State
of Society Report from Whitewater Monthly Meeting
(First Friends
Richmond)
2005-2006
I.
Ministry and Oversight
About
18 months ago, First Friends approved a year-long membership process.
Prospective members meet 3 or 4 times during the year to discuss
books read or questions/concerns about the Quaker faith at First
Friends. Those who have completed the year-long process, whether
long-time Friends, attenders, or new to Friends, have found the
process valuable as an opportunity to work through 3 things: their
understanding of Quakerism as it is practiced at First Friends; their
engagement with Christian faith; and how they are or would like to be
involved in the life of the meeting. These are all issues worth
discussing in depth regardless of one's previous Quaker experience.
The
Quaker Peace Testimony of First Friends brochure recently published
states: "First Friends Meeting upholds the traditional Quaker
Testimony to Jesus, the Prince of Peace, whose teachings, living
example, and inner guidance leads us away from the use of violence."
The Quaker Peace Testimony is not a smug “we know better"
attitude towards international affairs and the work for a just and
equitable society. It is a faithful effort to find and answer "that
of God in every one".
We
reach out to others in the community through our meeting brochure "A
Place To Grow". Brief descriptions include-a bit of Quaker
history in the area, our belief that there is "that of God in
every one", why we call ourselves a meeting, shared leadership,
Quaker silence, Quaker decision-making process, activities offered
and a warm invitation to join us in worship and fellowship.
Lavona
Bane and Lincoln Blake, Co-Clerks
II.
Family Ministries Report
First
Friends Meeting of Richmond is enjoying growth in many directions.
Volunteerism, fellowship, and community development have not only
increased our numbers but also help elevate vigor and enthusiasm for
our meeting.
In
my role I see the gifts of our volunteers as priceless. People
eagerly share their personal time in many ways: Sunday School
teachers, adult forum leaders, cooking and baking, visitation,
working with youth and youth projects, larger community and world
needs, etc. The key is personal involvement and enjoyment of being a
part of a loving community; with each person having something to
contribute.
Family
Ministries has been quite active over the past year. We increased our
Children’s Sunday School program from two to three classes. Up
until this year we offered K-2 and 3-5 grade classes. Last Fall we
added a junior high class (6-8). We have had as many as 15 children
in the classrooms on Sunday mornings.
First
Friends has seen a significant increase in newborns to four
year-olds. At present there are approximately ten children within
this age range. A once near empty nursery has become a busy place on
Sunday mornings. The growing numbers also include many children with
international birthplaces. We are eagerly anticipating the arrival of
a young girl from India who will hopefully soon join our kids.
Intergenerational
activities are an essential part of fellowship and community
building. This past year Family Ministries has sponsored events that
are designed to appeal to all ages. We kicked off the Fall Sunday
School season with a hotdog cookout. It has become a traditional
gathering over the past few years. Held close to Labor Day the
cookout was well attended and was a good spark to begin Sunday
School.
Pumpkinfest
is a safe/fun alternative to Halloween. Tailgate trick-or-treating in
our parking lot, costume parades, carnival games, and other fun
activities in the meetinghouse brought together kids from one to
ninety years of age.. This event has really caught on with our
meeting and the wider Richmond community. The meetinghouse is packed
full of kids, adults and most of all—laughter and fun.
Winter
doldrums are temporarily forgotten when we hold or annual Souper
Bowl/Chili Cookoff. Held on Super Bowl Sunday this event has become
very popular. Open to the Richmond Quaker Community and beyond,
cooks, sports fans, and good food bring together people who enjoy a
wide variety of activities—ranging from folks gathering around a
large screen TV for the Super Bowl to a circle of friends sewing
together. Recently this event has added a fund-raising component to
support local or Quaker projects by auctioning off pies baked by
Quaker Haven’s own Dan Bauer which Keith Kendall brings home from
the Quaker Men’s Groundhog retreat.
Good
communication and planning is essential. Family Ministries tries hard
to keep up with the diverse needs of First Friends. Everything from
planning baby showers, birthday parties, recognizing graduates,
Advent Sunday readings, Friendly Feast groups, Easter egg hunts, and
the larger congregational events require good communication. Two
years ago I began sending out weekly announcements and created a
First Friends Email List. The original list contained around two
dozen names. The latest weekly announcement (May 25) was sent to 120
email addresses. Sent on Thursdays it has become a good tool to
remind people what is happening at First Friends, particularly the
upcoming Sunday. Folks who know of others who do not receive email
have been good about relaying the weekly announcements.
