On a day-to-day basis my biggest struggle – if I’m finding it hard to find the words – is over whether I need to wait for inspiration to come, or whether I’m just being lazy and underprepared. Whether I’m letting fear or procrastination stop me. The Quaker method has a lot to say to that. You know, you wait in silence and if it doesn’t come then it doesn’t come. But also you have to be disciplined, and prepared, for that to work

https://thefriend.org/article/my-ministry-is-the-jokes-and-kittens

• 1937, 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 from Quakers World Wide: A History of FWCC by Herbert Hadley in 1991 (many thanks to FWCC’s Robin Mohr for a scan of the relevant chart).
• 1972, 1992 from Earlham School of Religion’s The Present State of Quakerism, 1995, archived here.
• 2002 on from FWCC directly. Note: Current 2017 map.

Friends in the U.S. and Canada:

• 1937: 114,924
• 1957: 122,663
• 1967: 122,780
• 1972: 121,380
• 1977: 119,160
• 1987: 109,732
• 1992: 101,255
• 2002: 92,786
• 2012: 77,660
• 2017: 81,392

Friends in Americas (North, Middle South):

• 1937: 122,166
• 1957: 131,000
• 1967: 129,200
• 1977: 132,300
• 1987: 139,200
• 2017: 140,065

You could write a book about what these numbers do and don’t mean. The most glaring omission is that they don’t show the geographic or theological shifts that took place over time. Midwestern Friends have taken a disproportionate hit, for example, and many Philadelphia-area meetings are much smaller than they were a century ago, while independent meetings in the West and/or adjacent to colleges grew like wildflowers mid-century.

My hot take on this is that the reunification work of the early 20th century gave Quakers a solid identity and coherent structure. Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years from 1952 is a remarkably confident document. In many areas, Friends became a socially-progressive, participatory religious movement that was attractive to people tired of more creedal formulations; mixed-religious parents came looking for First-day school community for their children. Quakers’ social justice work was very visible and attracted a number of new people during the antiwar 1960s¹ and the alternative community groundswell of the 1970s. These various newcomers offset the decline of what we might call “ethnic” Friends in rural meetings through this period.

That magic balance of Quaker culture matching the zeitgeist of religious seekers disappeared somewhere back in the 1980s. We aren’t on forefront of any current spiritual trends. While there are bright spots and exceptions ², we’ve largely struggled with retaining newcomers in recent years. We’re losing our elders more quickly than we’re bringing in new people, hence the forty percent drop since the high water of 1987. The small 2017 uptick might be a good sign³ or it may be a statistical phantom.⁴ I’ll be curious to see what the next census brings.

2023 Update: I seem to have mixed up some numbers in my original 2018 post and have corrected them above.

How we spend money is often a telling indicator of what values we really value. Money is not just a matter of financial statements and investment strategies. It’s children program. It’s local soup kitchens. It’s the town peace fair. It’s the accessible bathroom or hearing aid system. And how we discuss and discern and fight over money is often a test of our commitment to Quaker values.

Here’s some of the specific issues we’ve brainstormed for the issue.

Where does our money come from? A lot of Quaker wealth is locked up in endowments started by “dead Quaker money”—wealth bequeathed by Quakers of centuries past.

Much of our American Quaker fortunes trace back to a large land grant given in payment for war debt. For the first century or so, this wealth was augmented by slave labor. Later Quaker enterprises were augmented by capital from these initial wealth sources.

In times past, there were well-known Quaker family businesses and wealthy Quaker industrialists. But American capitalism has changed: families rarely own medium- or large-scale businesses; they own stocks in firms run by a professional managers. If the ability to run businesses based on Quaker values is over, is shareholder activism our closest analogue?

Many Friends now work in service fields. Family life has also changed, and the (largely female) free labor of one-income households is no longer available to support Quaker endeavors as readily. How have all of these changes affected the finances of our denomination and the ability to live out our values in the workplace?

How do we support our members? A personal anecdote: some years ago I unexpectedly lost my job. It was touch and go for awhile whether we’d be able to keep up with mortgage payments; losing our house was a real possibility. Members of a nearby non-Quaker church heard that there was a family in need and a few days later a stranger showed up on our back porch with a dozen bags of groceries and new winter coats for each of us. When my Friends meeting heard, I was told there was a committee that I could apply to that would consider whether it might help.

Where does the money go? A activist Friend of mine use to point to the nice furnishings in our meetinghouse and chuckle about how many good things we could fund in the community if we sold some of it off. Has your meeting liquidated any of its property for community service?

When we do find ourselves with extra funds from a bequest or windfall, where do we spend it? How do we balance our needs (such as meetinghouse renovations, scholarships for Quaker students), and when and how do we give it to others in our community?

What can we let go of? There are a lot of meetinghouses in more rural areas that are mostly empty these days, even on First Day. Could we ever decide we don’t need all of these spaces? Could we consolidate? Or could we go further and sell our properties and start meeting at a rented space like a firehall or library once a week?

Who gets the meetinghouse after a break-up? In the last few years we’ve seen three major yearly meetings split apart, prompting a whole mess of financial disentanglement. What happens to the properties and summer camps and endowments when this happens? How fiercely are we willing to fight fellow Friends over money?

