Hope’s Many Answers

Friends Organizations Offer Programs to Revitalize Meetings

Friends meetings committed to revitalization can take advantage of several programs offered by Friends United Meeting (FUM), Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC) Section of the Americas, and School of the Spirit Ministries. FUM offers a congregational coaching initiative called Flourishing Friends. In 2025, FWCC Section of the Americas will convene the first two-year long cohort of a new spiritual companionship program called Quaker Connect. School of the Spirit Ministries offers Faithful Meetings, a faith development program that Friends can sign up for on a rolling basis.

Left: Cathy Harris and Wayne Carter, of Plainfield (Ind.) Meeting, talk with Colin Saxton as part of FUM’s Flourishing Friends program in September 2023. Right: Scott Wagoner (right) leads a discussion of basic principles. Photos by Dan J. Kasztelan/FUM.

FUM’s Flourishing Friends invites each congregation to define for itself what flourishing means, according to Michael Sherman, coordinator of North American and Caribbean Ministries for FUM, who provides oversight for Flourishing Friends. Engaging Friends in conversations that invite answers is one of the responsibilities of Scott Wagoner, who serves participating meetings and churches, Sherman explained.

Some values congregations want to promote are sustainability, viability, and a clear future direction, according to Sherman. Meetings and churches involved in the program often define what they hope for.

“Hope has a lot of different answers,” Sherman said.

He noted, for example, that roughly half the congregations desire to find pastors. Sherman is also a preacher at Muncie (Ind.) Friends Church.

Around 2016, Wagoner, a certified congregational coach, and Colin Saxton, who holds a doctoral degree in spiritual programming, generated the idea of what became Flourishing Friends. They organized one-time events that later evolved into the first long-term cohort in 2020. From 2011 to 2018, Saxton was the general secretary of Friends United Meeting. The organization was actively serving Friends in the West Bank, Africa, and Belize; North American Friends asked FUM staff how FUM could better support them.

Participating congregations focus on identity, mission, and vision as well as developing “functional structures,” according to Saxton. A primary question participants are asked to consider is about how their meeting’s building and staff are used to help with the work to which God calls the community. Involvement in Flourishing Friends leads to a deeper experience of unity and engagement, which sometimes leads to numeric growth in members and attenders.

Meetings are struggling with “post-COVID malaise,” Saxton said. He cited studies that estimated that 20 percent of members and attenders at churches nationwide have not returned since the height of the pandemic. The estimate refers to the period from 2020 to 2022. Anecdotal evidence he has informally gathered confirms this estimate, Saxton said. The Friends who remain have less energy and need support to build community. One of the strengths of meetings is the shared belief of that of God in each person. The challenge is having a collective sense of identity.

The program offers nonthreatening discussions in a nine-month span that includes an in-person daylong retreat. These gatherings include Friends in close geographic proximity to one another. Mutual learning is important. The initiative seeks deeper connection among members of yearly meetings, according to Saxton. Saxton or Wagoner meet monthly with participating congregations by Zoom; they also hold a half-day Zoom meeting mid-year.

Meetings thinking about whether to participate should think deeply about who is called to take part and who can commit the needed time, Saxton explained. Determining who can participate might involve figuring out who can be released from other meeting obligations.

The program includes times of worship that includes silence and queries. The queries encompass mission questions as well as questions that promote worship sharing about “blocks, barriers, and opportunities,” Saxton explained.

“We’re not offering six easy steps to anything,” Saxton said.

FWCC Section of the Americas’s Quaker Connect program will encourage Friends to connect with the communities around their meetinghouses. Photos courtesy of FWCC Section of the Americas.

Quaker Connect will also offer Friends a chance to engage in work intended to bear spiritual fruit. The program is open to Quaker congregations within the FWCC Section of the Americas regions—North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean—that speak English and/or Spanish. Each participating meeting or church will discern an area of growth to work on, according to program director Jade Rockwell. Growth projects will be time-limited, so they will be “safe to fail,” Rockwell explained. Feedback cycles are built in.

Quaker Connect will work at the local meeting level to encourage Friends to connect with the communities around their meetinghouses, according to Evan Welkin, who supervises all programming at FWCC Section of the Americas as its general secretary. Participants will seek to respond to the needs of local community members while offering space to experiment. FWCC will offer participating congregations opportunities to evaluate and change the program.

Rockwell hopes meetings will expand their participation into long-term projects based on physical and demographic maps of surrounding neighborhoods.

“Good ministry is rooted in knowing and loving the local community,” Rockwell said.

Program staff plan to offer companionship, coaching, and support to participating meetings. They are currently recruiting coaches who exhibit leadership skills, commitment to pastoral care, and intercultural sensitivity, Welkin explained.

