Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting
Philadelphia Quarter
Spiritual State of the Meeting Report for 2023
March 2024
In many essentials, the spiritual state of our meeting has continued in much the same flow as the previous year. Our attendance has been good and has included a steady stream of newcomers, whose presence has increasingly brought a fresh perspective into our midst.
How is Spirit moving in your worship, and how have you nurtured deep, Spirit-led vocal ministry?
Our meetings for worship continue to offer attendance through Zoom as well as in person, reiterating our commitment to providing a “hybrid” option long-term, which allows people with health, disability, or distance issues to join us in worship. Vocal ministry is at times less grounded or more personal than we may hope for, but it often brings us beautiful and sustaining depth of sharing and spiritual insight. Our business meetings continue to be grounded by a sitting elder.
Spiritual growth is supported through several Friendship Groups who meet regularly, as well as through the work of the Outreach Committee, which offers ways to learn more about what it means to be a Friend, including through Seekers’ Meetings in which community members are invited to share their spiritual journeys with newer comers. Our Adult Class Committee offers two sessions per month preceding worship, engaging community members in conversation about faith, current social issues, and activism.
How have you fostered an environment in which members and attenders of all ages and abilities know they are loved, cared for, trusted, and respected?
We are blessed with attendance and movement toward membership by several families with young children, and our nursery and First Day School programs provide resources and receive lovely blessings as we serve their needs.
We seek ongoing, effective ways to make our meeting accessible physically as well as socially.
How have you sought to be neighbors and in relationship with other communities, and how have you been changed by these connections?
Neighbors and other visitors come into our space for showings of James Turrell’s Skyspace, in which our worship room is transformed by constantly changing light and color in a way that redefines our perception of the natural sky. Those who come to see this extraordinary visual and spiritual experience sometimes return to worship with us in the manner of Friends.
Our Meeting cares for the ministry of our member Katy Hawkins with a support group and by hosting her weekly classes in our space, along with her workshops and social justice benefits. Shiné: Mind/Body/Spirit is a practice space for whole-self integration that brings many newcomers to the meeting, both spiritual seekers and activists. The embodied practices that Katy teaches are aligned with liberatory work seeking to heal the dissociation from feeling that pervades our culture and undergirds white supremacy and oppression.
Our meetinghouse has continued to serve as a polling place, a venue for various family and social gatherings, and a regular meeting space for 12-step groups and community education classes. This year we were gratified to host young adult Friends in our Yearly Meeting, and we regularly welcome visits by classes from Penn Charter School who are learning more about Quaker places and practices. All of these connections energize us and widen our perspectives.
How have you been called to address issues of social justice, inclusivity, and difference, both within your meeting and in the wider world?
Our efforts to address issues of racism and awareness of living on stolen land continue, if slowly, to open our minds and hearts to the transformative work we are called to undertake.
Through our partnership with Family Promise (formerly PIHN) we continue to offer part of our meetinghouse space as temporary housing to a family in transition toward stability. In so doing, we learn, in an ongoing way, from the courage and persistence of the people to whom we can offer a waystation in their journey.
Over the past decade, our work in social justice (for example, around refugee support, against racism, and in hosting families in housing transition) has served to educate us, build our community, and (we hope) make a difference in our world. In recent years, however, we seem to be in a somewhat fallow period for communal work for social justice, although many of our members pursue this work individually. Recently we have heard from our members an expression of longing to revive our communal engagement in social action. Some challenges we face to meet this need are:
• finding a cause that inspires us as a community as well as specific actions that are both achievable and effective,
• identifying leadership with both passion and organizational skills,
• coordinating resources and efforts across multiple relevant committees, and
• engaging the interest and energy of a critical mass of our community while individuals already feel stretched and challenged by their work in the meeting as well as their personal lives.
How has the Spirit guided your work on climate change?
We continue to hear and support with gratitude of the work of Eileen Flanagan, our member whose ministry around climate justice and activism we support through a minute of religious service. In addition, our Peace & Social Concerns Committee works hard to keep abreast of local, regional, and statewide climate-related projects and initiatives, supporting some of them through our meeting’s annual grants and donations. It is hard to steer Friends to new ways when the current standards of American life still rely largely on fossil fuels, plastics, and increased resource consumption. So far, Spirit has not led us to collective action on climate.
In which areas does your meeting have particular concerns or need for support from the yearly meeting?
We have seen an increased number of practical challenges as we reach the 10-year anniversary of our new meetinghouse. For example, our heating system has not proven reliable, sometimes leaving our worship room unheated in cold weather over the past two years. Twice this winter we have had to move worship to our social room, where we were grateful to discover that worship continued to be well grounded. We trust our Property Committee to find an effective solution for this problem, but we also anticipate needing discernment in the coming year around what investment may be needed in our building and its systems.
Creating and maintaining the hybrid option for worship, adult classes, and our other programs since the pandemic has taken constant attention from many Friends. Although we can easily manage equipment costs, the costs on Friends’ time are significant, and this may be why some feel that they don’t have the energy to work on other projects.
Among the challenges we face is that there is a core group in the community who bear outsized responsibility for keeping the Meeting running. In recent years, as we have lost some of these key members, it has been difficult to fill those roles or even understand the scope of the work those individuals were doing. We have struggled to find clerks for several committees with the result that their work has lost momentum, and we have been forced to recalibrate our expectations about what we can offer and accomplish.
In the face of this challenge, we are faced with these questions, among others:
• How might we better align the number and missions of our committees with our current capacity, needs, and values?
• How can we formalize and streamline practices so that work can continue smoothly as individuals transition out of their roles?
• How can we engage younger people and newcomers so that they begin to gain knowledge about and take responsibility for our key operations?
Conclusion
This year we observe the 100th year since our Meeting’s founding. Having seen families from both the Orthodox and Hicksite traditions joining together in worship since 1924 to become Chestnut Hill Meeting, we feel the blessings that flow from our past and the gifts and problems that define our present. We remain deeply grateful for a community of worship and fellowship that can help us in this world so increasingly full of violence and instability.
Submitted with care by
The Worship and Ministry Committee
Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting
