Using the queries suggested by the Ministry and Care Committee of the Quaker Life Council, Wrightstown Monthly Meeting has prepared the following report on the spiritual state of our Meeting in 2023. In discussion, our thoughts coalesced into two major areas:
- What we had achieved, and
- What we felt we could do better (and, in some cases, what we had plans in the works to do better).
In the past year, we’ve worked to re-create the community we had before the pandemic. Our momentum built during the year with many of the actual achievements coming in the latter half of the year. In working to create and strengthen our community, we achieved the following:
- We have a solid core of attendees at each Meeting for Worship (now around 25 – 30 people each week).
- Our Care and Counsel committee has done an excellent job of reaching out to keep current members and attenders connected, and of sponsoring some in-person events.
- We have installed technology to improve the audio and visual experience linking our remote and in-person participants. We’ve benefitted from Bucks Quarter Outreach grants to do this.
- We have hosted different kinds of in-person events: picnic, outdoor music concert featuring the Fools and Prophets (formerly Faith and Practice) and some of our home-grown talent; monthly “Meet and Eats.” These events have grown in frequency as we emerged from our pandemic shells.
- We continue to participate in providing the Penn’s Park Food Pantry with food, contributions, and lending hands.
- We have a vibrant Nursery School which interacts in the greater community in profound ways.
- We have continued to provide part of our grounds to PDC Athletics for baseball tournaments and to the Middletown Grange for parking at its annual August event. The Bucks County Folksong Society meets monthly in our building.
- We were prompted by Lancaster Meeting’s minute decrying Christian Nationalism and the “Urgent Call” issued by a group of weighty Friends to meet several times and discern responses.
- We purchased several copies of books on racial justice (How to Be an Anti-Racist, White Fragility, So You Want to Talk About Race) and urged members and attenders to take them and read.
- To mitigate the effects of climate change, we have actively been pursuing ways in which we can be greener stewards of our property by collecting our leaves to create compost, leaving some for leaf litter to promote insect growth, converting some to wildflower meadow for pollinators, and explored mowing greener and/or less.
- We have appointed a Climate Witness Liaison.
- We are now going through the learning process of creating a 5 person leadership “clerk’s team” (including the presiding clerk, the recording clerk, the recorder, a rising clerk, and a past clerk). Initial indications are that this model has great potential. So far we see that the duties can be naturally divided according to the gifts and leadings of the individual team members and that the job of clerk can become less burdensome.
Our yearnings are best summed up in this list of what we feel we could do better. In some cases, we have made nascent efforts to get there:
- Although we have people with the required clearances providing childcare at Meeting for Worship, few children and young families have been attending Meeting, and we have no formal First Day School program. We have been unsuccessful in finding leadership to revive it.
- We have failed in many ways to connect with our Nursery School families and to pull them into the embrace of our Meeting. We have belatedly created a 6-point plan to remedy this, led in no small part by one of the Nursery School families that joined our Meeting before the pandemic.
- We are rejuvenating our Spiritual Exploration Group (SEG), which before the pandemic met monthly for 75 minutes before Meeting for Worship. It will once again meet monthly starting in March 2023, this time in hybrid form. These discussions have been almost exclusively attended by our members and attenders.
- We would like to do better at providing literature and following up with new attenders at Meeting.
- We have talked about rejuvenating our Outreach “conversations” which were similar in nature to our SEG, but used Meetup to engage a wider audience and took place on weekday evenings to engage a different demographic.
- Although we still contribute to the food pantry, we feel we could be more hands on with them again.
- Some people would like the Meeting to be more active in advocating for social justice. Our Peace and Social Concerns committee has not been active. Not many people are aware that we have books about racial justice to lend, and we would like to encourage people to read them.
- Meeting members have not yet actively engaged with our Climate Witness Liaison, but we hope to schedule opportunities for her to build interest and connection.
- The Nursery School staff hopes to start a vegetable garden on campus for the children and their families to tend.
- We would like to have more socialization after Meetings for Worship and recreate our annual “progressive” dinner (which does not involve travel).
- Most people in our leadership and clerking roles are well on in years and have served many terms. We continue to struggle mightily to identify new, and younger, members and attenders willing to take on these roles.
We will be applying to PYM for a Membership Development grant to continue to improve our audio, especially for those in our Meetinghouse who are hard of hearing. It seems likely that the Yearly Meeting could act as a clearinghouse for ideas from around the Yearly to assist us with our yearnings. We could also use resources from PYM to help revive our First Day School.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Pearson, Clerk
Wrightstown Monthly Meeting
