Burlington Quarterly Meeting of The Religious Society Of Friends
Ninth Month 4th 2004
 Burlington Minute On Restoring Place of Quarters

Burlington Quarterly Meeting is united in prayerfully proposing that the Quarterly Meetings be restored to their historic rightly ordered position in the structure and governance of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The Monthly Meeting, Quarterly Meeting, and Yearly Meeting structure was first established in the 17th century by George Fox, Margaret Fell, and others whose spiritual and organizational genius can continue to serve Friends well in the 21st century.

We consider the Yearly Meeting to be the approximately 12,000 Friends who are members of 104 Monthly Meetings, which are organized into 13 Quarterly Meetings. These Friends meet annually (or more often as need arises) in a Yearly Meeting to share in Divine worship, Blessed fellowship, and the conduct of business under Divine Guidance. The Yearly Meeting appoints committees and employs staff to carry out the work to which Friends have felt led by the Inner Light.

Unfortunately, the term Yearly Meeting in the minds of many Friends has erroneously come to mean the Yearly Meeting staff and committees. Consequently, at the grass roots level there has developed a we and them mentality resulting in a disconnect and even alienation and distrust between local Friends and the Yearly Meeting staff and committees. Even more unfortunate is a real, if invalid, perception on the part of many Friends that an inner circle runs the Yearly Meeting and that some decisions are pre-arranged or reached outside the sense of the Meeting. We consider all of this to be life-threatening to the spiritual health and good order of our religious society.

None of the above is meant to be a criticism of the hard-working Yearly Meeting staff and committees whose dedicated service we value and appreciate.

We are in unity with the comments in the Fifth Month session of Interim Meeting about the role of the Quarterly Meetings concerning the appointment of members to the Meeting on Worship and Ministry and concerning the forwarding of minutes to Interim Meeting. However, we note that Yearly Meeting staff and committees all too often by-pass the Quarterly Meetings, particularly in regards to the covenants with Yearly Meeting, which are rightly ordered between the Quarterly Meetings and the Yearly Meeting. We further note the absence of the Quarterly Meeting sign in books at the last sessions of Yearly Meeting. We regret that the Yearly Meeting attendance information, later collated by the Yearly Meeting staff, was sent to the regional staff but not to the Quarterly Meeting clerks. We also note that all the Quarterly Meeting clerks and times and places for Quarterly Meetings are not listed on the Yearly Meeting website.

We are united in recommending the following actions be taken as the first steps in restoring the Quarterly Meetings to their rightly ordered place in the structure of the Yearly Meeting:

We view the Yearly Meeting as a living organism; and, as with all organisms, if an organ is restrained and not used or exercised, it will atrophy and become vestigial. On the other hand, if an organ is used, exercised, and nourished, it will flourish and contribute to the health of the whole (I Corinthians:12). We find it paradoxical that the Quarterly Meetings are nourished by the Yearly Meeting in the financing of Regional Staff, but that the Quarterly Meetings are not rightly used or exercised according to the good order of Friends in the governance of the Yearly Meeting.

After prayerful consideration and discernment, we respectfully and humbly offer the following suggestions for Friends prayerful consideration and discernment to help restore the Quarterly Meetings to their historic and rightly ordered place in the structure and governance of the Yearly Meeting, which can, in turn, help restore the good order and spiritual health of our religious society:

We further prayerfully urge that the Yearly Meeting staff and committees be referred to as the Yearly Meeting Central Office or by their individual names or titles, and that great tenderness and care be taken that the term Yearly Meeting be reserved solely for the collective membership of the Yearly Meeting and the annual and called sessions of those Friends.

We ask that this minute be read in Interim Meeting, recorded in its minutes, distributed to the members of Interim Meeting, and forwarded to all Monthly Meetings. We ask that all consideration of this minute be laid over until the next session of Interim Meeting to give Friends time for prayerful contemplation and discernment.

Harold Jernigan, Clerk
Burlington Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
Ninth Month 12th, 2004