A lot of thought has gone into meeting congregations’ diverse needs, according to Rockwell. All of the FWCC Sections, covering four broad regions of the world, have expertise in working with ethnically diverse Friends.

To encourage language inclusivity, the Quaker Connect program offers bilingual materials in English and Spanish, Welkin noted (Rockwell speaks both English and Spanish). Rockwell’s responsibilities as program director include developing curriculum, introducing Friends at yearly meetings to the program, and supervising congregational companions.

Quaker Connect started as a way to address concerns of Quakers in monthly meetings.

“It originated from a sense that a lot of Friends have had that our monthly meetings are struggling,” Rockwell said.

The program will invite participants to reconsider some Quaker practices from the Quietist tradition, according to Rockwell. For example, requiring an indefinite period of contemplation to precede any action is one Quietist practice that contemporary Friends could re-examine. In the Quietist perspective, Friends emphasize waiting to see if an action is directed by God.

In 2023, FWCC Section of the Americas received a $1.125 million grant from the Lilly Endowment’s Thriving Congregations Initiative, which will fund Quaker Connect. Additional funding comes from the Thomas H. and Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.

These two streams of funding allow ambitious planning, such as including meetings and churches in the Caribbean and Latin America, according to Welkin. FWCC Section of the Americas staff did not initially know whether they would have the funding to reach all the geographic areas in the section.

“We’re able to consider our biggest dreams,” Welkin said.

Quaker Connect cohorts are two years long; the first cohort will meet in spring of 2025. Applications will be accepted until early January. They intend to add at least ten more meetings in 2026.

Friends participating in a School of the Spirit Faithful Meetings retreat at the Red Cedar (Mich.) Meetinghouse (left) and the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Meetinghouse (right). Photos courtesy of Mary Linda McKinney.

Faithful Meetings, a School of the Spirit program, offers Friends opportunities to reflect and connect even if they cannot make regularly scheduled meetings. Participants can read along if they are not able to attend because the sessions are designed to be asynchronous, according to facilitator Mary Linda McKinney. The three components of the program include an online classroom, spiritual formation, and multiple whole community gatherings.

Over a nine-month period, participants meet once a month: an opening weekend retreat, seven four- to five-hour half-day sessions, and a concluding daylong retreat. McKinney, who is a spiritual director, builds an online classroom for each participating group. The program can be completed by whole meetings as well as smaller groups of five or six Friends within meetings. In the online classroom, study is organized around monthly themes. There is a forum at the bottom of each topic page so participants can interact with each other.

The half-day gatherings, worship sharing, and spiritual formation groups have been rich for McKinney, who is a member of Friendship Meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Spiritual formation differs from other get-togethers, McKinney noted. The meetings are not a time for small talk; instead, participants focus on their spiritual lives. To avoid having the meetings taken over by chitchat, McKinney developed queries that would speak to group members’ conditions and invite reflection. Not every participant responds to the same query, McKinney observed.

One question participants consider is how to name the Divine. Considering this query helps bridge the chasm between theists and nontheists, McKinney explained. Many nontheists have had negative experiences in the churches in which they were raised. People with such experiences often come to Friends for something different, McKinney noted.

She prepares a primary topic for each session, including quotes from historic and contemporary Friends with links to resources. Following the links can be a spiritual practice, McKinney explained. Resources include Friends Journal articles, podcasts, and video recordings. At the session, participants engage in worship sharing around the designated topic.

McKinney spent a long time wrestling with God’s call to nurture others’ spiritual growth. The program is not about teaching the right way to be a Quaker, McKinney said. Rather, she wanted to create an experience that would meet needs she felt all along her own faith journey. She intends to support newcomers and longtime Friends.

School of the Spirit has been around for over 30 years; from the start, it offered a spiritual nurturer program. Before facilitating Faithful Meetings, McKinney previously served as a co-clerk of the board. She hosted listening sessions to discern what Friends were longing for in community and spiritual life.

McKinney noted that she does not have a divinity degree but has faith in her divine calling.

“What I have is a profound trust in the Holy Spirit,” McKinney said.

When new meetings consider whether they should participate in the group, McKinney provides a discernment process involving those who attend business meeting. Four communities have participated in Faithful Meetings since she created it in 2023.

“Each one has gotten something meaningful out of it. What they most treasured was the intimacy they experienced,” McKinney said.

Correction: A previous version of the photo caption for the School of the Spirit Faithful Meetings program incorrectly identified the group of Friends shown in one of the retreat photos. The retreat pictured on the left took place at Red Cedar (Mich.) Meetinghouse, not Chattanooga (Tenn.) Meetinghouse.