Part 6 -- Meeting Vitality
Saturday, April 10, 10:00 am to 11:30 am
This session focuses on how a meeting looks to a newcomer from three angles.
1. Community. Meetings are relatively small, coalesced groups, and it can be hard for a newcomer to get noticed, connect on common interests, and feel valued. Joe Moore has collected a series of observations that he will share about bring new attenders' experiences. He will suggest models to get to know our members, both experienced and new, while getting to know each other.
Joe Moore is a Lancaster Friends Meeting member and has been active in the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) locally and internationally. His background is in Human Relations
2. Managing Dissension
Conflict is the major reason why religious organizations lose congregants. When new attenders visiting our Meetinghouses encounter discord, they may stay or leave depending on how Friends engage.
Laura Pickering Ford has training and experience helping meetings in conflict. She has assisted meetings in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to manage dissension and reconnect meeting communities with deep listening skills. She is a recent clerk of Harrisburg Monthly Meeting.
3. Spirituality
Irene Oleskew will illustrate how to use “Queries for a Spiritual Self-assessment of the Meeting” to gauge the spiritual vitality of your meeting. She'll also bring a collection of practices for nurturing seekers and feeding those inner lights.
Irene Oleksiw is a member of Downingtown Friends Meeting and clerks its Worship & Ministry Committee. She's part of the Caln Quarter team that created the 2020-21 Membership Development Series. At PYM, she serves on the Membership Development Granting Group.
We will have break-out groups towards the end of our time together to share insights from the three segments relative to their meeting experiences, and put forward questions in the chat on items needing clarification.
This session follows five others held earlier this year: Digital Presence; All Together Now: Welcoming Families & Children; Friendly Fences; What's the Growth Formula? Facebook for Friends: Focused Out. Copies of these slides are available upon request. Contact Irene Oleksiw, [email protected].
About this Series
Like so many events in 2020, Caln Quarterly Meeting's annual gathering was canceled for May of 2020. Rather than throwing in the towel, we pivoted and recycled this year's gathering theme, Growing Our Meetings, into a well-attended Zoom session that introduced how many of our Meetings are growing and what their practices for outreach are. The session was open to members and attenders from across several yearly meetings--far beyond Caln Quarter. The feedback from many of the 120 people who registered for that session on May 2, 2020, opened the way for us to continue with a six-part series that will provide more details on many of the topics and issues raised during the May Zoom session.
