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2022 Spiritual State of the Meeting Queries

January 7, 2022

Dear Meeting Clerks and Ministry Committees,

Greetings from the BYM Ministry and Pastoral Care Committee. First, Greg Robb and Sarah Gillooly (BYM General Secretary) wish to extend apologies for getting the 2021 Spiritual State of the Meeting queries to you so late this year. Sarah and Greg had both a failure of communication and a failure of BYM office technology.  

Below are the queries that we hope you will find useful as you prepare your 2021 Spiritual State of the Meeting reports. We’ve written queries that we hope will spark discussion and understanding.  If you don’t find them useful, feel free to use your own. We would like to receive your reports around the middle of April if possible. However, given the delay this in sending these queries to you, we will be extending the deadline to mid-May for those who need more time.

The queries:

  • Talk about the joys and sorrows that your meeting has experienced this year. How have you grown in the Spirit?
  • What wisdom and tools might your meeting share with other meetings about how the Spirit has guided your response to the pandemic. What have been the challenges?
  • What wisdom and tools might your meeting share with other meetings about how the Spirit has guided your discussions on racism. What have been the challenges?

And an off-beat one:

  • If your meeting was asked to make a t-shirt that you would all wear, what would be the slogan? Would there be a picture?

If you don’t mind, please say a little bit about the process that your meeting goes through to prepare the Spiritual State of the Meeting. We are concerned that some meetings are finding the process to be dry and difficult.

In that light, we want to report that Friends from the Gunpowder and Richmond monthly meetings tell us that preparing their Spiritual State of the Meeting reports is one of their highlights of the year. Richmond organizes one large half-day retreat of worship sharing to review the queries while Gunpower has worship sharing in several sessions to cover more than just regular attenders. The job of their Ministry Committee is to reflect the discussion on paper. It is said not to be an easy task, with several bites of the apple needed! We bring this forward as a possible model for other meetings to experiment with.

Finally this year, when you send your reports to BYM office at admin@bym-rsf.org, please include the name (s) and contact information of the principal author(s) of the report. We want to thank them individually and invite them to meet with us to hear about their experiences and ask them what we can do better next time!

In the light,

Greg Robb, Gary Sandman, (co-clerks) and Eileen Stanzione (rising clerk) 
BYM Ministry and Pastoral Care Committee

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