June
is probably my favorite month at First Friends. Bible School Workshop
will be held this year from June 12-16. The kids will bring the
Sunday worship service for First Friends on Father’s Day, June 18.
A nontraditional approach to Bible School, Bible School Workshop is a
fun and challenging week for children and adults. This year the
workshop will focus on conflict resolution and all participants,
young and old, will hopefully benefit from the week together.
I
would like to finish this short report with a recent observation. The
average age of First Friends has been dropping over the past several
years. Our congregation has increased in size with the addition of
several families with children. However a significant number of
people in their 30-50s (single and married couples) without children
have also started to attend. In a recent adult Sunday School
gathering twenty-six people attended. Ten folks present had made the
move from the old meetinghouse building to new the meetinghouse (8
years ago), and sixteen had started attended since the move. It was
wonderful to see this significant growth in a relatively short amount
of time.
Like
any Quaker meeting we face our share of challenges. Yet there seems
to be a comfortable sense of optimism surrounding us. May God’s
Spirit continue to nurture and lead us.
Tim
Basford, Family Ministries Associate Pastor
III.
Financial Stewardship State of Society Report
Purpose
This
document summarizes the accomplishments, challenges, and goals
related to financial stewardship of Whitewater Monthly Meeting and
First Friends Church. It reviews the accomplishments of the past 5
years and describes the current financial stewardship challenges and
goals of the Meeting.
Accomplishments
In
the past 5 years, several policies and practices have been
established that promote good stewardship.
We
have established and implemented a policy whereby all unrestricted
bequests are directed to our Foundation rather than allowing them to
be considered for use in the current operating budget. This
encourages us to operate the meeting within the prescribed limits of
our budget and annual appeals process and use unrestricted bequests
to accomplish other goals as they are envisioned and given due
consideration.
We
have established and implemented a policy whereby our Foundation
assets are allocated in four distinct funds: Contingency, Meeting
Development, Outreach, and Education. Each fund has different
disbursement policies. This encourages us to strike an appropriate
balance between saving funds for unanticipated needs and putting
money t work to address need. The Policy is modeled after a similar
policy established at West Richmond Friends.
We
have refined our annual estimate of giving campaign to include many
frequent appeals and reminders during the campaign period, rather
than a single campaign event or mailing. We have also increased our
emphasis on education about the needs of the meeting and invited
members and attenders to consider their giving in terms of Christian
stewardship.
We
have refined our budget process to include a budget request form
that solicits all the information needed to accurately predict costs
for the meeting and raise the required funds through the annual
estimate of giving campaign. We have also worked, with limited
success, to make a distinction between operating budget (things
spent each year) and capital budget (things that have lasting value
over multiple years).
We
have established and implemented an annual appeal in May of each
year to educate members regarding the role of the meeting as a
member of Indiana Yearly Meeting (IYM) and to raise funds to cover
membership dues to IYM. In recent years, this education and
fundraising effort has yielded additional gifts of up to 30% of
annual membership dues for the program assessment of IYM.
We
have coordinated our work with that of the Missions and Social
Concerns Commission and supported and encouraged their effort to
increase the level and participating in mission-and-outreach-related
giving.
Challenges
We
face a number of challenges:
Financial
support for missions and social concerns is quite small when
compared to our operating budget, both in terms of total giving and
number of donors. The operating budget consumes approximately 90%
of giving, while only 10% supports mission work. The number of
donors to the operating budget exceeds 120, while the number of
regular mission givers is less than 20. Many members give directly
to a wide range of charitable organizations, including many that are
IYM missions and local mission activities of common concern, such as
the Richmond Friends School, the Lauramore Friends Home, Hope House,
and Habitat for Humanity, among many others. We need additional
discernment on how best to support these missions individually and
corporately and in a way that strikes an appropriate balance between
operations and missions.
Our
budget process does a good job of predicting costs for program costs
and recurring costs, but does not accurately predict costs of
maintenance and repair of the facilities and equipment. Now that
the building is several years old, various mechanical systems are
beginning to fail. We can more accurately account for the need to
replace these systems and predict their costs of maintenance. This
also applies to office equipment, especially the cost of replacing
our repairing computers and related software items.
Goals
To
address these challenges, we commit ourselves to the following goals:
Continued
discernment regarding the balance between financial support of the
operating budget and missions, and continued collaboration between
Stewardship and Finance and Missions and Social Concerns
commissions. Further, Missions and Social Concerns has requested
assistance from our Foundation to encourage wider participating and
increase the level of giving for mission work. In order to find
that balance, we expect both commissions to work closely and
coordinate their efforts each Fall so that members and attenders can
consider and accurately estimate their total giving for both the
direct costs and programs of the Meeting and our work in the wider
world.
