Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting
Spiritual State of the Meeting Report — 2024
In a world experiencing many interlinked crises and challenges, how are we led to live and to act?
Query: How is spirit moving in our Meeting? In our worship? How have we nurtured deep, Spirit-led vocal ministry in worship?
To describe how God/Spirit is moving in our Meeting is difficult, because a significant number among us would honor the essential mystery at the core of life by not even attempting to find words to answer this question. At the same time, there is a growing certainty among some CPMM members that when we are drawn more closely together as a community, we can be confident that Spirit/God is at work.
Out of a concern for the quality of corporate worship coming out of the pandemic, Worship and Ministry Committee members wrote personal statements about how they prepare for and center into worship, with one person sharing their own message at the beginning of worship every few weeks. The variety of approaches was thought-provoking and contributed to deepening worship. These written statements have been shared broadly with the wider Friends community through Friends Journal and Thee Quaker podcasts, and some of our members refer back to them for guidance and inspiration as they deepen their preparation for their own worship experience.
Hybrid worship (including in-person and Zoom attendance both) challenges us and expands our community. We are challenged to attend to Spirit in a changing culture that includes technology. We have sought diligently to upgrade equipment with support from Friends Center and grants from the Tyson Fund and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. We have hired staff and have processes in place to handle the rare moments when the technology doesn’t work. Zoom accommodates those who cannot attend in-person due to distance, illness or mobility issues. For some, it is a joy to be connected at all, and some attest to experiencing grounded worship and connection over Zoom. But for others, worship over Zoom can feel isolating.
We are living in the tension between inclusive welcome and the bumpiness that comes with new attenders with a wide range of understandings of vocal ministry. We perceive our Meeting as being tested and matured: our ability to welcome those among us who don’t conform to normative patterns of behavior needs to continue to deepen and grow.
Query: How have we fostered an environment in which members and attenders of all ages and abilities know they are loved, cared for, trusted, and respected?
— Do we extend the same invitation when it comes to participating in the work of our meeting, e.g. in regards to committees and Meeting for Business?
Hybrid worship is one of the ways we demonstrate care and love to members of our Meeting community. We continue to offer breakout groups for online fellowship following the worship hour to those on Zoom, as well as offering more substantial food and drink during fellowship hour in the meetinghouse.
Attenders and Outreach Committee has been increasingly active, visible and welcoming. We have continued to experience the blessing of a large number of young adult attenders.
Membership Care Committee has been reaching out to members who have not been attending worship recently. The committee is also working on a minute of support for transgender people. (It is helpful that Friends Center, where our meeting house is located, now has well-marked all-gender restrooms.) Membership Care Committee has also sponsored “chat’n’chew” lunches during fellowship hour, with a query posted at each table to start conversation. Periodic game nights, hymn singing and round singing gatherings help build our Meeting community.
Additionally, we have hired a new Youth Religious program leader who provides a First Day program twice a month for children. It is a joy to once again have children coming into the worship room to share what they have learned.
The Reparations Ad Hoc Working Group, under the umbrella of our Racial Healing and Wholeness Committee, has also drawn some newer attenders into deep engagement with the Meeting’s work.
Over this past year, our ad hoc Working Group on Work (WOW) has proposed a redesign of our committee structure, to reduce the total number of committees and replace them with a structure intended to allow for greater flexibility, nimbleness and responsiveness. Reaction to the proposal had been strong and quite mixed. We find ourselves currently in the wilderness, halfway between the old structure and something new, which we are still searching for. In the meantime, we are trying to engage more assertively in building relationships with attenders, inviting and attracting them into the work of the meeting through deeper conversation and real friendship.
We are grateful to note attendance at our hybrid Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business, which is open to attenders, is now higher than pre-COVID.
We feel the need to do much better in giving clear and consistent information about how members and attenders can become more involved in activities and committees.
Query: How have we sought to be neighbors and in relationship with other communities, and how have we been changed by these connections?
We enjoy good relationships with our two equity partners at Friends Center – American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) – as well as with Friends Child Care Center, and the various Quaker-related and -adjacent non-profit organizations which occupy our shared campus. We also now share the campus with Friends Select’s Upper School, housed in the 1520 Race Street building, which they have creatively renovated. Several CPMM members serve on the Friends Select School and Friend Center Boards.
Our relationship with Friends Select feels stronger. Under Michael Gary’s leadership, the school has turned toward increasing direct engagement with the city, including answering some of the city’s educational needs and responding to the unhoused people in Center City. These new emphases have reduced the dissonance some Meeting members had felt between Meeting and school.
As a Meeting, we provide annual financial support to Ujima Friends Peace Center. We are also one of the sponsoring meetings for the Philadelphia House of Quaker Voluntary Service.
A ministry carried by one of our members engages with healing trauma and providing the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) and Non-Violent Communication programs in the Grays Ferry neighborhood. They are preparing to open a Healing Arts Center to serve that community and others nearby.
The Friends Southwestern Burial Ground, under the care of our Meeting and Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia (MMFP), provides burial services to many Philadelphia faith communities.
Several members of CPMM have engaged for years with POWER Interfaith, a social justice organization bringing together many congregations in the Philadelphia region. As those who have been active with POWER move on to other things, there have not emerged new persons who feel this can be added to their present commitments.
Our committee managing the White-Richardson Fund provides grants each year to organizations providing educational opportunities to Black children and youth and to children of color.
Several Friends have expressed the hope that rather than reach out to more of our neighbors and other communities, that we could deepen and build upon the relationships we already have, such as Ujima Friends Peace Center.
Query: How have we been called to address issues of social justice, racism, inclusivity and difference, both within our meeting and in the wider world?
