Through the Flaming Sword

Before I began this study, I thought that, in addition to a steady decline in membership, the giving by the members we do have was also declining. But that’s not quite the case.

As you can see from the chart below, until the last decade or so, donations by membership actually kept pace with expenses, even though the expenses ...

Members

As I said in the previous post, New York Yearly Meeting membership has been declining since the Orthodox and Hicksite yearly meetings reunited in 1955.

The broad conclusions are as follows...

In an earlier series of posts which I titled Quaker-pocalypse, I talked about three curves that I thought were converging for Quaker meetings and institutions with potentially catastrophic consequences. These trends are: declining membership, declining donations from the members we do have, and rising fixed institutional costs. When the first two curves crossed the third, I e...

RECAP: I’ve been exploring in recent posts the various levels of intention and meaning in Matthew 18:14–20, and especially Jesus’s promise to guarantee the church’s authority in dealing with conflict in the church with his “presence” in verse 20, from which we get the phrase “gathered meeting”. In this and in the previous post, I’m looking a...

I tend to read the Bible as though what I am reading is addressed to me. I suspect that we all tend to do this. But it never is addressed to us in the 21st century. Every passage in the Bible is always addressed to someone besides us, who lived in a completely different time and cultural milieu.

In fact there are at least three timeframes at work in Matthew 18:14–20...