Through the Flaming Sword

I have a minute of travel for the fostering of the gathered meeting among Friends, which was originally written by Central Philadelphia Meeting. But I have since then transferred my membership to Princeton Meeting in New Jersey. Both meetings are in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. PhYM’s Faith and Practice is not clear about how to deal with the transfer of such a minute as part of a transfer of membership, so both meetings have had to work much of it out on their own. Princeton Meeting has just approved a new draft of the minute, so now that ministry is under Princeton’s care.

I want to post about the issues that transferring a minute raises later. Here I want to talk about how we handle minutes of travel and service in a time when many meetings don’t really know the faith and practice of Quaker ministry very well, when our books of discipline are not necessarily much help, and especially, when we often “travel” and serve virtually rather than in person.

Let’s start with the traditional practice using a hard copy of the minute.

Using a hard copy

Presenting the minute. I’m not sure how a minute of travel was presented to the meeting being visited in the elder days. Did the clerk of the minister’s meeting send it ahead of the visit, or did the minister bring it with them and present it themselves? Did they bring a letter from the clerk also, or was the minute sufficient in itself. I suspect the latter, but I hope some of my readers might know for sure.

Endorsing the minute. As I understand it, in the elder days the clerk or someone representing the body being visited endorsed the minute afterward on the back of the minute. This would include:

• the name, location, and other relevant description of the body visited and the date of visitation, 
• comments about how the ministry was received, and 
• a signature with the date of signature. 

In the Quakerism class I took with Bill Taber at Pendle Hill, if I remember correctly, he said that endorsement often was something quite minimal, such as, “Friend Steven Davison visited X Meeting in Y city, Z state on A of B month C year. His ministry was found acceptable. Signed Weighty Quaker, A’ of B’ month, C’ year.” Assuming, of course, that the ministry was acceptable. If there was some perceived problem, then the endorser said whatever seemed appropriate. 

Using an electronic copy

Nowadays, however, we often “travel” to give our ministry virtually through Zoom or some other internet-based conferencing tool. I have done just this for an FGC program on the gathered meeting earlier this year and for a Pendle Hill program on the gathered meeting during the pandemic. Neither I nor the sponsors of either of those programs followed these formal steps, so the questions of how to present the minute and how to endorse it in this virtual situation didn’t come up. I did tell FGC about my minute, but neither one of us took the matter further. But I think we should have; I wasn’t paying good attention.

But if we had tried to follow tradition, how would I have presented a digiital minute and how would they have endorsed it? Should we have used a digital copy of the minute in the first place?

Hard copy or digital?

Mailing the hard copy back and forth would be a bit cumbersome but staying analog has its appeal. For one thing, the conventions of practice for this are more or less settled and pretty straightforward. But more important, endorsing a digital copy turns out to be awfully complicated. I’ve been experimenting with doing so with my own minute’s pdf file as a learning exercise, and whew—not easy. I’ve tried one thing after another before settling on something that is still cumbersome, but I hope it meets the need, since I suspect that some circumstances will require the use of a digital version of the minute.

Here are my thoughts.

Creating the minute. The minute’s original hard copy format will almost certainly be a printed Word file, but its ultimate format will be a pdf so that the minute can’t be overwritten by accident. Normally, the clerk of the meeting would sign the minute after printing it, but this complicates things: now, in order to create a pdf file that includes the signature, you have to scan it. You could just let the typed name of the clerk stand for the signature and just save the Word doc as a pdf. But that doesn’t solve the problem of how to endorse the pdf.

Preparing for endorsement. To solve that problem, I would add a couple of pages to the Word doc for the endorsements before you scan it, maybe with a heading at the top of each of these extra pages like “Endorsements”. Then scan it to create a multi-page pdf file.

So what do you call this digital file?

Filename. I think the filename needs four elements:

1. the minister’s name;
2. the minister’s meeting;
3. a descriptive, like “minute of travel”; and
4. the date it was approved. 

For example: “Steven Davison – Minute of Travel – Princeton Meeting – Approved 07-12-2025”.

Presenting the minute. Whatever the traditional practice was, I think that the clerk of the meeting should send the minute along with an accompanying letter on behalf of the meeting and the minister. I don’t necessarily think it would be inappropriate for the minister to do it. But I prefer the clerk sending the minute for a number of reasons: 

• This gives more weight to the ministry; it reflects and confirms that the meeting is behind the ministry. 
• It unburdens the minister and relieves her or him from some potential awkwardness in presenting one’s self.
• It ensures that the meeting has a centralized record of all the doings around the ministry. At some point, the ministry will likely be laid down and/or the minister may no longer be around, and then all might be lost if she or he is the sole recorder of the minute’s travels.

I think the sender should bcc her or himself so that the sender has a copy of the email with the minute and accompanying letter or body of the email and they can store both in whatever virtual folder the meeting and/or the minister have created for such things. See the item on storage below.

Endorsement. Now—how do you endorse a pdf file of a travel minute? This is why you have to add those extra pages to the Word doc. Since most people will be using Adobe Reader to read the minute and Reader doesn’t let you write on a pdf file, the preparation for endorsement will have to take place on the Word file before the pdf is created. Here’s how I would provide for the endorsements:

In the accompanying letter, the sender asks the receiving clerk to do the following once the minister’s service is done:

1. Print the multi-page pdf file of the minute;
2. write by hand (legibly) the endorsement on the added page for endorsements, including the meeting or visited body and date of service, comments, signature and date of signature;
3. re-scan the whole document, creating a new pdf file with the same filename; and
4. return the rescanned pdf file to the the clerk of the minister’s meeting and /or the minister.

Process and storage. The final question is where do the Word file and pdf file live between visits? As I said above, I think the meeting itself should keep a record of all the travels of the minute, even if the minister is doing this also. These records should not be on a personal computer hard drive, but rather on a cloud drive, so that it’s not dependent on a member who may leave the meeting for some reason. The login information for this drive* should be shared between at least two people: the clerk of the meeting and the meeting’s treasurer, this latter because the meeting’s financial accounts presumably are also being kept in a central location that is independent of personnel changes. If the meeting has a physical filing system, I would create a file with this information to be stored in that filing cabinet, also. And maybe there are other people in the meeting to include, like the meeting’s recorder (the person responsible for the meeting’s membership statistics) and its secretary, if the meeting has these positions.

* I would keep all the meeting’s digital accounts in a central digital location: website hosting service login, its payment method and contract renewal settings; likewise for the same information for the Facebook account; and so on. I know of at least two meetings who lost their websites because the website’s management was in the hands of someone who either dropped the ball or left the meeting and the hosting service expired without anybody knowing