Wednesday
Another Viewpoint to the Society
Another Viewpoint - Originally written 8/31/2006, modified Dec. 7, 2006
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We might consider Friends, the physical aspect of the Quaker faith, however underemphasized of late, and its importance and relation to our inner conflict.
In this regard, the size and apportionment of expense by Monthly Meetings in the expense sections of its own budget speak to the expression of the Life in each local community. The large percentage each Monthly Meeting gives to wider bodies each year is centralizing Quakerism within New York Yearly Meeting. (This is not hard for some to visualize when our large urban Meetings are so apparently well attended.)
This is not the fault of one or two people, but the fault of all of us who have left it occur over time. New York YM now spends, in its operating budget, approximately 50% more than each of Baltimore YM and New England YM each year with fewer employees than each. NEYM and Baltimore are growing in number each year while NYYM declines (no matter what the current administration is telling us about NYYM’s ‘growth’ in numbers,. A Friend has visited these Meetings personally, sometimes unannounced, and this report of ‘numerical stability or growth in important cases ’ is simply not true).
A Friend has seen the demise of Quakerism already begun in New York Yearly Meeting by travel and first hand experience. A Friend has collected the data about the past 35 years showing the obvious steep drop-off. Friends have the option to sit back and slide or change. If we continue on this slide, members of NYYM will take the easy road to a business model where the Society relies on and serves the wealthy with a vacation each summer. We will assuage our guilt by the continuing placation of an angry and abusive minority. The historic meetinghouses will be museums, where the few remaining Friends might someday discuss the remaining testimony of peace over coffee and crackers, before the Sunday afternoon tour starts. (Note the recent NYYM failure to address simplicity in its newsletter.)
This picture is one which will develop as follows: we’ll see in increase in the number of recorded ministers – those who profess to know more than the common person. The formation of a more visible hierarchy of top-down bureaucracy will be financed by fewer and fewer wealthy individuals, and by the large urban meetings. Annual Sessions will become a month-long retreat at Silver Bay in the Adirondacks, where silence will be worshipped and the theoretical concepts of peace will be discussed. Those who attend will arrange a scholarship paid by wealthy donors, or will have family money to support them. The wealthy donors to Friends meetings will not be Friends themselves, but wealthy philanthropists needing tax deductions, sometimes given honorary memberships, who fancy the theoretical concepts of historic Quakerism. Our donors will also host lavish fundraisers in the historic and austere Quaker museums in New York City.
The beginning of this sleepy end, my Friends, is here…..unless we wake up.
First and foremost - NYYM is becoming a permanent bureaucracy which has its first goal to perpetuate full time jobs at any expense, and without due accountability and transparency - under the guise of religion.
A permanent institution or bureaucracy, especially one which presides over a declining support base, religious or not, is like a human brain in a body of a hiker undergoing hypothermia on the side of a mountain in winter. The brain of that stranded hiker has the reaction to shut down the peripheral systems. These systems are the blood flow to the outer extremities, the arms and legs - those which might be the only hope of self-rescue - in order to preserve the surely doomed heart and brain – the inner core – a little bit longer. So, the inner core of NYYM is de facto, the self-nominated, heart and brain, and has a programmed reaction to perpetuate itself even as it shuts off the support to its extremities which are its lifeblood and its potential self-rescue.
In this evolving model, Monthly Meetings will be like subsidiaries of a corporation, literally sending in to the home office, collections called ‘overhead’ to support those who provide the spiritual guidance and logistics for the local groups, and the month-long annual Sessions and retreat in summer.
This is how the quiet demise is beginning. The New York Yearly Meeting, and by Yearly Meeting, we mean the small group of insulated few who ‘run’ the Yearly Meeting central committees – Personnel, Nominating, Audit, Treasurer, Financial Services, General Services Coordinating Committee, and Trustees - have quietly decided, while the membership numbers have dropped like a stone over the past 35 years, that NYYM will have permanent employees rather than an ever-changing, sojourning staff which facilitates an annual event where Monthly Meetings discern what it is that they can all agree upon. This is how the end of any irrelevant and unresponsive organization probably looks – a few centralized, out-of-view - pulling the strings of the puppet show that we all see. Notice any similarities here to our Federal government where facts or its perennial budget shortfalls are manipulated to show a certain ‘reality’? In early September there was an expose in transparency of governance on public TV where Representative Shays (R-CT) and Cooper (D-TN) showed us the United States federal deficit is many times higher than what is published. Granted this is not a sexy topic, but its runs at the core of strife in our world and in our Society. Maybe Quakers don’t really differ from the general public? What might remain remarkable about Friends over time - is their innate integrity. But, is it gone?
How Quakers purportedly differ from Christians of other faiths is that Friends have no Synod nor Diocese in a top-down hierarchy of authority. Why a top-down permanent government is primarily having difficulty being formed in NYYM, is being discussed in Monthly Meetings of late, in how to pay for such a permanent bureaucracy.
