view Sufferings/2021-04-10/notes.txt @ 546:f1d9fe20dc91

for AM 18/9
author Henry S Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
date Wed, 18 Sep 2024 15:11:27 +0100
parents 794ad2765a03
children
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Important initiative to put the matter of the relationship between BYM
the charity and AM charities.  There's a request from BYMT to AMT to
feed back to them about this [ref. Agenda paper].  Online meetings
planned for May.  Heading towards an MoU between BYMT and AM Trustees,
by the end of 2021.

Note that Wales is actually going ahead with a merger at the Charity
level!

Assisted dying: Deep sense of worship and care in the meeting

control of the body; we don't have a settled view;
unravelling the tangled web around how we die in this country is not
best started by pulling on the end labelled "legalise assisted dying"

Punt [with support for palliative care and the Hospice movement]

'Overseers' and 'Elders' -- AM encouraged to experiment with
alternatives both to names and to the structure itself.

Yearly Meeting Gathering 2021:  Booking information coming soon, bookings open
in June
  AM to be ask facilitate opportunities for fellowship, f2f if possible
  3 weeks, intensifying in wk2
  YM itself 30 Jul/6--8 August

  Theme: For our comfort and discomfort: living our
            testimonies of equality and truth
        (Privilege and Climate Justice)
         1) Responses to racism;
	 2) Working on our responses to gender diversity;
         3) Faith-based actions in support of climate justice.

YM 2022: Unchanged at 27--30 May Friends House

Workshops coming soon on reorganisations towards a Simple
Church/Simple Charities

Jeffrey Dean: We can't go on as we did before, only meeting online,
but We need physical community sometimes _as well_.

Tradition vs. traditional_ism

[HST: My experience as I come to the end of 6 years on Sufferings
      And the wide range of sources from which I've heard the same
      thing

      By a series of well-meaning, and individually not unreasonable,
      steps, we have arrived at a point where Meeting for Sufferings
      is no longer fit for purpose.  Not so much because we're doing a
      bad job at what we've been asked to do, piece by piece, but
      because our business has grown and ramified to the point where
      it is almost never the case (today's sessions on assisted dying
      being a notable exception) that the full power and value of a
      gathered meeting for worship for business are being brought to
      bear.

      So I was very pleased to see what I take to be the most
      important sentence in the paper before us:

       "The Working Group considered the core functions from first
        principles, setting aside our understanding of existing
        structures."

      I hope almost _nothing_ will be off the table as we start
      consideration of possible new approaches to the governance of
      the Church and the Charity.  What I mean by 'almost' is that the
      place of Yearly Meeting in session as the ultimate worldly
      source of authority for BYM is not, at least for me, at issue.

      But _anything_ else, particularly wrt the Church, and what is
      delegated to what bodies by BYM when it is _not_ in session,
      needs to be rethought again from the ground up and the top down.
      Sufferings obviously have a key role to play in this, and our
      dissatisfaction with our current situation now needs to turn
      into an energetic contribution to fixing it, even if this means
      laying ourselves down in our current form (or indeed with our
      current name).]