Reviews in Business Meeting of the State of the Meeting report below, from those assembled: "Beautifully written" x about 5
Review from RantWoman: excellent, high-quality happy talk and twaddle. Not only is there barely any room for disability or difficulty or the next chapter of a long history, there is not even room for pain and challenge hanging silently on a clothesline. WHAT kind of wimpy divine presence are we talking about anyway?
The text after the authors and Business Meeting declined not only the extensive edits RantWoman previously proposed
http://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-meeting-as-stated.html but the two items she reiterated in Business Meeting, one about disabilities and difficulty, and one about marriage equality, imperfect as the WA measure is without federal changes.
State of the Meeting Report (April 2013)
University Friends Meeting
Our worship this year has been rich and balanced. Our meetinghouse hums with life: in addition to two First Day meetings for worship and midweek worship, our Social Hall is rented out most nights, a preschool thrives on our ground floor, and 20 homeless individuals find shelter in our worship room each night. At Quaker House, we welcome both travelers and six new social service Fellows each year through our QuEST program. This year we’ve had three new adult members, two new junior members, two transfers to other meetings, and three deaths of members: Rich Beyer, Bill Hanson, and Frances Hain. It has now been a few years since our Year of Discernment, a process many of us found to be quite enriching and strengthening, and this year we ask where the clarity we found that year might again serve as a way to reset our compass.
One question that weighs on us is how to respond to some members’ feelings that we are overcommitted or overstretched. With our numerous committees, care committees, two buildings to maintain, and a full roster of staff positions, some members wish for a greater lightness in our Society’s step. Are we attempting too much? Are our tasks and roles the right ones? Do we work in simplicity and Light? At a threshing session on this topic, a suggestion emerged that we might try a drastic winter pruning—cutting back on the number and size of our committees and endeavors, and from that cleared space, seeing what structural needs emerged. We wait to take action until we are clear we fully understand the challenges faced by staff, member/attender-volunteers, and staff support.
We have been quite clear in our commitment to properly welcoming and supporting our youngest attenders. To this end, in addition to our permanent preschool teacher, who is in her second year of working with our infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, we’ve hired two permanent First Day teachers, who provide regular programming for our elementary-aged children. (RantWoman is unsure of the precise wording re Junior Friends). A group of Junior Friends from our Meeting and South Seattle Friends Meeting meets the first week of each month. We gather quarterly with young families at our meeting and South Seattle Friends Meeting, in order to grow our community and to share our experiences of raising children within the Quaker faith.
Our worship community includes survivors of sexual abuse as well as sexual offenders. We hold this balance carefully and with deliberate transparency. From this attention has grown a set of policies and practices geared towards the safety of our children.
At our fall community-building retreat, we considered how our worship nurtures our community. We are a large meeting, and there are many ways members and attenders find their home here: in play with our children, in connection to the homeless individuals sheltering with us who lead us to consider the plight of the homeless across our city, through the dozen individual care committees that allow us to focus our Light, through attention to the act of ministry in all its guises, by reaching out to the QuEST Fellows whose service work inspires us, enjoying each others’ company at Light Lunch, engaging in collective social action and political advocacy, tending to the native plants that surround our meeting house, and by greeting with open and attentive hearts the newcomers and old-timers with whom we meet for worship.