This is because Friends, unlike those of other faiths, are very, very few in number. With so few congregations and such small budgets in each local congregation, the percentage that each congregation, each Monthly Meeting, is now being asked to contribute to this ‘overhead’ of New York Yearly Meeting in amounts approaching 50% of the total expenditures of each Monthly Meeting. In trust funded meetings, the amount sent to NYYM is in the range of 70% to over 100% of total member and attender contributions. In contrast, a local community church in the Episcopalian faith contributes somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of its annual expenditures to the Diocese. NYYM had 9 Monthly Meetings with over 200 members in 1970. In 2006, it has one – Brooklyn Meeting, the site of a large NYYM outreach initiative lately. These large Meetings are the communities which have budgets which can, in parallel, feasibly support large permanent salaries. These salaries have increased each year for at least 15 years and lifetime pensions are now part of the compensation package.
Some casually say the answer to all of our problems going forward is in the tapping of trust funds left by dead Friends. But, some might be afraid that what negative fallout occurs after hitting the lottery for a poor person and his immediate family, will also happen to Friends who would like to rely on this kind of ‘luck’. The money amassed by our forebears given in trust to us – a handout - which keeps us from really growing in number and spiritually, by allowing us the time for arguing inane details behind closed-looking doors of our unwelcoming meetinghouses - simply shows that those who do not know how to make money by serving people well, probably don’t have the wisdom and responsibility to spend money properly. Like a lottery winner, we’ll create a dysfunctional life by catering to the special interests and the hangers-on, which come out of the woodwork at the scent of free money. We’ll be poor Quakers who rely on wealthy people or trust funds in hopes that these unlimited reserves will pay our ministers, and solve all of our problems.
The answer, Friends, lies not in reliance on trust funds, on what someone else gives. The answer lies in what WE as Friends can give, it lies in the direct connection of Friends to our Monthly Meetings as vibrant and cohesive religious bodies. Our local communities give life from the ‘roots’ up, and the reason to be, to the annual expression of the Life in the branches and leaves of the ‘tree’ of our faith. Our faith, like a tree itself, is remarkable only in the context of our own self-imposed restrictions – our discipline in watering and pruning where needed.
Why your Meeting should consider its (large) contribution to NYYM carefully before approving it (see below)
1. Your Monthly Meeting, whether it is large or small, does members a disservice by allowing someone else to nurture and witness for you somewhere else. Your small Monthly Meeting also does itself a disservice to allow a larger Monthly Meeting to over-contribute to NYYM in lieu of under-contributions by others. Each Monthly Meeting has to be responsible for itself in order to grow physically and spiritually. Monthly Meetings should be cohesive in the sense of an organic Yearly Meeting, but be basic freestanding independent bodies at the same time.
2. The NYYM annual operating budget has increased from $400,000 to $550,000- by 1/3 since the arrival of a General Secretary in 2004. The GS was hired for $70,000 per year to live in NYC and work three days at the office, rent which very fairly now costs $28,000 per year, to oversee the ‘functioning’ of NYYM. The staff have been given raises each year for the past three years and most probably every year, while other lines have been cut. Even still, in 2006, after many cuts, the padding of the Yearly Meeting budget is evident in the amount left over from what it says it needs, what it gets from Monthly Meetings, and what it ultimately spends in a given year. NYYM built up a reserve of $225,000 over a 15-year period when it took in less than it said it needed each year over that period.
The GS does not live in NYC. He is in the office less than one day per week, and he functions more as a paid minister more than a business manager. There are no published employee reporting structure, and no published time and task specific job descriptions for employees, as Baltimore and NEYM have. NEYM and Balt YM provide valuable services to Monthly Meetings such as Youth Programs for many children, and well-designed 1st Day School programs. NYYM does not do this and if it does, it serve many fewer participants.
The Field Secretary of NEYM is paid approximately $45,000 per year to work out of his home and go into the office once per week. He has a second job as a graphic designer. The Field Secretary edits the NEYM newsletter four times per year and it is available to be distributed electronically in format. NEYM’s newsletter is far superior in content and design to NYYM’s 6 times per year - Spark. Baltimore YM GS is paid approximately $58,000 per year and must live in the Washington DC metropolitan area.
2. NYYM refuses to bring costs into line on its own. There is no mechanism within NYYM (the Financial Services Committee is there mainly to collect money to pay expenses, and has no cost cutting authority) to critically evaluate the budget requests of committees and positions on a zero-based rationale each year. And these costs, if evaluated at all, are evaluated without any kind of itemization. They are evaluated by those who have a vested self-interest in maintaining these costs, or who have become part of the Silver Bay ‘in-crowd’. The only way to ‘control’ these costs then, is to return to the classical ‘bottom-up’ financing model that gives authority to Monthly Meetings to determine what NYYM will be. Friends, do not let the return to bottom up financing die. Put in the effort earlier than later to discern your Monthly Meeting’s life as outlined in its local and wider expenditures. NYYM will then grow out, not up - in the organic and true manner of Friends.
In Friendship,
Glenn R.
Go to the 3/7/2007 essay - What Integrity means to me
