DQM 2023-10-29

Dover Quarterly Meeting

Held in Concord Friends Meetinghouse and on Zoom.

29^th October 2023

Present: We began the meeting at 1 p.m. with the following Friends present.

• Dover- Jeremiah Dickinson, Beth Collea, Maggie Fogarty, and Ginny Kristi
• Concord - Ruth Heath, Kathy Urie, Elaine Bello, Pat Wallace, Betsy Meyers, Mark Barker, Jennifer Smith, Rich Kleinschmidt, and Kieran Dinnean
• Souhegan - Brian Drayton
• Lawrence - Kathleen Wooten
• No one from North Sandwich, West Epping, Gonic, or New England Evangelical (Nashua) attended.

25-23  Previous Minutes of July 30^th.

We received a correction from West Epping that they did not know the two mentioned as members of their meeting who had died during Covid.  Mark Barker shared that the two had moved to Concord and were attenders there when they passed.  With these corrections the minutes are approved.

26-23  Financial Report

The treasurer sent a report that we have $814.40 in a checking account and $1,005.91 in a savings account for a total of $1,820.31.  Of this, $812.37 are restricted Trust funds, reserved for “poor ministers…in the service of the Lord.”  This report was accepted with thanks.

27-23  Nominating Committee – Officers of Dover QM

Kathy Urie and Faith Sellars, both of Concord Meeting, have been the representatives from our Quarter to the Beacon Hill Friends House Board in Boston.  Their terms are up and they each have expressed willingness to continue in this service. Friends approved.

The terms of clerk, recording clerk and treasurer are also up.  LeeAnn Stevens is willing to continue as treasurer.  (It is far more time consuming and difficult to change signatories than to keep the financial records!)

Jeremiah Dickinson is willing to continue as clerk and Marian Baker is willing to continue as recording clerk.  Sandy Hargy volunteered to join as Assistant Clerk.

Appreciation was expressed with gratitude for past and future service.

We approved appointing these Friends for one year and look over the issue again at that time.

28-23  Beacon Hill Board

Kathy Urie then gave a report from Beacon Hill Board.  The pandemic was a challenge.  There is a separate board for managing the day-to-day operation.  Recently they changed their website.  They received a $500,000 grant for building repairs.  This enables them to now have a facility manager.  The house has also raised $24,000 in in-kind donations.  Jen Newman, after being program director, is now the new Director of the house.  She wants to come visit Dover QM.  Appreciation was expressed for BHFH’s Zoom speaker programs throughout the year that were available for all Friends in NEYM to attend.

29-23  Reports from our Recorded Ministers

30-23  Anti-racism Remonstrance

An epistle was received from a cohort of Friends who attended the Nurturing Faithfulness program at Woolman Hill concerning anti-racism.  The Friend who placed this on the agenda was not able to be present so Friends were encouraged to read it and consider if it would be appropriate to bring to their local meetings.

31-23  Reports from Meetings

The date for our Next Meeting

It falls on Dec. 31 (New Year’s Eve).  Concord would be having their all age game night on New Year’s Eve and our QM could meet before that.  The meeting sensed that holding a gathering on that day would not be best, and days in January were considered.  Friends decided to hold it under advisement and think about when or how to hold our next quarterly meeting.

[Since the meeting, it has been clarified that this meeting was the 4^th of the year and that the next regularly scheduled meeting of the Quarter will be on March 31, 2024.  This is an artifact of using the 5^th Sunday as the meeting time.  We only meet four times a year, even if there is a 5^th, 5^th Sunday.]

Mailing list for Dover QM - If you want to be on the mailing list of the QM - let Jeremiah know.

Meeting adjourned by 2:30.

Dover Quarterly Meeting of Friends

New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, Religious Society of Friends

℅ LeeAnn M Stevens, Treasurer, 400 Webster St, Manchester, NH 03104

Respectfully submitted,

/s/ LeeAnn M Stevens

Treasurer, submitted 2023-10-29

**Restricted Funds are the “Mary G. Morrell and Horatio S. Morrell Trust Funds.  Such funds are dedicated to help ‘poor...ministers… in the service of the Lord.’”

Brian Drayton’s Report for 2022

10/13/23

Dear Friends,

I am late in making my report to the meeting for 2022; and soon it will be time for a 2023 report.  Perhaps you will accept this letter as bridging both.  I will be grateful for any guidance or questions you may have for me, either to probe the past, or consider the future of my faithfulness in my calling.

