NEW YORK YEARLY MEETING - Governance Issues

In leaving you with a final epistle in this series, I ask you to ultimately examine not my words, but the data behind what I've stated. My hypotheses on the state of one dying Quaker Society did not come out of nowhere; they came from the evidence, from the data.

Here below, two Eastern U.S. Yearly Meetings which have drawn steeply increasing financial resources (adjusted for inflation to compare real spending over decades) up and out of Monthly Meetings have also suffered steep membership losses over a 50 year period. Two Eastern U.S. Yearly Meetings which have only slightly increased real costs to members over that period, have grown steadily.

In other words, the steeply increasing and or large total cost of a Quaker Yearly Meeting is proportional with steep total membership loss in that Quaker Yearly Meeting. How is this relationship explained? Is one the cause or the effect of the other? How does this phenomenon affect the expression of the Eternal Life in your Society?

As Yearly Meetings become centralized hierarchies, and take on more and more responsibility, activity and cost for the life of Monthly Meetings in your part of the Quaker world, does total membership in your wider body decline proportionally? I continue to ask Friends to consider these questions.

For those who have borne tales that I have an agenda or an axe to grind - so have been their unfortunate and untrue whispers. I am sanguine in my faith. My uncomfortable openings in this series will be to the benefit of true Quakerism.