Continued
work to improve our budget process to more accurately predict costs
that recur over longer periods of time, especially equipment-related
purchase, replacement, and maintenance costs.
Summary
In
summary, we continue to work to improve our spirit-led giving to
support the work of the Meeting and of IYM. We specifically hope to
improve our processes to more accurately predict the costs and strike
a better balance between operations and missions.
Ray
Ontko, Clerk Stewardship and Finance
IV.
Spiritual Education for Adults
At
our Meeting the Center for Spirituality Commission (CFS) is
responsible for offering experiences and creating programming which
enable adults, whether churched or unchurched, to discover the “inner
sanctuary of the soul.” The mission of our commission is to
be open and inviting to people - whether from inside the Meeting or
outside - in all walks of their faith journey. We try to offer
an environment which trusts each person can discover “that of God”
in herself or himself. While most participants in our offerings
are regular members or attenders of our Meeting, regularly a number
of our offerings are attended by people from outside the Meeting,
from other denominations, faiths, and - occasionally - the unchurched
population of Richmond. Occasionally some of our offerings take
place in other locations such as Friends Fellowship Community or
Quaker Hill Conference Center. These off-site locations
often draw participants from beyond our Meeting; this is one of the
goals of our committee.
The Center
for Spirituality regularly invites all clerks of our Meeting’s
commissions and committees to suggest ideas for adult educational
programming and make proposals for such offerings. Most often, we
receive suggestions from our Missions & Social Concerns
Commission and Ministry & Oversight Commission. Family
Ministries Commission is responsible for all spiritual education for
children and youth. CFS and Family Ministries share
responsibility for intergenerational events and educational and
community-building activities.
It is important to note that
First Friends Meeting and its adult education committee have
committed themselves to:
offer
education possibilities for adults across the whole theological
spectrum, from evangelical to universalist and liberal
cultivate
awareness and understanding of the active interconnection of
personal spiritual faith and living in our complex, diverse society
and world. “Discipleship” is seen as a personal, interior
spiritual development with social/political implications leading to
action in the world. This understanding leads to our attempt
to interweave topics and themes in educational offerings with both
these dimensions.
consciously
develop interfaith dialogue with Christians of other denominations
as well as with persons of other faiths, in particular Muslims - the
latter, in an effort to counter the negative, “enemy-making”
images in American media. This commitment has been most manifested
in our continuing and growing relationship with Richmond’s
Catholic community (sharing joint services duirng Advent and Lent)
and with the wider Muslim community in our area. These general
commitments help explain the rationale undergirding some of the
topics of our offerings below.
Our
understanding of “education” includes traditional Sunday School
Bible study, using the International Sunday School format by Barclay
Press. An ongoing adult Sunday School class (“Room 4 Exploring”)
uses a variety of resources; a videotape series or program (e.g.,
“Theologians Under Hitler,” and “Paul the Emissary”),
a book or article, a speaker or speakers, or a series led by one
person, such as the pastor’s 6-week Quakerism course using Michael
Birkel’s Silence and Witness.
We
also have one-time forums on a wide range of topics - such as, in the
past year: forgiveness, spiritual direction, spiritual friendship,
community service, discussion of events leading up to Jesus’ birth
and surrounding his birth using the F. Zeffirelli film, Jesus of
Nazareth, Muslim speakers sharing their experiences of Ramadan, a
pharmacist from the Meeting helping seniors understand the Medicare D
Prescription Drug Plan sign-up, gratitude, conflict resolution in
relationships (2-part series), forms of prayer, images of sacred
geometry, our local newspaper’s responsiveness to the community and
its religious institutions - with the paper’s Viewpoints Editor,
Meeting parents of an autistic child explaining their challenges and
educating the congregation in empathy and support, a one-man show
“Harry Truman,” the topography of spiritual growth; a four-week
series using excerpts from the book, God’s Politics, by
Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, in Wash., D.C.; the
Mexican Quaker director of our local Latino center speaking on issues
facing our growing Latino population; report of a Quaker nurse from
our Meeting who helped with Hurricane Katrina relief.
