The youth were unanimously and passionately in favor of hiring a youth coordinator, and so were most adults who had worked with youth. But for some Friends, this was not enough. They were concerned about the cost, felt that the age range was too broad, that the YM did not have the experience to run such a program [and] whether the YM should even hire a paid staff person. Underlying many of these concerns was the old bugaboo: fear of change, and suspicion of young people.
[The clerk] said we are here as a community of faith. Yet the Spirit blows where it will. Friends need to present their ideas or proposals, then step back and make space for the Spirit to enter. We don’t have a product to create or a goal. We have a process we know works, our Quaker process, and we need to give it space to work.
