Membership

• One Meeting's Process for Setting Membership Procedures, by Tallahassee (FL) MM
• Tallahassee Membership Minute
• Tallahassee Guidance to Clearness Committees for Membership
• Tallahassee Clearness Queries for Membership
• Membership Procedures, by Chapel Hill (NC) MM
• Chapel Hill Membership Questions and Queries

One Meeting’s Process for
Setting Membership Procedures

by Tallahassee Monthly Meeting, Southeastern Yearly Meeting

Invitation Sent to Meeting Members

Oversight Committee request for a Meeting of Members for Guidance on Membership Issues, 18 Ninth Month 1:30–3:30.

The Oversight Committee is struggling with issues such as:

• criteria of membership
• responsibilities of membership
• members commitment to the corporate development of the Meeting
• process of membership
• maintaining membership
• laying down and transferring membership.

We will address these concerns by responding in worship to three queries.

• For the first query we will go around the group asking each person to speak or pass.
• For the last two queries, Friends may speak as they are moved.

Please remember the worship-sharing format:

Open and close with silence and allow silence between speakers.<

Share from your personal condition and experience of God’s Will.

Listen in worship to others, do not respond.

Allow everyone a chance to share before speaking again.

The queries are:

1. What does it mean to be a member of my meeting?
2. What is the responsibility of the meeting to its members, and of the members to the meeting?
3. What is the difference, in my meeting, between being an attender and being a member?

Please note: The following proposed minute grew out of a concern raised in the Oversight Committee and several subsequent After-Meeting discussions. Both Oversight and Worship and Ministry have prayerfully considered several drafts of the minute. It will be presented for approval in Twelfth Month Meeting for Business. Friends should be aware that the two committees also plan to draft materials intended to acquaint new attenders with who we are and what we bear witness to.

(The next two sections were approved by Tallahassee Meeting following this meeting.)