“We are each the hands, minds, hearts, and spirit of God – and of this Meeting, too. With each challenge and event — the small tasks and large — we inspire, nurture, and weave this community stronger and deeper.” CHFM Clerk Miyo Moriuchi, March 17, 2024.
WORSHIP — Worship remains the core of our experience as a Meeting community. As our Worship and Ministry Committee noted, “we are becoming a resource for a wider public interest in Quakerism, with new faces coming through the door every week. Our worship has become a mix of deeply grounded messages, unseasoned messages from new visitors, and periods of settled peace.”
Often there have been more personal messages than true ministry. This suggests that we could explore offering delicate eldering, when it seems well-led and seasoned, on how to be more spiritually grounded. We are also exploring how to foster better preparation for worship. One approach is music: for two or three mornings each month a group gathers before worship to sing together around the piano. A brief offering from the Query for each month is read on the first Sunday by the person holding care of worship. Another offering of a monthly Bible study time was laid aside during this past year, due to the weight of life demands on the person who had been anchoring it.
We also yearn that more Friends attend our Meetings for Worship with Attention to Business. On our third First Days of the month, 60 or more may come to worship, but only 18 remain for business. We seek ways we might increase attendance to get more members and attenders of our Meeting involved in this important process which undergirds our Meeting’s practical, spiritual and communal life.
One First Day early in the year, the heat in the meeting room failed, so we moved worship to our social room on a bright and snowy morning . We found this change to lead towards a less grounded but still warm and connected time together: more like worship sharing. We are also grateful to our Property Committee for dealing effectively with the heating issue.
During 2024 we held four memorial meetings for worship. Such events bring significant needs to be met in the midst of grieving, and we find they work best when the work is coordinated among the relevant committees: e.g. Worship and Ministry holding care of worship; Care and Counsel and Hospitality coordinating what may be helpful for family members and for a reception following the meeting for worship.
As the national elections approached last fall, we worried that the volume and tone of ministry during worship would reflect people’s anxieties. But our worship has remained for the most part deep and largely centered. Messages about the state of the world felt more grounded in love and seeking for guidance than in anxiety. However, there was grief and disappointment at the election’s outcome. And this has led to deep soul searching for appropriate actions – both individually and as a spiritual community.
COMMUNITY — We have continued a rich series of Adult Class offerings twice a month, drawing on both local Friends and outside speakers. These experiences build a stronger sense of connection among those attending. Another approach is a new Childrens’ Committee formed within the First day School as a way of introducing our children (now mostly in the primary grades) to Quaker committee procedures and decision-making. Yet a third approach is having fun together. At the end of the dark winter, we enjoyed a three-hour, three-ring evening event attracting 50 people: chili dinner, outrageous talent show, and energetic dance party (especially for the kids).
We have the rare opportunity among Friends Meetings, of housing a James Turrell SkySpace and hosting regular showings. The experience of a showing can provide a chance for some who participate to become interested in attending a meeting for worship. Others are drawn to visit out of curiosity, or because they remember silent worship they experienced at a Friends school, or because they seek connection with a grounded community in the face of what is happening in our world with its political and climate issues and wars. Many of these visitors, including young adults and families, have returned to become more frequent or regular attenders and, increasingly, part of our community. In 2024 we held two Seeker Gatherings and launched a number of “Friendly 8s” groups that helped people get better acquainted as they shared about themselves, including their religious journeys.
We are blessed to have a “deep bench” of spiritual skills among us, including several noted Quaker authors and Friends who serve key positions in various Friends organizations. We also benefit from innovators, such as our Climate Action subcommittee who kept before us the long-term climate crisis facing humanity and got our attention with vegetarian snacks and weekly sustainability hikes. We have supported two individuals living into their ministries. Eileen Flanagan’s minute of religious service has been renewed, and she is completing a book on global climate change and its spiritual implications. Katy Hawkins offers weekly classes and workshops exploring a Quaker approach to mind/body integration, drawing people from the neighborhood to share in the serenity of our meetinghouse.
