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

I just sent out a mes­sage on Quak­erQuak­er about retool­ing it for the mod­ern age:

I’m not one to make New Years res­o­lu­tions most of the time but it seems as if mod­ern­iz­ing Quak­erQuak­er should be one for 2023. While it still boasts over 3,700 mem­bers, it’s built on Ning, a long-outdated and semi-abandoned plat­form that has any num­ber of frus­trat­ing tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions. Quak­erQuak­er isn’t used as much as it should be, even by its members.

Reimag­in­ing Quak­erQuak­er and set­ting up the tools to make it work will cost some mon­ey. Please con­sid­er fund­ing Quak­erQuak­er and its evo­lu­tion for 2023, either as a month­ly dona­tion or a one-time gift. Also I’m open to emails with ideas about what you’d like to see (I’m imag­in­ing some­thing that’s more mod­est but also more used).

I had a much-longer orig­i­nal draft that detailed all the rea­sons why Ning is hope­less­ly inad­e­quate in 2023 but it was nixed by my Advance­ment Direc­tor (okay, my wife as she sits next to me at the table work­ing on home­school cur­ric­u­la). Suf­fice it to say that I’ve let Quak­erQuak­er stay in a kind of sta­sis because I did­n’t want to lose some great com­ment threads. The best ones could be eas­i­ly archived. I have a day job pro­duc­ing great Quak­er con­tent but there are still ways to reboot Quak­erQuak­er and make it a use­ful des­ti­na­tion for infor­ma­tion and con­ver­sa­tion that com­ple­ments oth­er Quak­er online spaces.

The Jan­u­ary issue of Friends Jour­nal is out and the theme is “Repa­ra­tions.” It’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong list of arti­cles.

Talk­ing with some­one from anoth­er meet­ing out our respec­tive out­reach strate­gies I remem­bered my long ago blog post, The Biggest Most Vibran­ty Most Out­reachi­est Pro­gram Ever. I’m sure this must have been inspired by some grand announce­ment by Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing or Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence about some now-forgotten out­reach pro­gram with breath-taking goals. But as I work at out­reach in a local meet­ing lev­el again and talk with oth­ers doing the same, it real­ly does seem like it need­n’t be so complicated.

I’ve writ­ten a wrap-up of a car­ol­ing event this Sun­day at Crop­well Meet­ing in Marl­ton, NJ. These write-ups aren’t real­ly writ­ten for prospec­tive vis­i­tors (they can get­ting FOMO jeal­ousy from the Face­book and Insta­gram feeds) but for oth­er Friends. Crop­well is a old meet­ing but almost died out and has been recon­sti­tut­ed over the last 15 months. Every­one seems espe­cial­ly inter­est­ed in out­reach and these posts are a record of what we’re doing.

I’m cur­rent­ly in-process of for­mal­ly trans­fer­ring my mem­ber­ship from Atlantic City Area Meet­ing in Gal­loway, NJ, to Crop­well. ACAMM is a great meet­ing and seems to be doing well but Crop­well feels like a bet­ter fit for this phase of my Quak­er journey. 

Christ­mas Car­ol­ing Comes to Cropwell