Being responsible for the whole range of
adult education, the Center for Spirituality in the last year has
offered education in a wide variety of formats, including:
mid-week
book study groups at noon on Fridays, led by our seminary field
education intern - using H. Nouwen’s book, Peacework:
Prayer, Resistance, Community; and Whispers of Faith , a
compilation of Young Friends’ writing about their experience of
Quakerism
“Doug’s
Department,” led by our pastor on Wednesday evenings, on a variety
of topics
a
Thursday evening class on Christian/Muslim dialogue, co-led by Colin
South, and Saoud el Mawla, Muslim Plowshares Professor at Earlham
College
a
3-part evening series on “Quakers, Sexuality, and the Bible,”
led by Stephanie Crumley-Effinger, Professor at Earlham School of
Religion
a
half-day workshop on “Quaker and Catholic Spiritualities,”
co-led by Michael Birkel, Professor of Religion at Earlham College,
and Sue Kern, a local Catholic lay leader and trained spiritual
director
a
film viewing and discussion of “What the Bleep Do We Know?”
on the relationship between science and religion
a
3-hour workshop, led by our Ministry and Oversight Commission for
our developing Care Team. Workshop was “Living Faith:
Pastoral Care is a Ministry of the Congregation” which drew
heavily on a video program, “The Grit and Grace of Being a
Caregiver: Maintaining Your Balance as You Care for Others.”
Other special events of an
educational nature have included:
Our
Meeting’s second trip to the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati,
this time including our participation on an interfaith panel
discussion which was part of that center’s 10th anniversary
This
winter a group of Christians and Muslims, many from beyond our
Meeting - participated in a weekly class on Christian/Muslim
dialogue, using Mennonite David Shenk’s book, Journey of the
Muslim Nation and the Christian Church, the Bible and Qur’an
The class was co-led by a Christian and a Muslim. The class moved
our Meeting’s experience of interfaith dialogue to a deeper
level.
In
February, we hosted in a threshing session for our Quarterly
Meeting, organized by the Yearly Meeting, on “Quakers and the
Sacraments.
Working
with our Missions and Social Concerns Commission, we arranged two
Sunday worship services and forums called “Community Service
Sundays.” This helped participants become more deeply aware
how our congregation is both individually and corporately involved
in a wide variety of community service and its spiritual
undergirding. This is an example of the occasional attempt we
make to coordinate the theme of both a worship service and a
following forum. Another such experience featured Stephanie
Ford, Professor of Spirituality at ESR speaking on spiritual
companionship, with a forum following on spiritual direction,
led by our seminary intern, Lisa Lundeen Nagel.
Each
year CFS organizes a special nurturing event. This year it was a
contemplative retreat at Quaker Hill Conference Center, led by
our intern Lisa Lundeen Nagel, who has specialized in spiritual
direction. During the school year she also offered 1-to-1
spiritual direction - a deepening form of spiritual
education.
This
spring the Meeting began a “Healing Circle”, that will meet once
a month. This builds on the Meeting’s history of a healing
group which met to explore many dimensions of emotional, physical,
and spiritual healing.
Three
other dimensions of spiritual education here are:
Bulletin
inserts and “Missions Minutes” reports at the close of Meeting
for Worship on the mission or social concern emphasis of that
month. This program, called “Kaleidoscope of Blessings,”
is our Meeting’s chief means of raising funds for missions and
social concerns giving, both locally and internationally,
Quaker and non-Quaker.
The
three Friends Meetings in Richmond will offer a year-long Quaker
Studies Program beginning in October 2006 through May, 2007, open to
anyone interested.
Our
pastor, through his messages and classes, is a key spiritual
educator for our Meeting.
For
leadership of our adult offerings we draw on the following:
our
pastor – Doug Gwyn who is a gifted preacher, teacher and counselor
other
staff and members of the Meeting
resource
persons from the wider Friends community, the College, ESR, FUM, IYM
resource
persons from the wider Richmond community, esp., social service
organizations
leadership
on tapes, CD, DVD, etc.
The
Center for Spirituality tries to keep its hand on the pulse of the
Meeting’s needs, concerns, and interests, so that we can offer
educational opportunities that can be most nourishing to the wide
range of adult stages of faith development present among us. We
welcome the widest input possible. We try to balance the tasks
of generating programming with the process of discerning spiritually
where we are at any given time in this journey of learning and
growing, as one agent of positive, life-giving change in our world.
As
we reflect on this year, it seems clear that we have offered a lot of
variety with the hope that a wide spectrum of offerings will somehow
give something to almost everyone. Our committee – indeed the
Meeting as a whole – is creative, energetic and thoughtful in its
discernment about what to attempt. CFS members are dedicated
and follow through on their commitments.
Wayne
Copenhaver, Clerk, Center for Spirituality
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