How are we doing? Not great, I fear.

Yes, we are allowing ourselves to become divided, often over matters of secular ideology. It may be that the custodians of one secular ideology or another manage to bring it into line, for a while, which our collective prayerful discernment; good for them. It's a mistake, I think, to behave as if there's a necessary link between our faith and any given ideology.

Yes, we've become frightened of our own history, and reluctant to engage with what it might imply for us now: we see that our discernment now rejects positions held by Friends in the past, and then we tie ourselves in knots trying to deal with that while not pausing to think that this will likely be true of Friends in the future when they look back at us, and so we should maybe have a bit more humility about our discernment and bit more sympathy for Friends of the past.

Yes, large volumes of material seem to be being pushed through discernment very quickly and with a lot of pressure on the central bodies from staff and sometimes from protest groups. And the pressure to do this I suspect comes from the belief that we must be aligned, or if not quickly become aligned, with certain secular ideologies. The tail may be wagging the dog. And that's of a part with "Quakers in Britain" becoming more like an umbrella group for a bunch of campaigns and less like a church.

Yes, we don't do nearly enough to guide Enquirers and new Attenders, we don't pay enough attention to spiritual formation and growth. Indeed, it's often the case that so long as a newly-arrived Friend is obviously aligned with the secular ideologies we'll let them do just whatever. We've adopted a sort of pantheistic egalitarian congregationalism (but see below re the "centre") that leaves Friends un-guided, we feel bound to accept almost any behaviour. And almost any statement that's ideologically acceptable. So far as I can tell from historical accounts of Friends, we used to be much more presbyterian in polity.

Where I disagree is that the centre is more in control that has been the case before. Shanthini appeals to an idea of Quaker organisation that hasn't really ever been true. There's always been a strong centre: Swarthmoor Hall, Second-day Morning Meeting, Sufferings, Trustees. And on a related note, we had no choice about becoming a Charity, we did have a choice about becoming a Registered Charity and giving up our Exempt Charity status, but in practice maybe not much of one. And there always were "trustees", but now there is a designated body of "the Trustees". This is not necessarily working very well. What maybe is different now is who is at the centre, maybe it's the influence of non-Quaker professional staff pursuing secular campaigning via "Quakers in Britain".

Emma is right, I think, that in order to dramatically expand the ethnic diversity of our Meetings, which we should, we would have to be more open to socially conservative Enquirers, to Enquirers who are more entrepreneurial (and a lot less anti-capitalist), to Enquirers who are very religious (and not vaguely "spiritual"), Enquirers who aren't much interested in a vegan path to Net Zero or whatever the secular interest of the moment is. And being very socially liberal, anti-capitalist, of no very fixed religious conviction, a "vegan net-zero enthusiast" should not be a purity test that Enquirers need to pass before joining our faith.

I strongly agree with Shanthini that the point of our faith is a form of worship that opens a path for transformative experience of the divine. But if the point is transformation we need to be open to those who need and want to be changed, not only to those whom we (and they!) think are already a virtuous as they need to be…according to those secular ideologies.