At an October meeting forty years ago, Salem Quarterly Meeting entered a brief minute in their records, recording their sense that I had evidenced a sustained gift in the ministry.

This brief declaration was not an award, nor an accolade, but the affirmation of something like a covenant: the meeting and I acknowledged that we were joint stewards of a concern, mutually responsible for my faithfulness to the gift.  The concern might be enacted in different ways over its lifetime; my attention or faithfulness might fluctuate with changing life conditions; the gift and responsibility might someday be withdrawn.  The recording was therefore not a mandate to perform a particular set of duties, only a commitment that I would be watchful, day by day, for guidance and for opportunities to use the gift; that I would be diligent in following such openings; and that I would undertake to continue my spiritual formation and learning, so that I could become a more useful instrument in the work, and align myself more and more to it.

Thomas Kelly spoke eloquently about the importance of focusing on a few concerns, and I came to see that the calling to ministry was one of mine, an organizing and constraining fact of life which was a necessary path for me, if I was going to learn how to live, as best I could, as a disciple of Christ.  This, naturally, is laid alongside other gifts in my life — marriage and parenthood, livelihood, citizenship, and a few other such abiding concerns.  The meeting's acknowledgment that this concern was a true one has helped me not forget my responsibility to the gift, not for a day in the past 40 years — even if in the remembering, I feel convicted because I have fallen short.

Knowing very well that my work is one little thread in the great fabric of service and faithfulness by which the divine life is incarnated in our world, I have sought to understand as well as I can how my bit fits with others, and to learn about my learning in case it may be of any use to others in their pilgrimage.   The impulse of the teacher is a deep element in my personality, and so I have also felt impelled to transform my own experience — including my experience of limitations and failures — by reflection, and by setting it alongside others' experience and reflections, joining in, as it were, in the long conversations of our faith tradition, a community that extends backward in time, and around the world.  Teachers must be diligent learners, and the experiments in faithfulness of my friends and mentors in this timeless community have been indispensible blessings.

Now, I understand my calling to be "gospel ministry," and I want to say a little thing about what that means, as I have come to see it.  A minister is a servant, who acts under orders, but often must figure out how best to understand and implement those orders, and this (sometimes scary) freedom may grow as the minister's experience grows.  A minister of the gospel is one who serves the life of the gospel, which is Immanuel — God with us — in ourselves and others; and calling it "gospel" indicates that this living God is inextricably linked with the character and person of Christ, before, during, and after the revelation in and through Jesus.

While the implications of this commitment are not always obvious or easy to identify, still it does constrain us, because thereby we know that we are seeking to know and live by a spirit whose commandment is love of God and of neighbor, who calls us to a perfection as articulated in, for example, the sermon on the mount, and whose being embraces life and death, joy and suffering, human and non-human, now, in the past, and in the future.  The minister's "job" is in support of this search.

Traditionally among Friends, the ministry of the gospel was in prayer and speech, under the immediate guidance of the spirit of Christ.  But the work of the ministry as Friends understand it is not in preparation of ideas or messages, nor in "leadership," but in listening and inward travail (travel).  From this inward work, ministers may find themselves led into a wide variety of modes of working — in meeting, or in homes, or other settings, drawing near to the witnessing Light of Christ in companionship with others, and acting, speaking, or keeping silent as led. When I open a new travel journal, I copy in these famous words of John Woolman, as a reminder of what the work consists in:

Love was the first motion, and then a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life, and the spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they might be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of truth among them.

Well, this has been my intent, my understanding of the work I am called to.  Sometimes I have been adequate to it, often not.  Every year I ask myself in prayer, "Does this concern continue, is there life in it?" I believe that this year the answer again is "Yes."  You, to whom I hold myself accountable, may sometime or other disagree, of course, and as I have said, I welcome your guidance.

___________________

As to what specifically I have been up to in the line of ministry since my last report, that is fairly easily told.

First, I continue to feel, as I have written to you for the past couple of years, that I need to be writing.  This has taken two main forms.

I have continued writing in my blog, Amor Vincat (amorvincat.wordpress.com).  This is partly a place for proclamation and teaching for those who find it; it is also a way of letting people into my workshop, as I try to digest, shape, and otherwise grapple with things that I read or hear, in the light of my concern.

