*Meeting for Sufferings*

6 February 2021

Henry S. Thompson, SE Scotland AM representative

All the papers for the meeting are available online at

  https://www.quaker.org.uk/documents/mfs-2021-02-agenda--papers-package

The minutes and other follow-up material are available from

  https://www.quaker.org.uk/documents/meeting-for-sufferings-minutes-follow-up-2021-02

*Report by the Recording Clerk on tabular statement for 2019*

Paul Parker gave an excellent illustrated presentation on the changes
for Britain Yearly Meeting in the numbers of members, attenders, etc.

It's worth noting that the data reported on is all pre-pandemic...

He started with a graph of the whole trajectory of membership from the
late 19th century onward. This showed that we are down by more than half
from our peak in the mid-20th century, to 12,498 in 2019.

There was a net loss of 200 members for the year.

There are 70 Area Meetings, made up of 470 Local Meetings, so one new
member net in every local meeting next year would stop the fall.

Since 2009:
  22% of Local Meetings have grown by 10% or more 
  54% of Local Meetings have shrunk by 10% or more

10% of our Meetings have over 50 members, and account for about 1/3 of
our membership.

Small meetings are more likely to be growing than large meetings.

More than half the meetings which are losing membership are largish,
that is, with 20 or more members.

The national patterns are often seen within individual Area Meetings
[true for SESAM, I think]

Paul pointed out that a simple consequence of the numbers is that
approximately "One in 20 Quakers has to be a Treasurer".

If you're interested in reviewing the numbers yourself, they're online
in the Tabular Statement summary at
https://www.quaker.org.uk/documents/tabular-statement-2019-for-ym-2020,
which also includes one of the graphs from the Recording Clerk's
presentation to Sufferings, which is not available online (yet, it is promised).
His commentary for his presentation at Yearly Meeting in December
2020 _is_ available online:
https://www.quaker.org.uk/documents/tabular-statement-plain-text

There was some comment on the likely effect of GDPR-induced culling,
which our Area Meeting certainly experienced.  I noted that we show
_twice_ as many 'terminations' as deaths between 2009 and 2019, in big
contrast to the other Scottish AMs.  BYM itself shows 50% _more_
deaths than terminations.

*Report from Trustees*

The financial situation is not great, but we're not in serious trouble
yet.  There were 35 voluntary redundancies, with the result that no
non-voluntary redundancies were needed.  The vast majority were from
the Quiet Company, which has been hard-hit.

*Reflections on the past year*

We spent time in small groups sharing our Meetings' experiences since
March, drawing some comfort in hearing that most Meetings seem to be
coping, and have coped in similar kinds of successful and
not-so-successful ways.

There's a website at FWCC that offers online Meetings for Worship
around the world, mostly but not entirely from Europe and the US:

  http://fwcc.world/kinds-of-friends/online-worship