Is there a future for North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM)?
When its Representative Body gathers on Saturday August 1, the formal agenda will focus in deciding among a series of options.
The Options list is long, and — who knows — may get longer in the next 24 hours. Further, besides the specific list now on tap, there is another one which isn’t there, but is, namely “None Of The Above.”
Indeed, that was the clear choice at the previous session on June 6, when three “options” were debated. After several hours, the Clerk himself declared there was nothing approaching a groundswell for any of them, no unity, no consensus.
Viewed with detachment, the finding of “no unity” was a perfectly workable outcome. Viewed theologically, from the traditional understanding that the divine will is disclosed in Quaker process, no unity is as clear a message as is unanimity for specific action. The message then is: Stop. Don’t make change. Wait.
There’s plenty of precedent in Quaker history for this: in Philadelphia, controversy over outlawing slavery took decades to resolve. Later, the move to permit paid pastors lasted many years, and is not universal even today. Numerous other examples could be cited.
For that matter, on June 6, the NCYM Faith & Practice was still in place; the YM office was functioning; member payments were coming in. There was no real deadline for decision; the doomsday predictions had not come to pass. The sky would not fall.
But this outcome was intolerable to those who had come to the session determined to purge and plunder. There had to be a decision, they insisted, presumably in time to be ratified somehow at the annual sessions, which are held the first weekend of September.
An account of this long, difficult session is here.
So the Clerk yielded and called a special Representative session for August 1.
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