Byberry Friends Meeting is at a crossroads. Over the past 7 years, a handful of our very weighty members passed away and with them years and years’ worth of operating and financial knowledge, as well as the status of being guiding Elders in the community. As a result, confusion ensued, disagreements occurred, people moved away, and several transferred their membership to Quaker Meetings out of the area. In all, we lost 12 active members in a truly short time. With only 17 members remaining (7 being active) we are left in a very precarious position. Not only do we have a congregation to stabilize and expand, but we have a five-acre property, with four historically significant buildings to maintain, as well as a sacred burial ground.
During this troubled time, we also faced two other times of challenge, one at Byberry and the other while helping-out at our neighboring Upper Dublin Meeting. At Byberry, we were made aware that a young Native American girl, Gertrude Spotted Tail, daughter of a Brulee Sioux Chief, had been laid to rest in an unmarked grave in our Byberry Friends Burial Ground circa 1883. We learned that she had died as an adolescent (while on a summer work assignment on a nearby non-Quaker farm, sent there from the Carlisle PA Indian Boarding School). Subsequently, a representative from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition came to meet with us. We gave her a tour of each building and our historic holdings. Once we were in the attic of the Schoolhouse, which is filled with natural history items, we discovered a human skull (labeled Native American) in a long-ignored corner of this attic.
As a result of these events, we ended up as the “Front page Headline” in two separate editions of the Philadelphia Inquirer. We were unprepared for the publicity of these unfortunate elements of our history, and as a small group, we were nearly devastated by the whirlwind of painful feelings within and around us. Luckily, General Secretary Christie Duncan-Tessmer connected us to Friend Boone Murphy of PYM’s First Contact Reconciliation Collaborative, who helped us understand how best to proceed. She helped guide us through several conversations with members of the Nanticoke Lenape in Southern New Jersey, a conference call with native American Leaders from around the country and, through divine grace, we welcomed Gail Spotted Tail, a living relative of Gertrude’s, to an afternoon of visiting, healing and repast. Gail has since come back and visited with us again.
During this very same time-period, a neighboring Friends Meeting, Upper Dublin, reached out to us for guidance and support during a time of conflict and pain within their membership. Fortunately, one of our meeting Elders, with decades of executive experience including international Quaker organizational leadership, was willing to step in. Unfortunately, this commitment ultimately took years of her time – and with our small numbers, we lacked “bench strength” to handle spiritual crisis after crisis easily. Although some Quaker leaders from the Yearly Meeting and Abington Quarterly Meeting tried to help the neighboring Meeting in their own way, a complete breakdown in understanding, accurate information sharing, and trust occurred among Upper Dublin Meeting members and the outside parties participating in “the conversation.” Luckily, the acute conflict is now in the past, and Upper Dublin is on an upward trend of healing, reflection, and strengthening.
Considering all of this, and faced with near-total lack of capacity, Meeting Members held a retreat in 2018 to engage with the question of whether we should “Lay Down the Meeting” and find out how to “liquidate its assets.” We knew then, that to “Save the Meeting,” a major investment of finances and people’s time would need to be made. Members decided, at that retreat, that we had real potential to revive the Meeting, and that we would “pull out all the stops” to give all possible chances of success to that growth.
From there, we hired a Consultant and Guide as we slowly began to rebuild Meeting activities. From a re-invigorated First Day School to relationship building sharing coffee/lunch after Meetings for Worship, to neighborhood outreach and engagement, we finally were starting to feel that we were on a roll. New people started attending and members stepped up to leadership roles among the Trustees and in the Meeting itself. We even were able to secure several grants to help us financially with our plans for the congregation and for the historic property.
And then COVID hit, and everything stopped. Today it is still nearly stopped, except for the construction of a modern addition to the Meetinghouse, which will be completed by June 2022. For a second time in recent years, we found “more community” when we needed it by partnering with Upper Dublin Friends Meeting.
In this new partnership, and with help from a 2022 PYM grant, we created three weekly joint Zoom Meetings for Worship, a book club, and an adult class. Our newest attenders are still coming back, and we feel optimistic that, with ongoing hybrid meetings and broadened community in our future, we are well positioned to move forward, growing our size and power, and offering a spiritual home for those seeking God’s Truth.
