In my earlier
post, I explored the idea of testing ministry in Meeting for
Worship, and outlined some simple tests that I find helpful when
testing ministry. I also mentioned that these were only readily
applicable in simple, undirected worship, and other sorts of meeting
in which we might minister need to be handled differently. In this
post I will explore the most common other sort of meeting, the
“Meeting for Worship for Business”, often shortened to “Business
Meeting”, and known formally in Quaker faith & practice
as “Meetings for Church Affairs”.
These meetings are the
primary decision-making organ of Quaker bodies, from our Local and
Area Business Meetings, to Britain Yearly Meeting in session, and all
of the business meetings to run all sorts of other groups. It is
probably helpful at this point to quickly recap the essential
principles and process of the Quaker business method, though a full
exploration would certainly merit a post all to itself.
So, let us take a
theoretical, idealised Meeting for Worship for Business. Any given
“real world” case will deviate from this, but in various
different ways depending on the meeting, so the platonic version
seems a good starting point. The meeting in session is a number of
Friends, probably in the small dozens – to avoid any of the
complications brought by a particularly large or small group. One or
two Friends undertake to clerk the meeting, and sit at a table where
they can see everyone. Everyone else sits arranged in such a manner
to be able to see as many of the rest of the meeting as reasonably
possible. The clerk introduces an item of business, a decision that
needs to be taken. The clerk will introduce the business, perhaps
with the help of another Friend who is familiar with the matter in
question. The decision to be taken will be made clear to Friends, and
all necessary information will be provided at this time, or even
better in advance of the meeting (this being a point where pretty
much every real world case will depart drastically from the ideal,
but it is a complication that is besides the point of this post). At
that point, the meeting begins discernment – a period of worship
focussed on making a decision.
