*Canadian Yearly Meeting has about 1200 active adult members in 24 monthly meetings and 32 worship groups. Including the worship groups under the care of the monthly meetings as part of their membership, we have three large meetings (129, 142, 144); ten medium meeting (36 to 78); ten small meetings (12 to 30). The average size of the 32 worship groups is seven. We are the second biggest country in the world in terms of land area and have the world’s longest coast line. The total population of Canada as of 2001 was 31,082,000 — about the population of California.

ravel in the ministry, you say? In Canada, you say? Imagine your yearly meeting with members living 8,895 km apart. (That’s 5,527 miles for the metrically challenged.) This is reality for Canadian Yearly Meeting (CYM, see right sidebar)! An ambitious hypothetical trans-Canada minister not only has to travel the length of our shared border with the United States but also well north of the border in order to visit meetings in Edmonton, Ottawa and Halifax or worship groups in Prince George or Saskatoon. If a minister wanted to visit the off shore meetings and worship groups on Vancouver Island (British Columbia) or Newfoundland (Nova Scotia), a ferry ride would be necessary. And if that minister was really dedicated to visit isolated Friends, it would require another ferry ride to Haida Gwaii (aka Queen Charlotte Islands) and a long drive up the Alaskan Highway to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. The United States is big, but Canada is BIGGER!

How does travel in the ministry prosper in Canadian Yearly Meeting? Although CYM Organization and Procedure allows half-yearly meetings of CYM to record ministers, this is now rarely done. On the other hand we do a fair amount of visitation among meetings and worship groups. CYM’s Home Mission and Advancement Committee (HMAC, fondly known as Hay-Mac) promotes visitation through providing financial assistance for transportation and encouragement of CYM members to just do it! CYM’s Continuing Meeting of Ministry and Counsel (CMMC) also promotes visitation. CMMC members have been given a travel budget by HMAC, should they feel led to travel as ministers and/or elders. In 2001 CMMC established guidelines for travel in the ministry for its members and other CYM Quakers who feel a call to travel under the care of CMMC. These guidelines are adapted from the procedures worked out by the Traveling Ministry Committee of FGC.

In September 2001 two CMMC members visited Vancouver MM (British Columbia) in response to their invitation to begin the year of spiritual renewal and adult education. Caroline Balderston Parry of Ottawa MM provided a day-long workshop, “Celebrating our Spiritual Journeys.” In addition she and Lynne Phillips had consultations throughout the weekend with several of Vancouver MM’s committees dealing with renewal and worship. In February 2002 Caroline was invited by Coldstream MM in Ontario to present a day-long workshop at their retreat on simplicity. Caroline was accompanied by Jo Vellacott as her elder. Although Coldstream is a rural meeting and Vancouver a big city meeting, both meetings were experiencing degrees of isolation from the wider Quaker community and its spiritual traditions. Both meetings expressed thanks for the spiritual enrichment of their communities.

Last July Betty Polster of Victoria MM on Vancouver Island, BC was invited to give a clerking workshop in northern British Columbia, hosted by a small worship group in Lillooet. This workshop was followed by the Vernon MM retreat of which Lillooet is a member and the retreat was preceded by a wilderness hike for some of the younger and fitter participants. The clerking workshop was attended by about a dozen participants, making it a very cost effective approach to spiritual formation. Betty has given several weekend workshops at Pendle Hill on clerking. To send just one person from BC to such a workshop would cost about twice what it cost to give twelve people the same training.

Due to distance and high travel costs, visitation often demands a sacrifice of time and money from Canadian Friends who feel led to inform, inspire and support one another. Much of our ministry is informal “kitchen table” ministry. To give you a complete account of all our Friendly travel would probably exhaust both your patience and my fingers. However, since this is an FGC paper, I cannot leave out the contributions from FGC’s Traveling Ministry Program (TMP). In April 2002 Marty Grundy and Charlie Basham traveled through Atlantic Canada, visiting every monthly meeting in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and all but two worship groups. Accounts of their visits are posted on the FGC website (www.fgcquaker.org) along with accounts of other TMP activities in Canada. FGC has also held consultations and retreats for people engaged in traveling in the ministry or in promoting it. The current clerk of Home Missions and Advancement committee, Daphne Davey, was inspired by her attendance at an FGC 1999 consultation to bring greater emphasis on visitation in HMAC’s programs and budget.

Given the obstacles mentioned at the beginning of this article, the reader might be wondering why we bother to cross the vast distances of Canada. I will borrow two reasons. The first from Marty Walton (The Blessed Community):

It isn’t easy to be a Quaker. There’s so much to learn about how to do things, and there are usually so few of us in any one place. We seldom know the comfort of all around community support and we seldom feel we have done all we could. Yet again and again we stubbornly choose to devote time and energy to our small minority, our fragile little meetings and worship groups.

Visitors from “away” teach us how to do things, teach us to enlarge our boundaries, to become a part of the wider community of Friends, and strengthen us through the forging of bonds that help to compensate for smallness and isolation. The benefit to the individual Quaker is eloquently expressed by Mary Rose O’Reilly (Friends Journal): “If someone pays attention to the part of me that struggles to know God, my search intensifies. . . . If someone believes with me in the amazement of grace, prays with me, and reminds me of God’s tenderness, I live more thoroughly and bravely in sacred time.”

This is what ministers do when they do it well: believe with us, pray with us, remind us. The rest is up to God and the Spirit within.

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