Once again (as we have been doing since the early 1990s) we offered summer hospitality to an unhoused family through Family Promise. We remain one of the few faith communities in Northwest Philadelphia who are able to do this. It was particularly moving when the father in this family came often to worship with us and then served as photographer for our Centennial picnic.
The year 2024 marked our Meeting’s Centennial as a worshipping community. So far, our activities to celebrate this milestone have produced a 100-year history publication, a set of illustrated poster panels by decade, a wonderful family-oriented picnic, and several follow-up activities still planned in 2025, including a retreat to map out our Meeting’s future. This anniversary has also provided an opportunity to refresh our entrance sign and buy some new benches for our landscape.
Our meeting seeks to build and strengthen our far-flung community in these fraught times. Happily, we are blessed to have both numerous visitors (a good number of whom return and become embedded in our community life) and many seasoned Friends, some of whom are more able to engage because of our hybrid worship.
COMMUNICATIONS — This remains a challenge in our electronic age. Two members faithfully produce our monthly newsletter, but more of us need to read and use all the wonderful information it contains. Hybrid Zoom technology has been a challenge to set up and run during Meeting for Worship as well as Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business. It has been challenging to find an adequate microphone and has also required hours of training of a team of people who can be our “connector” each week, along with frequent adjustments and trouble-shooting activities. Fewer people are worshipping on Zoom than used it during the pandemic, but we continue to average around ten Zoom attendees each week, and we are committed to welcoming those who are at a distance or faced with disability issues.
In the meeting room as well there are challenges: people with hearing difficulties can have trouble hearing messages and announcements at times. Other weekly challenges include keeping announcements brief, not overburdening the newsletter editors, and supporting committee initiatives when time is constrained. In good Quaker fashion, an hoc committee was formed – a team spanning several committees – to look comprehensively at how to maintain and use the hybrid technology, as well as being in liaison with our Worship and Ministry committee, to continue to address all these communication issues.
COLLABORATION — There has been good collaboration between and among our committees. The occasional Seekers Meetings are conducted by both the Worship & Ministry and Outreach Committees. Worship and Ministry and Care and Counsel seek to meet once annually to explore an issue or need which can involve both committees, such as the death of someone in the meeting’s family or how to handle an emergency. In the winter and spring of 2023-24, the Peace & Social Concerns Committee offered a series of 12 classes about our global climate and environment to our First Day School – and they were accepted with joy. In some cases, people who serve on two committees at once provide important liaisons.
Many Friends have been distressed by the Hamas attack on Israelis, and the response of Israel’s relentless and continuing bombing of Gaza. The meeting sponsored two talks on the
conflict and a worship experiment on how James Turrell’s “Greet the Light” guides us in shifting our perspective, in ways that might help us get out of interpersonal gridlock. A few community members tried to organize ongoing opportunities to pray for peace, but with less response than hoped. The meeting also hosted a training on being a peacekeeper in the streets in coordination with an interfaith peace walk organized by a local rabbi. A good number from our community participated.
We also shared our meetinghouse with several Quaker groups on retreat, holding a large annual gathering, or simply visiting to learn more about Friends. These groups included PYM’s Young Adult Friends, Quaker Youth Leaders (from six Friends schools), Ujima Monthly Meeting along with the Fellowship of Friends of African Descent, and classes from Penn Charter School.
In conclusion, we have often noticed that even our pragmatic, everyday activities — such as library work, landscaping, making name tags, offering the microphone to those wishing to speak during worship, managing the budget, tending to the kitchen, building a new website, teaching First Day School classes, writing “postcards to the powers” or power-washing the Social Room floor after each weekend’s activities — are usually conducted with a sense of gratitude, willingness and spirit-led community-building. The warm handshake at the door, smiles while doing kitchen clean-up, the care Nominating takes in building committees — all such tasks reflect grounded and grateful attention to our shared work.
One wise elder observed at the time of the national elections, “We are fed more deeply when we encourage ourselves to connect our ministry to Spirit rather than staying at the level of our worldly thoughts. Trust the power of the silence to bring us to a deeper connection to Spirit. Spiritual messages that come from a deeper place will speak more effectively to the things in the world that we are most concerned about.”