We ask ourselves: How would our lives be different if we were able to receive the support we need to be released from internal and external oppression? If we were to nurture our imaginations, and the love we’re already doing, what would it be like then? What would we be doing differently?
For 15 to 20 years, the Racial Healing and Wholeness Committee has supported CPMM in addressing institutional and structural racism, implicit bias and white privilege in our Meeting and the Quaker world. CPMM funded the opportunity for 10 members and attenders to take part in a four-day workshop on “Creating a Culture of Reparations,” offered by the City of Philadelphia in January 2023.
The Reparations ad hoc Working Group which arose from that experience has been a center of high energy in our Meeting since its inception, working to change our Meeting’s culture to engage with Reparations. We are now on the cusp of discernment as a body on whether and how to engage in Reparations.
The Racial Healing and Wholeness committee sponsors an ongoing support group for white members and attenders wishing to address their own implicit bias and privilege. The committee sponsors workshops and retreats for the Meeting, addressing these issues from various directions.
Our Gifts and Leadings Committee provides steady attention and support to members through lifting the meeting up in prayer to see who might benefit from the committee’s support, clearness committees for discernment, and nurturing of gifts and Spiritual Accountability Groups for those carrying ministries on behalf of the Meeting. Some of these ministers are:
– One Friend has for years carried the ministry of helping the Religious Society of Friends to become more welcoming and inclusive of Black Friends and Friends of Color. She has traveled extensively to present and facilitate programs.
– Another Friend carries the ministry “Love and Respect Transform: Alternatives to Violence,” which addresses trauma and gun violence in the Grays Ferry neighborhood and is opening a Healing Arts Center.
– Another Friend carries a ministry of supporting Quakers, translation of Quaker publications, and Alternatives to Violence Project in Russia and Ukraine.
– Another Friend serves as clerk of PYM’s Middle East Collaborative, and has been bringing to our attention the AFSC Apartheid-Free Communities Initiative.
– Another Friend is working to share the message of Quakerism over the internet through Thee Quaker podcast, as well as a daily Quaker message and a project to make video portraits of monthly meetings.
We have done education on the Israel-Palestine war, adopted a minute calling for ceasefire in Gaza and Israel, and donated funding to AFSC to support their peace work. We have hosted Right Sharing of World Resources for a dinner and workshop, and secured donations for them at that event.
We welcomed Andrew Grant from New England Yearly Meeting to present on the history of Quaker involvement with Indigenous Boarding Schools. We are starting to explore this history, reworking our Land Acknowledgement Statement and exploring how to partner with Lenape people.
Our Membership Care Committee is preparing a Minute of Support for transgender people. Our Library Committee recently shared a presentation on books banned for their content concerning Black history and LGBTQ people.
Our Finance Advisory Committee has researched the possibility of putting more of our Meeting funds into Impact Investing, which would benefit our local community, make funding available for Black- and POC-owned businesses, and serve low-income parts of the city.
Our Friends Center facility and communications arrangements have been accessible and welcoming to those with physical disabilities, including ease of wheelchair access in our worship room, and using Zoom for hybrid Meeting for Worship.
Query: How has the Spirit guided our work on climate change?
– Does the Meeting acknowledge the inextricable link between climate change and racial justice? Are we holding these two goals simultaneously?
A number of our members are active in Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT), PYM’s Eco-Justice Collaborative and Quaker Action Mid-Atlantic Region. They regularly bring reports to the Peace and Social Concerns Committee and the Meeting.
– One Friend is highly involved in legislative efforts and keeps our community informed.
– Another is a current co-clerk of the EQAT board.
– A third Friend has organized periodic “climate change potlucks,” where members meet to share what they are doing or planning individually to reduce household carbon emissions and to inform and inspire one another.
CPMM has not appointed a Climate Witness Liaison.
We are an equity partner in Friends Center, which has been a fossil fuel-free facility for about 20 years, and which is currently planning to expand its solar system and install an EV charging station.
We have donated funds to Quaker Action Mid-Atlantic Region, which advocates for action at the state level to address the Climate Crisis and the strangulation of our Pennsylvania legislature by the fossil fuel industry. We have also donated funds to support solar in low-income communities, and to relieve food insecurity.
Our Finance Advisory Committee’s exploration of Impact Investments is laying the groundwork for the Meeting to align our investments more closely with ecojustice and racial justice. We are currently invested in the Philadelphia Reinvestment Fund and Philly Impact Fund and are moving toward investing more of our funds in these and other impact investment funds.
How are we seeking ways we can love one another – all human beings, all life – better, and share the care and support that all of us need?
No one among us doubts that – in spite of the privilege we enjoy – the dominant culture in our country is oppressive in many ways. As a sign of our integrity as Quakers, we need to be transformed: From a norm of reacting from our own woundedness, to recognizing we are communally wounded, oppressed, encumbered and trapped in various ways within the current systems of thinking. These current systems are based on domination, inequality, scarcity and “winner-take-all.”
We aspire to stop engaging in patterns which perpetuate our culture’s oppression. As a community, we recognize the need for us to do soul-searching work to liberate ourselves from oppressive patterns which facilitate harm to others and to ourselves. We aim to support one another in moving toward liberation. Some of the activities we have described above illustrate how we are attempting to do this.
We believe it can be possible for us to overcome our sense of “scarcity” and of constant hurry. It is a myth that we lack enough time and energy to do all that seems needed. Many of us are helped by setting aside time for Quakerly discernment, which allows us to identify which areas of our lives rightly require our greatest attention, so that we may de-emphasize other things.
We believe that the Quaker way has tools which can help us to go deeper as individuals, and as a community.
