State of the Society and Consideration of Yearly Meeting Queries – 2024
Medford Monthly Meeting welcomed the opportunity to consider the Queries formally as they focused our attention once again on examining ourselves, which we did over two sessions of extended worship-sharing during our regular Business Meetings
The most encouraging and nourishing change is two new members and their children and one attender and her children. They bring new hope to us as well as a new understanding of how to reach younger people. Their presence has led to a new adult education program which involves education in Quaker fundamentals and sharing our individual understandings of how we experience them – so far, well attended. Also, we once again have a First Day School.
We continue to address outreach with a new website and a commitment to keep it active, and feel it will be our most visible face to the community as we explore how to use it better. While investigating the installation of new signage we currently utilize banners on our graveyard fence to announce new events. Both the Black Lives Matter banner and the rainbow sign brought two families in who stayed to worship with us. A new Memorial Garden of native trees and plants has been completed and we are now moving to re-landscape the street-facing side of the Meeting House which is unfortunately our “back” yard – into a “front” yard. We are opening our face outward to become a more visible presence in the community.
We remain active in many areas as an extension of worship, both corporately and as individuals: in food banks and Quaker walking tours; in visitations to and a continuing relationship with Medford Leas Worship Group; in shared efforts on climate change with other churches and other Meetings; offering the use of the meeting house by AA, the Historical Society and an “Open Mic” once a month led by a member. We are trying to deepen our friendship with the local AME church. The number and variety of individual volunteer activities from dog therapy visits to serving on boards – especially the Woolman Memorial – are too numerous to mention. Sometimes we feel we are “too busy” and seek ways to focus on fewer deeper activities more rationally organized over the course of a year.
Three climate change initiatives include a bi-monthly vigil on climate change outside the meetinghouse, a program for parents and others on “Seeds of Hope; Talking to Children About Climate Change”, and coordination with Green Faith Circle in sending a bus to the large climate change march in NYC. Significantly, one member has taken the lead within the Meeting, at Yearly Meeting, and as a representative to FCNL’s Central Committee from Quaker Earthcare Witness.
We are experimenting with rotating the position of Meeting Clerk into three 4-month terms as a way for more members to learn how, and then experience, what it means to do it. Many only accepted this change reluctantly having felt it far better to have one point person for a full year at least. We also reduced the number of committees by absorbing burial into property and lunch and social into outreach and combining adult education and First Day School. There is the same amount of work but the absorbed committees will not require separate minutes or reports.
We remain painfully aware that we are of one class and race, thankfully not still of one age. We need to more fully recognize that Quakerism can appeal to anyone–of any race or class– and we yearn to realize the openness to all that was evident, if itself imperfect, among early Friends – despite any awkwardness or discomfort we may feel in doing so.
April 7, 2024
