Through the Flaming Sword

In an earlier series of posts which I titled Quaker-pocalypse, I talked about three curves that I thought were converging for Quaker meetings and institutions with potentially catastrophic consequences. These trends are: declining membership, declining donations from the members we do have, and rising fixed institutional costs. When the first two curves crossed the third, I expected that meetings—meaning, mostly, yearly meetings—would have to radically restructure themselves or they would collapse. 

I’ve made a case study of New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM) to study these factors and trends. I chose NYYM because I know it well; I was a member for decades and was its communications director for several years, and in that role I wrote its annual reports, so I’m very familiar with its data-keeping format. Also, NYYM’s records are kept in the Quaker collection at Swarthmore College, which is easily accessible for me. Furthermore, NYYM’s Orthodox and Hicksite yearly meetings reunited in 1955, which provides a clean starting point for the data. My data field thus extends from 1955 through 2020/2021.

The results surprised me some. Membership has been steadily declining, and maybe more important, the number of monthly meetings that are inching toward collapse has been accelerating. The rate of giving by members to their meetings is more complicated, but shows a troubling trend over the last twenty years, especially when compared to fixed expenses.

In the next post, I look at the membership figures.