Structures and the Spirit

Beth Allen writes about a historical change in the administration of Quaker Meeting houses in London and the end of Six Weeks Meeting

My small Local Meeting, like most others, gathers a varied collection of worshippers: a peace campaigner, a financier, a physiotherapist, a street pastor, the chair of a local housing association, a teacher and others. Each Sunday the living depth of our stillness gathers, lightens and heals our concerns, our failures and successes; as we separate, the silence flows into our weekday lives, into the nursery which uses our building, and into other faith and local groups which hire our rooms.

We are just one Meeting among forty in London – of which thirty-four have Meeting houses. We gather as individuals, to sit in the living flow of the stillness, and we also meet as an organised body. Like other Meetings, we ask ourselves: ‘What is our Meeting’s ministry? Does our organisation channel the flow of quietness, does it enable our activity outside Quakerdom, does it support us, or does it drain us? Is our Meeting house a gift or a burden? What organisational and physical structures help us to walk cheerfully over today’s world?’

Working together

Friends have always worked together across the metropolis in some structured way. George Fox set up the Monthly (now Area) Meetings, and the Six Weeks Meet-ing, to enable Friends to think together about the city’s needs. Area Meeting boundaries changed, Meetings sprang up or were laid down as the city grew, and Friends moved to the suburbs and beyond.

Six Weeks Meeting 350 years later had developed into a body appointed by all the Area Meetings that looks after London’s thirty-four Meeting houses and burial grounds. A small paid staff run the organisation and plan regular inspections of properties. As more Meetings and Area Meetings begin to pay bookkeepers and building administrators, local Friends need more expert advice on staffing, pensions, insurance and all the rest.

Six Weeks Meeting has been working with the Area Meetings to find an appropriate structure for London Meetings in the twenty-first century, and on 1 January 2017 Six Weeks Meeting became London Quakers Property Trust (LQPT).

We had to register as a charity, like other Quaker bodies, as we own property with an insurance rebuild value of nearly £30 million and an unquantifiable sale value of two or three times that figure. We decided to simultaneously become a company limited by guarantee, so that the trustees as individuals were protected. Accordingly, we are primarily a charity, but also a company.

Pooling funds

The core purpose of LQPT is exactly the same as that of Six Weeks Meeting – to care for, repair and maintain the Meeting houses and to provide for worship. We pool our funds, so that the financially stronger Meetings support the weaker ones, and our method, unchanged since George Fox’s time, is to think together about providing places for Quaker worship for forty Meetings of different sizes, across London, ranging from Westminster, with 100 members and a hundred attenders, seventy-five on a Sunday morning, to Orpington, where four Friends meet in one member’s sitting room.

In the new company structure, each of the seven Area Meetings in London is a member of the company, and is represented by the Area Meeting clerk of trustees. The existing Six Weeks Meeting trustees are now the company’s board, responsible to the members, the Area Meetings, and, therefore, more clearly accountable to all Friends in London.

Quakers in London can now work together in a coherent and organised way. Personally, I find that this increased sense that ‘we are all in it together’ reconciles me to the loss of the historic name of Six Weeks Meeting. Also, the new name describes our function better to the rest of the world. Sometime in the first half of 2017 we will meet for the first time as the members, the board, and all interested London Quakers.

We are working towards a method of thinking strategically together, and we find that we are filling an unforeseen structural gap. When London Yearly Meeting laid down Quarterly Meetings in 1967 few of us realised that we would no longer have regional bodies with the authority to bring Meetings and Area Meetings together to support each other, to look imaginatively at our shared needs in a changed situation, and then – the essential element – to agree on action together.

Could our changes in London be helpful to Friends in other regions in Britain Yearly Meeting? Would Area Meetings elsewhere benefit from getting together to pool expertise on finances, buildings, insurance and employment? London’s solution will not work in exactly the same way elsewhere, because different regions have different strengths and needs; what suits the physically close Friends in London might not help the widely-separated Meetings in Lincolnshire.

Scottish Friends know how to connect over huge distances, and hold Business Meetings by phone conference and Skype. Friends in the 1652 country, with so many historic Meeting houses, have particular advantages and problems. Some regions – Wales, or Devon and Cornwall – are well defined, while others – the Midlands – are not. Historically, Quaker business groupings were organised around travel routes; nowadays, communication is more electronic than physical, but we can surely find our natural groupings.

Risk and gain

For varied reasons, there are fewer of us these days to sustain the organisational structure we have inherited, and we can all see the indicators of strain – nominations committees struggle, Area Meetings can’t find clerks, older Friends feel duty-bound to maintain tired-looking buildings created when membership numbers were higher. It would be useful to know if other parts of Britain Yearly Meeting are also beginning to employ staff locally to do much of what we used to do voluntarily.

Is this a good way forward? What do we risk, and what do we gain? Yes, we have lots of attenders, we have lots of interested newcomers; however, they come for the deep stillness, not for the sometimes tedious activity. One attender, asked to consider membership, replied: ‘No – if I join, I will be put on a committee.’ We do outreach for the sake of those we speak to, not to feed the Quaker machine.

In the London Quakers Property Trust we will do our best to ensure that Friends across London are enabled by this new structure to talk over and implement any necessary changes to our organisation and buildings, so that our worship deepens, our buildings inspire us and others who use them, and our Meetings continue to develop as cheerful and attractive communities, joyfully witnessing to Quaker testimonies and values.

The springs of life

As we’ve worked on our new structures in London, I’ve often gone back to the words of William Braithwaite, in Quaker faith & practice 10.04:

The life of a religious society consists in something more than the body of principles it professes and the outer garments of organisation which it wears. These things have their own importance: they embody the society to the world, and protect it from the chance and change of circumstance; but the springs of life lie deeper, and often escape recognition. They are to be found in the vital union of the members of the society with God and with one another, a union which allows the free flowing through the society of the spiritual life which is its strength.

The outer garments of our organisation need renewing so that they are appropriate for today; but the springs of our shared inner life are timeless.

Beth is clerk of the London Quakers Property Trust.

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Six Weeks Meeting

‘Six Weeks Meeting, dating back to 1671, does not fit neatly into the modern pattern of Area Meetings, General Meetings and gatherings. It is made up of representatives from the Area Meetings within the London region. Its main objective is to maintain, preserve and insure the places of worship of the constituent Area Meetings, and their contents. It is accountable to the constituent Meetings for the stewardship of the funds and assets it holds on their behalf.’

Quaker faith & practice 15.09

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