How does the Spirit move among us?
Green Street Monthly Meeting has an average of 39 people attending on Sundays, including a few every week on Zoom and all the children. We frequently have visitors from other meetings and people new to Quakerism. We have had an increase in the number of applications for membership. However, we are struggling to provide pastoral care for all of our members and attenders. We are having trouble finding and supporting committee clerks and meeting officers. After a particularly difficult business meeting last fall, we now have a recording clerk for the first time in several years. We are investing in learning new ways of dealing with racial wounding in our meeting. We are grateful to Jack Drummond and O for leading us through a series of restorative conversation circles. This has become an extended process, with ups and downs. We have endured another year without a Meeting Secretary, but we have resolved our payroll tax issues and hope to hire one in the coming year.
Hospitality in the meetinghouse after meeting is well organized and attended – and it is making a difference in building community and welcoming new attenders. Zoom hospitality after worship also happens most Sundays for Friends joining remotely, hosted by a member of our worship and ministry committee who lives at a distance and regularly participates via Zoom. We are attending to wearing nametags that help us know each other’s names and making it easy to create new ones. Our google group is an important part of sharing announcements with our community. We have a new tradition of a poetry reading after worship in the spring, which has become a joy in our year. Having semi-programmed worship on fifth Sundays and special programs for Christmas and Easter and a Thanksgiving potluck is an important part of welcoming families into our community.
Worship at Green Street Monthly Meeting is a mix of silence and vocal ministry. Friends describe it as connected, ranging, quiet, tranquil, gathered, settled, uplifting, nourishing, deep and peaceful. We are considering how the arrangements of the benches and the fireplace and the zoom connections intersect and how they affect worship by the meeting and by the school under our care. We continue to explore how worshipping jointly with Germantown MM over the summer months affects our community. We took a break in 2025 and our ministry and worship committee met jointly with GMM to consider how to address patterns and incidents of racial wounding in our community. We will return in 2026 to worshipping jointly in July at GMM and in August at GSMM.
For the first time in many years/ever, we hired a First Day School Coordinator. We have a more steady preparation and coordination of our children’s religious education. We have benefited from the online Welcome to Quakerism series organized by Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting (and hosted by our clerk) to offer an introduction to Quaker faith and practice to new adult attenders at our meeting over the last year. We held a fire drill at the rise of meeting one week. Several members of our meeting have participated in community disaster preparedness trainings, both for natural disasters and for the immigration-related government-inflicted disasters in our country.
Our reparations committee continues to share the story of our $500,000 commitment from 2021 with other congregations and community members. This year, our reparative financial commitment contributed to first-time homeowner subsidies for Black households in Germantown and to the Black Music Preservation Project, which tutors Germantown black youth in learning jazz from local musicians and in STEM subjects. The committee invited Friends to a 1838 Black Metropolis “Arrivals” walking tour, and showed a documentary called “The Cost of Inheritance” followed by discussion with Sister Pat Gunn, Gullah Geechee storyteller and activist and Rep. Chris Rabb of Philadelphia. A small group has started reading together “White Work and Reparative Genealogy” by Mary Watkins.
