Yearly Meeting is an occasion when the concerns of one group of Friends or another can be shared with the meeting as a whole, as it seeks God’s guidance and relates each particular insight or service to the others brought before it. At different stages of its history its agenda and pattern have been built up in different ways. There was a time when the main exercise related to ‘the state of the Society’ as revealed by the answers to the queries or, after written replies were discontinued, by triennial reports from quarterly meetings. The twentieth century witnessed a considerable growth in the number of standing committees of the Yearly Meeting and Meeting for Sufferings, and in their size and work, and increasingly the agenda of Yearly Meeting was built up round their concerns. An Agenda Committee (6.18) is charged with the duty of considering and deciding upon the business to be put before the Yearly Meeting.