Steven Davison looks at a proposal to record members at the yearly meeting level:
without meaningful pastoral care, regular worship, spiritual nurture, and a fellowship that goes deeper than just three annual meetings could provide, what does “membership” mean? All that’s left is Quaker identity and a sense of belonging to the unique spiritual community that is New York Yearly Meeting. To me, that’s a half-baked Quaker life.
Sierra-Cascades YM records members at the YM level. One or two dozen or so people became members at their Annual Sessions in May. These were generally people who had been members elsewhere, but with the split from NWYM, their memberships were lost.
It’s something I know I’ve heard YAFs in BYM talk about wanting. And I wanted it too, especially when I was in college. It didn’t make sense to me to become a member of Friends Meeting of Washington, when I was going to graduate in a year and possibly move to who-knows-what city. I could more readily commit to Quakers in the mid-Atlantic region than to Quakers in a particular neighborhood of a city that takes an hour to cross.