On being clerk of a Quaker meeting
Posted by Sappho on September 23rd, 2018 filed in Quaker Practice
I fear I may have lost most of my readers, with my long silences on this blog. It’s been nearly three weeks since my last post, and I’ve been busy with, oh, everything. My sister is still recovering in a nursing home from her multiple spinal fractures (and could still use support for her GoFundMe. I’m still doing all my usual activities, including work, Toastmasters, DBSA, Stanford Professional Women of Orange County, etc. But right now I want to tell you about an activity I haven’t spoken about much.
You know, if you have been reading this blog for a while, that I’m a Quaker. Well, for the past year and a half, I have also been clerk of my Quaker meeting.
“Clerk” sounds, in modern language, like a secretarial role, but the Quaker term “clerk” goes back to the 17th century, when the word had a different meaning. As clerk, it’s my role to facilitate our monthly meeting for business (or meeting for worship on the occasion of business), and also to be a central point of contact for the meeting.
Other roles of the clerk vary from meeting to meeting (and may vary depending on who is retired and who is still working – in my case, I’m employed full time, and our clerk of Ministry and Oversight is retired but still energetic, so she does probably more to keep the meeting going than I do). As clerk, I serve ex officio on Ministry and Oversight Committee. When I attended Palo Alto meeting in pre-cell phone days, the clerk’s phone number would become the phone number to reach the meeting. Now, we have a meeting cell phone, which currently lives in the home of a couple who serve on Ministry and Oversight, and we are considering whether to switch to a Google Voice account. In our meeting, it’s the clerk’s role to close meeting for worship; at one point at Palo Alto Friends Meeting, this task was rotated among Ministry and Oversight.
As clerk, I respond to email to our meeting (but not phone calls, as Al and Dee have the cell phone), sort mail, keep track of the meeting calendar so that I can confirm that our committees start their various tasks (nominations, budget, etc.) at the right times, and share in various Ministry and Oversight tasks, including membership applications and coordinating care of members in need (this might be an elderly couple moving into a retirement home or a member going through a hospitalization). And of course I take part in the ordinary things that I was already doing as a member of meeting (just yesterday I staffed a table at the World Religions tent in the Irvine Global Village festival). When decisions come up in meeting for business where we don’t find unity easy, I may need to be involved in conversations between meetings for business to determine the best way forward.
Because a lot of this activity is shared with Ministry and Oversight, and because the pastoral care part of what Ministry and Oversight does is confidential, some of what I do in any given week may not be something I can share in a blog post, the way I can share my usual political arguments. But this is the general gist of the job.