About the OfS2 task

We held three consulation sessions with Friends in late January and early March. At the beginning of each the background to our work, and some key questions, priorities, and (very broadly) what the options might be, were summarised in a presentation that you can see in the video below. A written transcript is available below.

OfS2 home page

120 Friends attended the sessions. Discussions covered wide areas, and in the light of the final report and recommendations, you might go on to look at the FAQs, written with the questions arising at these sessions in mind, and other documents listed on the options for Scotland page.

You can also watch the presentation in a larger window.

Transcript of the presentation

Friends, for the last 10 to 15 years it has become steadily more difficult to fill the posts required to run the religious Society of Friends.

This is a problem that has been brought to General Meeting (GM) over the last few years, so about two years ago GM set up a first group to look at the problem, then over the last six months a second group has looked further at the options available.

In this session we want to find out how you as Quakers in Scotland feel about our current situation, and what we need so that we can try and match our needs with the structural options available to us.

The basic principle behind our work is that meeting for worship is the cornerstone of the religious Society of Friends, and with that in mind we focused our thinking on the friend who turns up regularly for meeting for worship.

We tried to view the society from their perspective, from this position.

These are the issues we're trying to address

• Too few friends willing or able to fill roles
• Too much duplication of roles and tasks
• Too few friends with appropriate skills in each separate area meeting
• The burden of responsibility on Friends acting as trustees
• Friends distanced from or disinterested in the wider Quaker community

And then we considered how a change of structure can help resolve these issues.

So we here we are trying to put ourselves into the mind of the friends who turn up regularly for meeting for worship.

So what many friends see today is their local meeting where they meet for worship and they know their local Friends.

Many people aware of their Area Meeting, where our membership is held, which considers matters that affect all the area meetings within that area.

Then in Scotland we have General Meeting, which includes the four separate area meetings and deals with matters that relate to the Scottish government and Scotland-wide issues.

Then on top of these organizations we have structural organizations we need people to be trustees attend meetings for sufferings nominations etc etc

The issue is that too many friends find this picture is confusing and it takes up a lot of energy which can distract from the spiritual aims of the society.

So we started to work from the basics upwards, what are our needs for our worship and witness, and we came up with these three things that the worshiping friend needs:

1. Spiritual: we need learning guidance and sharing to help us on our spiritual journey
2. We want to be part of the Religious Society of Friends and to worship with other like-minded people
3. Resources: if we want to have somewhere we can meet with friends for our worship we're going to have to meet somewhere, which needs to be managed and maintained

However in each of these three areas there are a number of activities that are needed to make them happen. These activities are needed to support us on our individual spiritual journeys.

When people get together in public meetings for worship these sorts of things need to happen but to provide these functions and activities described resources are needed such as places to meet with heat and light all of which require financial assistance.

it's important to note each activity area will need to be analyzed in detail once the general structure has been agreed.

Another parameter is that our meetings for worship vary widely from just two or three friends gathering together to meetings of 80 to 100.

It's interesting to note that the average size is 12 across Scotland but regardless of size of our meetings all friends must each feel equally supported.

So if you put these two pictures together we get a picture of an area meeting with a range of different size meetings and all those functions to support them and their worship.

But in Scotland we have four area meetings under general meeting all doing their own things in their own way.

This leads to duplication for example each area meeting produces an annual report and a newsletter and manage a set of membership plus everything else.

But the key point is how many posts do we need to fill in Scotland each triennium.

It's been remarkably difficult to give a precise number for the number of posts that need filling every three years for a number of reasons but to suffice to say that filling 290 to 300 posts from a membership of six to seven hundred is the root of the problem.

This is a serious problem even if we include the 600 or so attenders so this leads to the two questions which we would like your thoughts on:

• What holds us together as Quakers? and
• How can our Scottish Quaker structures better meet our needs?

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