I have also been working for the past two years on a book I've entitled The gospel in the Anthropocene: Letters from a Quaker naturalist.  This has now been fully drafted, and with guidance from a small group of gifted, honest, and enduring Friends I am revising and starting to seek a publisher.  This project, which for all its slowness has felt most urgent, represents the convergence of most of my "few concerns," as a science educator, ecologist, minister of the gospel, and critter, dwelling gratefully and inquisitively on this astonishing, little-known planet.

I have not been traveling much at all, but during the past year I have, together with Noah Merrill, convened gatherings for ministering Friends.  These seem to be happening roughly quarterly, and we have tried to host them in different places around the yearly meeting, to enable as many as possible to attend.  This is the sort of thing that is necessary if our meetings are going to have a ministry of depth, variety, and power.  For this to emerge, the Friends who are rightly called must grow in their gift, and exercise loving interest and care for each other, as ministers always have in the times of Friends' vitality.   Meetings also must grow in their discerning love for the service of those carrying this gift, so that the gospel ministry takes its place as a vital ingredient in the life of meetings, one among many manifestations of the work of the Minister, in whom we can be a unity. I feel called to help.

Finally, I have continued this year with my "midweek meditations," which have been some

As to what the coming year holds, I am very open.  No doubt the book will be a continued task, at least for a while. Other writing projects may emerge: the work on Willliam Dewsbury, which I set aside to work on The Gospel in the Anthropocene, will probably become a main focus again. I am also starting to suspect that it will be right to begin traveling more in the ministry, but what form that will take I am not sure.  If I am asked to do some teaching, I will accept as seems in right ordering.  The "ministry to ministers," which has been a persistent, not to say chronic, part of my concern over the past forty years, is likely also to continue.

I will conclude by quoting from something I wrote a while ago, which still expresses my experience:

Jesus teaches us to expect joy in following him, and in our unity through his Spirit with our brothers and sisters.  Take time to experience joy in the call to service, and in times when you have served faithfully.  The Gospel ministry is costly; yet if it is a concern you are carrying rightly, it is path of rejoicing, and growing peace.  The increase of joy, and of confidence in God's reliable presence, has always been accepted as evidence that the minister has been faithful.

This is not to be mistaken for self-congratulation or a sense of superiority, which are antithetical to the joy of which Jesus spoke.  In the inward training that we go through, we come more and more to know how to anchor our life and service in divine love, and find our fears diminished and defeated.  We become more sensitive to evil in ourselves, our society, and those we meet.  We become more compassionate, knowing the many ways that we are likely to be mistaken, deluded, or limited by our personalities, our understandings, our experience, our culture.  We feel it more keenly when we come to recognize the Seed's oppression, and we come to understand Nayler's words, when he said that the spirit he felt "is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it, nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression…with the world's joy it is murthered.  I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth."

Yet even so, we are given along with this a heightened sense of gratitude.  We become great in thanksgiving, and feel how gratitude is a taproot of prayer and upwelling life.  With Fox we "rejoice to see the springs of life break forth in any," and are free to take delight in the multitudinous evidences of the Life and Light, in other people, in the natural world, even in ourselves.  As Lewis Benson wrote, "It is a wonderful thing to be called to the ministry of the Gospel of Jesus Christ"

In Christian love your friend,

Brian Drayton

Woolman Hill Anti-Racism Remonstrance

This work was birthed within the Nurturing Faithfulness cohort from 2022-23 representing 35 people and seven yearly meetings (New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM), New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM), Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM), Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM), North Carolina Yearly Meeting (NCYM), Southern Appalachia Yearly Meeting and Association (SAYMA) and Canadian Yearly Meeting (CYM)). We are Quaker Voluntary Service staff (QVS), Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) members, workshop facilitators, writers, clerks, committee leaders and above all else: we are Quakers. We are not a decision making body and have not reached unity on this document.

The Nurturing Faithfulness community has experienced the impacts of racism within our group, we have wrestled with harm that was experienced during our 9 months together and are working to be faithful to our relationships which has meant tending with our grief, deeply listening to one another and being willing to be changed. We invite our monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting communities into this practice of faith with us.

