Letters - 16 October 2026
'In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.'
Community standards
Friends who post comments on thefriend.org are deemed to have consented to our community standards, which can be found in our Terms & Conditions. Please familiarise yourself with these ten simple guidelines so that we can keep thefriend.org a safe, respectful and inclusive platform for discussion.
Comments breaching these standards will be removed, and persistent breaching of these standards will result in the comment facility on the letters page being suspended.
Membership
I was very pleased to read Beth Allen’s article in the Friend (‘Re:members’, 2 October). To coin a phrase, ‘that Friend speaks my mind’.
I have been thinking about this for a number of years, and have not gotten around to formulating my opinion, or finding the right time to minister at Yearly Meeting. So I would like to offer this contribution to the discussion.
I think we confuse two things under the heading ‘Membership’: first, membership of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), and second, membership of our other Meetings, which is to say those that are Local, Area, regional/Wales/Scotland, or the Quaker Recognised Bodies (QRBs), etc.
My suggestion might be that we should separate the two.
I like Beth’s comparisons with the National Trust and political parties. I took this one step further to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), where membership gives entry to its gardens as well as a long list of partner gardens. This seems very similar to our situation.
BYM is a membership charity and I suggest that is one sort of membership comparable to the RHS. The reason is that we have the right to attend Yearly Meeting, and that is confirmed by us having to register to attend sessions of that gathering, as we do now, and in return either receive a Zoom link or a lanyard with a badge with our name and Meeting on it. That is the way it is checked. So anyone can apply for membership and the reason for doing so would be, as Beth suggests, to support its ethos – that is, those things currently ‘tested’ by our visitors.
The other sort of membership would be very similar to the one that we have now. I mean to say that as attenders at a Local Meeting, individuals can and could apply for membership to our Area Meeting as now, or, if that does not work for any particular individual, we could apply for membership of our regional/national Meeting (in my case Cymar which is in itself a registered charity governed by trustees and members). The same applies to Quakers in Scotland or London, to Young Friends, or to any QRB. We would look to these bodies to provide the pastoral care mentioned by Beth.
The recording of all these members would be by the body granting the membership to inform the record-keeping person at Friends House as now, for the Tabular Statement.
So there would be two reciprocating memberships. By becoming a member of Britain Yearly Meeting we would have the right to membership of other Quaker bodies, and if we become a member of another Quaker body that would give us the right to membership of Britain Yearly Meeting.
That seems to me to be a very uncomplicated and straightforward way for us to proceed.
Peter Rivers
Localism
I suspect Jan Arriens meant something very different to what I mean by localism when he talked of ‘toxic localism’ in his article (‘Solidarity and survival’, 2 October). He quotes Rowan Williams as saying that these qualities of solidarity and togetherness are the way ahead in an increasingly precarious world, but the problem, Jan says, is how to get there, and how can this way of thinking be embedded?
Well, it won’t be just by talking, wishing and hoping for it. Nor will it be by creating ideas of a moral framework such as he quotes from the Quaker Truth & Integrity Group, or indeed advocating a spiritual basis based on solidarity and connectedness. What is needed is practical and radical fundamental change in economic patterns (which is almost never mentioned in these discussions) and in subsequent societal outcomes.
The point is that this does mean localisation – communities coming together by sharing their actual needs, rather than those required by the globalised economy (the very reason everything is teetering on the edge). And the ‘bonus’ is that people just do respond to actual and practical sharing by developing solidarity and togetherness. It is but human.
Andrew Sterling
