LDG have provided an update on Friends’ progress in transferring their membership to Quakers in London. If you haven’t recived your membership transfer email, please contact membership@quakersinlondon.org.
Last Sunday, some members of each current AM in London took the first step to transfer their membership to Quakers in London (QiL) at the end of the year. And – five days in – nearly 40% have already completed the paperwork!
This article is for those who haven’t yet completed the process because they are having problems with the form filling, or worried about the implications of joining QiL.
Through discernment over many years within each of our AMs and, more recently, working together as the Joint London Area Meeting (JLAM) every AM has agreed to become part of QiL Area Meeting at the beginning of 2027, and to formally close the current AMs soon after.
You need to actively agree to transfer into QiL just as you would leave one AM and ask to join another if you moved to another part of England. Quakers in Britain hold membership at AM level (not at Yearly Meeting or Local Meeting) so – by the time your old AM closes – you need to have agreed to join QiL or you won’t be in membership anywhere. In effect, you will have resigned your membership.
We hope you will all agree to transfer, but it is your decision.
Every AM within Britain Yearly Meeting is a charity and that’s necessary so that they can own meeting houses and hold AM or LM bank accounts. Some are Charitable Incorporated Organisations and some are Charitable Companies. In October 2025, JLAM (with the minuted authority of each AM) opted to take over LQPT’s current charitable registration (Minute JLAM 25/19), which is legally structured as a Charitable Company. As a result, the legal governing document, which is called the Articles of Association, has been updated to suit Quakers in London rather than LQPT. You can read more about the Articles of Association here and see the final draft here.
When you transfer into QiL you become a member of that Charitable Company as well as a member of the AM in Quaker governance terms. As an Area Meeting and a worshipping community, how QiL works will be governed mainly by Quaker Faith and Practice chapter 4 and by the QiL terms of reference and other documents that we develop ourselves. We will also need to follow the Articles of Association for certain technical issues. There is no risk to members of the Charitable Company because it is ‘limited by guarantee’ – and the only potential liability is to pay ‘up to £1’ in the extremely unlikely event that the charity were to close with debts.
In the words of Beth Allen from Bromley Meeting ‘We need to be an ordinary well-run organisation, with good structures and sensible practices, which we then make extraordinary by transcending, not discarding them.’ Qf&p 8.25
Whichever type of charity JLAM had chosen, you would have had to complete a form to transfer. And the form gives you a chance to say what information you want to receive and whether you want to be included in a directory available to other members.
If you decide that you don’t want to join QiL then you can do most things as an Attender, but we hope that you will be part of our London-wide AM as a Member.
If you want to complete the form and don’t know what to do, don’t worry:
- If you’re in Membership of one of the London AMs and haven’t received a personalised email with your form, send a message to Chris Martin (Assistant Clerk Membership) at membership@quakersinlondon.org and he will sort it out.
- If you’re not sure how to fill in your form online, maybe someone in your LM can help?
- If you – or someone you know – needs a hard copy, message Chris (membership@quakersinlondon.org) and he can give you a hard copy.
Chris and others are happy to come and visit anyone at home who would like to talk all this through or get some help. The important thing is that everyone who wants to transfer their membership, does so. Ideally this should be completed by the end of the year, but we’ve found a way to make it possible to transfer latecomers in the early part of 2027 too.
Please trust the discernment of the last eight years, ‘Live Adventurously’, fill in the form and transfer your membership.
The London Development Group