This document was created out of community building and a lot of worship.  This is not a complete or perfect list and waiting for the complete and perfect will keep us stuck.  This is urgent to the life and future of the Religious Society of Friends, deepening relationships and returning to our Quaker roots of a social justice spirituality.  We have a renewed understanding that racism is a violence that needs to be addressed within the blessed community of Friends.  Quaker meetings have fallen short. We call on you to take action.

A vision for the Religious Society of Friends is one that is connected to our lives on turtle island, one that has an elastic relationship with time, that has open doorways – no barriers – people can always join us. One that is connected with our Quaker roots, truth and ancestral wisdom.  We are ones who prioritize people and their spiritual lives over structures (such as meeting houses).  We move through conflict and fear and are closer to ourselves, each other and God because of it.

Many friends are concerned with the word “demand”, they understand that the language comes from the legacy of social justice movements but don’t feel it is appropriate to demand anything from the Religious Society of Friends.  It is being left in as an fierce act of love and as a call to love just as fiercely. It is being left in because it conveys the level of urgency that is appropriate for the concerns of our beloved community.  This isn’t a guideline or theory of practice that we can push off any longer.  We acknowledge this is not going to sit well with everyone.  If you are feeling uncomfortable or resistant what is there for you to learn?

Committing to complete this list of demands will aid your meeting in being more relevant to people young and old supporting them to: feel more connected, experience deeper worship have more fun together, build stronger community, feel more love, feel more inspiration, be more welcoming, love each other better, experience deeper worship, inspire future generations and evolve guided by the divine. .

We want to challenge and excite Meetings within the Religious Society of Friends with the demands below.

LIST of DEMANDS to LOVE FIERCELY:

1. By the end of 2023, the meeting will publicly enter a process of being transformed by racial justice and update us on its progress through this list so that we can all learn from each other.
2. Read/watch/listen to anti-racist media and create programming or opportunities to connect about it.
3. Meeting for worship with attention to business engages in discernment about what meetings want their culture to look like moving forward.  Work through White Supremacy Culture article by Tema Okun and wrestle with white supremacy culture in the meeting.
4. Reparations.
   
   1. Building relationships with local indigenous tribes, attending public events and paying a land tax.
   2. Build relationships with Black communities and collaborate with ways to provide support.
5. Have 40% of the meeting engage in faithfulness groups where Friends identify how they are led in their racial liberation work.
6. Have at least two Friends from each monthly meeting apply to the 9 month Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racism (QCUR) Fellowship**.
7. Commit to closing worship with freedom songs for one year.
8. Create opportunities for attendees of Meetings to build trust and relationship with each other (ie having meals together & social events).
9. The first 8 demands should be seasoned with your meetings to discern what God is asking of you and your meeting.

**QCUR is a coalition of Quaker Organizations that is working towards liberation within the Religious Society of Friends. Applications for the upcoming cohort will open summer of 2023 and close in September.

The following are people who have elected to sign their name and by doing so commit to doing the work in the spirit of this document.

Signatures:

• Zenaida Peterson, Quaker Voluntary Service, Quakers Collaborating to Uproot Racism
• Eva Whittaker, Beacon Hill Friends House, Three Rivers Worship Group and Friends Meeting at Cambridge
• Karen Lockett She/Her Frederick Friends Meeting Frederick Maryland
• Jennifer Hogue, Friends Meeting at Cambridge, New England Yearly Meeting
• Janet Hough, Cobscook Friends Meeting (NEYM)
• Campo Larrick, Chapel Hill Friends Meeting
• Laura Hoskins, Putney Monthly Meeting
• Rachael Carter, Quaker Voluntary Service
• Benjamin Warnke, Brooklyn Monthly Meeting
• Amy Duckett Wagner, Fallsington Friends Meeting
• Sal Emi Link, Mount Toby Friends Meeting, New England Yearly Meeting
• David Kunz, Frederick Friends Meeting Frederick Maryland
• Anne Pomeroy, New Paltz Monthly Meeting, NYYM and Brooklyn Monthly Meeting 8 am worship
• Beth Morrill, Hartford Monthly Meeting of New England Yearly Meeting
• Karie Firoozmand Stony Run Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meeting
• Daquanna Harrison, Adelphi Friends Meeting
• Katy McRae, New Haven friends meeting
• Elviem (LVM) Shelton
• Marcelle Martin, Swarthmore Friends Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
• Betsy Tobin, Frederick Friends Monthly Meeting, Baltimore Yearly Meeting