Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 14th December 2025

Dear Friends,

I suppose the question to ask is not, why am I applying for membership, but, why not sooner than this? All I can say is that I am not a hasty person. I have been considering applying for at least four years. I have felt myself to be part of Friends for so long that it has shocked me, on occasions, to realise that I am not thought of as ‘one of us’ but rather ‘one of them’. I have come to see that how I perceive myself in terms of commitment and belonging is not necessarily how I am perceived. At times this has made me sad. But I can see that I owe it to Friends to make my position clear. If the Society can be thought of as a ship, I would like to be one of the crew, not a passenger, and to be seen like this.

Jai Penna, 1989 (Quaker Faith and Practice, 10.34)

Five years ago I applied for membership in the Religious Society of Friends.  At that time, I thought a lot about the passage above, and the antithesis between passengers and crew.  If asked why I wanted to come into membership, one ready answer was that I wanted to be one of the crew.

Five years on, I am much less comfortable with the implication that members are crew and attenders are passengers.  There are Friends in membership who seem (for the time being) to be neither passengers nor crew.  Perhaps they are on a prolonged period of shore leave, or they have boarded a different ship, or they have decided that seafaring is not for them.  And meanwhile there are attenders who are busily scrubbing the decks, cooking the meals, scanning the horizon for hazards, and indeed helping to steer the ship.  What, really, is the difference between members and attenders?

We need to think again about membership:  what it means, and how it works.  And perhaps the above passage, however familiar, should be gently retired from the next edition of our Book of Discipline.

Tim Pitt-Payne