From Adria Gulitzia, in Autop­sy of a Deceased Church: Quak­er Edi­tion:

Think about that: since 2010, near­ly one in four Quak­er meet­ings or church­es has closed its doors. The top­ic of dying con­gre­ga­tions, and how to save them, feels urgent to me, and I’ve been unable to write much of any­thing since I read these dev­as­tat­ing numbers.

These are pre­lim­i­nary U.S. num­ber from Friends World Com­mit­tee for Con­sul­ta­tion, which does a peri­od­ic cen­sus. We need the usu­al dis­claimer that mem­ber­ship num­bers are always more a lit­tle dodgy (which FWCC read­i­ly admits) and that the pic­ture is dif­fer­ent out­side the Unit­ed States, espe­cial­ly in Evan­gel­i­cal Africa. But, how­ev­er you slice it, these are con­cern­ing numbers.

Adria promis­es a whole series of posts. I’ll be tuned in.

Autop­sy of a Deceased Church: Quak­er Edition 

A new series on the book “Autop­sy of a Deceased Church”

In the Shad­ow of Babylon 

Update: a new post has dropped, Wor­ship­ing the Past, Aban­don­ing the Future:

When con­gre­ga­tions die, it’s usu­al­ly after a slow ero­sion rather than a cat­a­clysmic event. Dur­ing that process, there are sev­er­al points when they could change direc­tions. The decline is sel­dom irre­versible. But instead of fac­ing real­i­ty and respond­ing accord­ing­ly, peo­ple use some high point in their past to jus­ti­fy why they should not change now. And so they die. 

I like Adri­a’s ques­tions at the end about focus­ing on the periph­eries of our com­mu­ni­ty. It was some­thing of a per­son­al rev­e­la­tion for me many years ago when I real­ized I should focus my out­reach efforts on the peo­ple who would be Quak­er if only they knew about us (and if only we were accom­mo­dat­ing and wel­com­ing) rather than the folks already on the benches.

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished 1/3, updat­ed 1/6