First up in our features is Joann Neuroth’s “Putting Our Money Where Our Hearts Are,” a look at how her meeting in Lansing, Michigan, took seemingly tiny steps that have grown into signifiant community outreach and investment.

When we catch our breath to add it all up, we realize that the volunteers who “feed the pantry” daily have put $11,000 of food in that box each year. It feels a bit like loaves and fishes! Where did it come from, one grocery bag at a time? We are pretty sure anyone proposing an $11,000 program back in 2020 would have been quickly set straight about limits to our capacity. But one can of soup at a time, we have truly surprised ourselves.

How Meetings Use Money

January 2025

Friends Journal

Finally, we might see dying meetings disinvest from their First Day School programs, as the needs of parents and children are tacitly acknowledged to be in competition with those of settled older adults. Those with power and longevity in the community ensure that their needs keep getting met, while increasingly neglecting those they are called to serve—children, those new to our faith, people in prison, people with disabilities and people who are struggling financially.

Friends instead spend their dwindling resources on internal priorities and the expenses associated with keeping a meetinghouse well-warmed, well-lit and well cared-for—even if there’s nobody in it.

When doing outreach, you have to focus less about the people in the meetinghouse and more on the people who would be joining if they knew we existed and were welcomed in. So too, I think, for our priorities in a shrinking meeting. It’s easy to turn inward and just keep the status-quo rolling. I see meetings in well-populated areas that are shrinking and not doing what they need to do to be more visible in their local community.

Turning Our Resources Inward

Dying churches use their resources for their own comfort, rather than to serve others.

In the Shadow of Babylon

As far as I know, the final settlement in that case was never made public. In a larger sense, the “final settlement” demanded by God’s grace and justice will never be measured in dollars, but there is something satisfying about knowing that money was involved: almost nothing slices through pious misdirection or sophistry like cold cash. But it’s also true that cash doesn’t cut deeply enough.

I’m still unconvinced we’re all doing enough to bring daylight to skeletons in our closets or healing to victims. Lawsuits make everyone clam up, yet they too often seem to be the only mechanism for shedding light on the situation in the first place.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/02/trustworthy-part-one-cost-of-betrayal.html

This is a prediction for 2019 and beyond: The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free. The value comes not just what they’re buying, but who they’re buying it from and who gets to enjoy it.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/

Penn was a man of paradoxical qualities. He espoused a radically egalitarian Quaker theology, insisting that something divine resided within each individual, yet he owned slaves on his American estate. He praised representative institutions such as parliament and the jury system, but spent years in hiding for his loyalty to an absolutist king. ‘I am like to be an adopted American,’ he wrote shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania in 1682, but spent only four of his remaining 36 years there. And he was chronically incapable of managing money, spending eight months in an English debtors’ prison in his 60s, even while his colony quickly became a commercial success.

https://aeon.co/ideas/hes-not-the-guy-on-quaker-oats-hes-much-more-interesting

As Quakers, we seek to live out our faith through everyday actions, including the choices we make about where to put our money. We believe strongly in the power of legitimate, nonviolent, democratic tools such as morally responsible investment to realise positive change in the world. We want to make sure our money and energies are instead put into places which support our commitments to peace, equality and justice.

As you’d might expect, there’s been backlash. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has condemned Britain Yearly Meeting’s decision as a “biased and petulant act.”.

Quakers will not profit from the occupation of Palestine

Quakers in Britain has today become the first church in the UK to announce it will not invest…

Quakers

She’s being given the award for her “fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community,” according to a statement from the prize board. Bell Burnell told the BBC she plans to give all of her prize money to women, ethnic minorities and refugee students aiming to become physics researchers. 

You can read more about Bell Burnell on her Quakers in the World page.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/07/jocelyn-bell-burnells-1967-nobel-pulsars-breakthrough-prize-science/1220936002/

Tip of the hat to Doug Bennett for the suggestion and links.

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!

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Friends Journal