A Redrawing of the Quaker Map

April 1, 2007

In a stunning series of announcements, the soul of Quakerism may have found its original resonance again in the geographic regions of North New Jersey, Southwestern Connecticut and New York State, United States of America.

After a wave of key resignations by the NYYM Trustees and the Clerks of the NYYM Coordinating Committees, in what had been known as New York Yearly Meeting, the member monthly meetings and regions have affirmatively broken apart from and morphed or assimilated into more responsible Yearly Bodies which, from proof by decades of growth, use good Quaker governance in their business affairs.

“The Quaker map has been redrawn to give us a real chance to live our own spiritual lives”, said a member of a small Monthly Meeting in Rockland County, New York. The unidentified Friend - a virtual nobody – reports he has never once stood to take in the grandeur of the occasion and listen to himself speak in New York Yearly Meeting sessions at Lake George, in the Adirondack Mountains.

This is how that newly redrawn Quaker map will look:

(Click on map to enlarge)

Farmington Scipio Butternuts Yearly Meeting (FSBYM)

Going first to the western region – the Farmington Scipio Regional Meeting along with the Butternuts Quarter, have incorporated under New York State Religious Incorporation statute and severed ties with what’s left of New York Yearly Meeting. The announcement was leaked by a senior official within the newly incorporated body – the FSB Yearly Meeting. The FSBYM official declined to be named, but said, “the announcement has been a long time coming, and even though a highly paid employee of NYYM traveled extensively in our region(s) in the past three years, we felt it was pure patronizing behavior on the part of the NYYM elite who gave him his marching instructions to come and bug us all the time”. Going further, the official continued, “There’s nothing religious about our decision, all the mumbo jumbo in the world the ministers throw around has no meaning, it is purely a realization that we’ve been sending our money and time into the toilet of the NYYM office for years, and its time to stop.”

Affiliation with New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM)

Echoing with a slightly different timbre as the western region, a combined statement by the Clerks of the Northeastern Regional Meeting, Nine Partners, Purchase and Long Island Quarterly Meetings, says the following:

“Its time to reign in our own dissident Friends who spend their (and our) valuable time going abroad to NYYM affairs, squandering our money and valuable human resources away to some elitist house of cards in the sky. Effective immediately we have joined New England Yearly Meeting, a well-run and governed growing body.”

Jersey Yearly Meeting (JYM)

Monthly Meetings in North and Central New Jersey in two regions – Shrewsbury-Plainfield, and All Friends have come out with a similar combined statement:

“We’re sick and tired of a few of our Friends going off to a nice vacation in the Adirondacks and coming back and asking us to contribute 1/2 to 3/4 of our member contributions to NYYM, when its obvious that the money is being sucked from things we could be doing here in our local community, to a place behind some iron curtain of non-transparency, fronted by mealy-mouthed talking heads. As of today, our Monthly Meetings have all agreed to form JYM or Jersey Yearly Meeting." A lowly peon in one of these meetings was quoted saying, “We have our own Ramapo Mountains, and we spend too much time trying to figure out what it is we get from New York Yearly Meeting instead of just going out and doing what we want to do more effectively within arm’s reach of where we live. We also have the McCutcheon trust funds now that the home has been poorly managed almost to death.

See related news story.

See a related release by the former NYYM.

The Clerk of the Shrewsbury-Plainfield Half Yearly Meeting said, “We may decide to join Philadelphia Yearly Meeting or Baltimore Yearly Meeting at some point, we’ll see how it goes. Right now we feel we can nurture and witness for ourselves better than anyone else can.” The whole process was begun by a little old lady in our discussions who asked, “Does our Monthly Meeting have to be a member of a Yearly Meeting”?

East Village Yearly Meeting - Radical

Finally, what was formerly New York Quarterly Meeting (in New York City), will morph into East Village Yearly Meeting – Radical. (EVYM – R) In a statement, the NYYM remaining employee who has begun a sit-in, and refuses to leave the New York Yearly Meeting office, where the lights have been turned off, was quoted as saying, “I’ve contacted the office of mayor Michael Bloomberg and asked him when the city plans to blow the charges and allow New York City to float out into the Atlantic ocean, forming its own city/state of radical politics and atheist religion.” When reached for comment, an advisor to Mr. Bloomberg said, “Granted we have some kooks in this town, but we stopped listening to middle-aged and elderly anarchist East Village radicals who wear big peace signs on their jeans jackets decades ago.”

In a statement by the former New York Quarterly Meeting Clerk, now the Clerk of the EVYM-R, he said, “We spent years trying to revise our Quarterly Meeting handbook and realized we didn’t’ have people to staff our current or even our pared down positions, then finally came up with the plan in a moment of Divine inspiration, to form our own Yearly Meeting - to remove one level of bureaucracy from our lives. We’re actually going to make Brooklyn Meeting a Quarterly Meeting and have it begin to spawn neighborhood meetings in the manner of the first generation Friends. Brooklyn on its own has 2.2 million inhabitants. We wonder why didn’t we do this years ago?”

Representative Meeting April 2007 cancelled

When reached for comment, the clerk of the Former New York Yearly Meeting said, “ We’ve decided to cancel our next Representative Meeting, 4^th Month 2007, in western New York State. The body has spoken decisively, and we would not like to waste any more of our time, nor our precious natural resources in driving and flying way out there, nor in printing the newsletter or the agenda – even for the 50 people or so who would have showed up to rubber stamp our former agenda.

Yes, its an April Fools joke. See the next posting explaining the use of humor in making a point.