Page 6 - Edition Summer 22 News and Views revised 31.05.pub (Read-Only)

Letter to dear F(f)riends Stephen Feltham

Dear F(f)riends,

The main point of my letter is to seek out the joy within our community.

The January Area meeting for business was not deemed to be comfortable by many in
attendance. But I say, “We do not attend meeting in order to be comfortable, we attend to
discern the will of God on the matters before us.” Nonetheless some left the meeting feeling
fraught and discontent. I say “Why? In what way has the will of God upset us? Is it because you
felt God was not present or because you had forgotten s/he should be?”

WIFM or “What’s in it for me” is a question often posed outside of Quakers, but I have never
seen it addressed either directly or indirectly within our Society. In a time of diminishing
membership numbers, I believe we are overlooking the basic needs of our members. I see that
we do attract a few enquirers and often they become regular attenders, but a good proportion do
not feel led to become full members. There may be very individual and particular reasons for
this, but I believe there must be a pattern somewhere, a discernible trend that is within us to
address.

There is no doubt that there is a paucity of folk willing to take on the various jobs within our
meetings. I question if this is because folk just don’t want the hassle and the resulting air of
negativity associated with service to meetings. Serious business meetings are not the places for
song, dance and laughter, so no joy there, but to leave a business forum and enter another and
be presented with the woes, miseries, injustices, inequalities and wrongs of the world that we
must address can leave one in a very dark place. We need joy as much as our skin needs
sunshine and the vitamin D it brings.

At risk of being misjudged here I must assert that each of us wants something out of Quakers. It
seems a bit of an anathema to have said it, for one’s primary reason for joining our Society
would not on the face of it be selfish. I don’t say that it is, but I do say that we each hope for
some sort of a return on our loyalty and membership. I suspect that many are not getting it and I
worry that too many remain just out of habit. Quakers harp on about equality but what equality is
there between members and the quaker institution? What is given is time, effort, money and all
sorts of service but what does the institution give in return? I know there are some intangibles
but joy is not amongst them.

Our membership declines mostly because folk die off, but others leave because convincement is
no longer there. Others go because of a spat or irreconcilable differences with another person.
And yet QF&P has many wise words to address these situations but sadly, they have failed to hit
the spot on so many occasions.

During a period of thirty years, I have travelled the world and l looked after hundreds of
organisations. I have seen much grow from tiny start-ups into large businesses employing
thousands. I have seen some fail sometimes through bad luck and sometimes through bad
management, but ‘management’ is just another term for behaviour, and it is behaviour that

6