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WINTER
2000Jack Mahon
Woodstown MMDriving to the meetinghouse in Woodstown for—what else?—a meeting, I passed two young men wearing ties, white shirts, and dark slacks. Each carried a small leather-bound book. I classified them, quickly and stereotypically, as Mormon missionaries. Later that evening, I chanced to look out of a window and saw them again, walking the other side of the street. Where were they from? I wondered. How far had they come to spread their good news in Woodstown? Are they just beginning their work here or has their period of evangelizing almost reached its end?
Of course, they might not be members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. No matter. They had captured my imagination and so, for now, for purposes of setting my mind on a course, Mormons they were.
Wherever they called home, they were reaching out that evening to the souls who live on North Main Street. “Reaching out”—I doubt they call it that—is now an expression of twenty-first century American Quakers. “Missionary work” has a foreign-sounding ring to it and so we avoid the term. Probably just as well, as, given our current circumstances, we’d likely do a second-rate job of it. Instead we “reach out” or “do outreach.” And so we have found a comfortable expression for what we do in the name of evangelizing. Or, maybe, we do just enough to satisfy the definition we have chosen.
The year 1999 was the first one in more than thirty that Philadelphia Yearly Meeting did not lose membership. We experienced a net gain of one new member! And 1999 was also a year in which my monthly meeting experienced a dramatic rise in membership, the first marked increase in memory. The yearly meeting’s decline in membership has a long history. It was a well established and documented trend. How did “we” (monthly, quarterly, or yearly meeting) do it? Why did it reverse itself in 1999? In fact, it didn’t. What did Friends do in 1999 differently from 1998? Probably nothing.
Think of the trend of declining membership as a Metroliner at full speed. The transition from traveling forward at eighty miles per hour to backing up slowly is not made with the same ease with which you would reverse a baby stroller in a shopping mall. The first step is to begin to slow down. As the train slows, the passengers feel deceleration. For a moment, they feel the train to be “stopped” and only later will they experience “backing up.” It is far from instantaneous.
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s (momentary) reversal of declining membership began years ago and, like the train’s progress, the first step was to begin the slowing process. Once the initial set of brakes were applied, new and improved “brakes” were invented (on board!) and put to work even as the “train” was slowing. Anchors were thrown out and some heels were dug in, too. First we slowed; then we stopped; then we began in the other direction.
Still, if we are honest with ourselves (and there is no reason to be otherwise), we will admit that we have taken only baby steps in the name of outreach. We have progressed a good deal by doing little more than acknowledging our problem. Fortunately, even that minimal effort has shown some success. For the most part we have opened our doors and welcomed those who have entered. Ironically, we continue to think of people coming into our buildings as if it is “reaching out” by us. The Mormons would laugh.
Was 1999 a fluke? Who knows? For now we only know that the long period of decline has been slowed and temporarily stopped. Will we begin another slide or will we begin to add members to our meetings? We have begun to advertise the times and places of our worship and the fact that our doors are open. For the Society of Friends, that has been a large step. But if we continue to do nothing more than that, if we think that people will come into our buildings and remain as Friends of the Truth because they have fallen in love with our buildings, we will be disappointed.
We have taken the first small step but it is premature to celebrate the end of the journey. There are people not now in our meetings for worship who want to be there, if they could only find us, if we could only find them. Of this, I’m sure. Are we at the beginning of our period of missionary work or at its end?
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