What conversations aren’t we having? Where do we invest our corporate savings? Who decides how we spend money in our meetings?

Please feel free to share this with any Friend who might have interesting observations about Friends’ attitudes toward finances!

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

If you’re swept up in a net, you’re off balance; you don’t have the same certainty about yourself and your surroundings as you did before. Part of what it means to be gathered is that uncertainty, that trust in something even if you don’t fully understand it.

https://theanarchyoftheranters.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/the-difference-between-a-gathered-meeting-and-a-focused-meeting‑2/

Friends don’t have a particularly good track record with regards to controversy. There’s no reason we need to pretend to be talking historically. We’ve had two major yearly meetings break up in this summer (meet Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting and North Carolina Fellowship of Friends), with at least one more “at bat” for some future long hot summer.

Controversies flare up in many places. Friend Sa’ed Atshan just broke his media silence to talk about the cancelation of his talk at Friends’ Central School in February and the subsequent walk-outs, firings, and litigations. The controversy around Avis Wanda McClinton’s disownment by Upper Dublin Meeting continues to incense large numbers of Philadelphia Friends, with fuel to the fire coming from the role that the Undoing Racism Group does or doesn’t have in the yearly meeting structure. Last year a majority of Friends of color boycotted public events at the FGC Gathering over frustration at the site selection process and the underlying issues extend to other Quaker venues.

The most-commented recent article in Friends Journal is “It Breaks My Heart” by Kate Pruitt from the online June/July issue. Many readers related to her sense of alienation and loss. Two comments that hit me the hardest were:

Not all Friends are found in Quaker Meetings. You’re better off without your meeting.

Gone now is the hope… of finding community among Quakers. To be frank, why bother? There’s plenty of brokenness right where I am.

And I get enough “Why I’m leaving Friends” manifestos in my email inbox every month that I could turn it into a regular Friends Journal column.

It seems to me that are a number of underlying issues that tie these controversies together. What do we do when a group of Friends starts acting in a manner that seems contrary to our understanding of Quaker testimonies and practices? How do we balance love and judgement when conflict arises among us? When do we break out of Quaker niceness? Maybe even more challenging, how do we maintain our integrity and accountability when controversy breaks us into camps willing to engage in exaggeration? And just what do we say when the outside public only gets half the story or thinks that one side is speaking for all Friends?

So this is a plug for submissions for December’s Friends Journal.  The theme is “Conflict and Controversy” and the submission deadline is September 9. We’re not looking for blow-by-blow accounts of being mistreated, and we’re not terribly interested (this time) in manifestos about Quaker cultural norms. I’m less interested in specific issues than I am the meta of discernment: How do individuals or small groups of Friends move forward in the heat of controversy. What do we do when the easy solutions have failed? How do we decide when it’s time to break out of Quaker niceness to lay down some truth—or time to kick the dust off your sandals and move along?

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

I interviewed her by phone from my back porch on a snowy day and very much enjoyed conversation. I’m fascinated by the challenges of an organization like AFSC—one that has to balance strong roots in a religious tradition while largely working outside of it. How do you balancing the conflicting identities? It’s not unlike the challenge of a Friends school like Ramallah’s.

I was also particularly moved by the genuine enthusiasm in her voice as she talked about engaging in honest conversations with people with whom we have strong disagreements. In this polarized age, it’s tempting to try to stay in the safety our bubbles. Joyce seems to thrive stepping out of that comfort zone:

I think we’ve learned from this last U.S. election that we need to listen more. This can often be a challenge for people who are very passionate about the positions they take. Sometimes the passion is so overwhelming that it sort of overrides that willingness to listen to other narratives. This is something that we really need to work much harder on. Truth is always incomplete. We always have to look for other truths. We need to break through some of these boundaries that we’ve put around ourselves and seek a wider spectrum of perspectives.

I think AFSC will be in good hands with Ajlouny.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

The day before Martin Luther King was murdered he said, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” We must have this same desire if we are going to survive the fear and violence and mass confusion of our time. And we should be as unabashed about letting people know that it is our religious faith that motivates us, regardless of the setting or the consequences.

Many peace activists are driven by religious motivations, which is often all that keeps them going through all the hard times and non-appreciation. Yet we often present ourselves to the world in a secular way using rational arguments.

It took me a few years to really admit to myself that Nonviolence.org is a ministry intimately connected with my Quaker faith. In the eight years it’s been going, thousands of websites have sprung up with good intentions and hype only to disappear into oblivion (or the internet equivalent, the line reading “Last updated July 7, 1997”). I have a separate forum for “Quaker religious and peace issues” [which later became the general QuakerRanter blog] In my essay on the Quaker peace testimony, I worry that modern religious pacifists have spent so much effort convincing the world that pacifism makes sense from a strictly rationalist viewpoint that we’ve largely forgotten our own motivations. Don’t get me wrong: I think pacifism also makes sense as a pragmatic policy; while military solutions might be quicker, pacifism can bring about the long-term changes that break the cycle of militarism. But how can we learn to balance the sharing of both our pragmatic and religious motivations?