
• Caddir went on a narrowboat trip, and didn’t make it to epilogue

Here’s our daily round-up of what we know about has been blogged elsewhere:

• Jez Smith looked forward to Tuesday
• Miranda Chadkirk explains the chatrooms
• Ekklesia report on the opening of our consideration of Committed Relationships and also on the Salter Lecture
• Gil Skidmore slows down
• Les Hereward rounds up his Tuesday
• Caddir is en-joy-ing herself!
• Jez Smith on Discerning the Quaker way
• Judy Kirby was in the Committed Relationships session
• …as was Miranda Chadkirk