Through the Flaming Sword

Donations per member

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 curve has been rising. In fact, expenses rose relatively steeply from the mid-1970s to roughly 1992, but donations kept up. In 1992, expenses leveled off some, then they rose a bit around 2001, and then they leveled off again around 2004.

Meanwhile, donations per adult member kept up through that first stable period, but couldn’t quite match the upturn in expenses between 2001 and 2004. Then, beginning with the Great Recession in 2008, donations began a slow decline that had not stopped by 2020, while expenses remained fairly stable for a while. 

Until 2014. Around then, the expenses curve turns chaotic. Expenses rose very steeply and spiked dramatically in 2019 and then crashed in 2020. Meanwhile, all through that period donations remained flat. I suspect that the pandemic caused the crash in expenses in 2020. But I’m not close enough to the yearly meeting anymore to explain what was going on during that last period.

In this period since 2014, the yearly meeting apparently made up the difference with its annual general appeals, with its investments, and with other income. I’m no finance expert, but it looks like a dramatic increase in the value of investments in that period helped to fund the dramatic increases in total income while donation income remained flat.

As this disparity between income and expenses becomes more obviously a threat for some yearly meetings, they will have to make increasingly severe cuts in their budgets. Some of these cuts will necessarily fall upon staff, as they already have in Philadelphia YM, as I know, and reduced staff is not likely to reverse membership decline or increase charitable giving. It’s a feedback loop.

What’s a yearly meeting to do? I’ll think about that in the next post.

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 the 66 years from 1955 through 2021, NYYM membership declined by 3,342 members, from 6395 to 3,053, or 52.3%. As you can see from the chart above, the decline began around 1970 and may have started leveling off a bit beginning around 2003. As you can see from the second chart below, the trendline, if it holds, reaches 0 members in 2056.

Yearly meeting appointments

When I was active in the yearly meeting from the 1980s through the late 2010s, yearly meeting session attendance—people actually in the room for business meetings, rarely got above 120, roughly 3% or so of total membership. If that percentage of active Friends holds, the yearly meeting will have only 50 people doing its business by around 2035, less than ten years from now. In 2020, the yearly meeting had 49 committees or other bodies to which members were appointed and more than 400 appointments that were filled on paper. You can do the math.

Factors

Removals. Unfortunately, I don’t have data for 1973 through 1985, which latter year is about when I joined. But I remember that in the late 1980s into the early 2000s, meetings became more resolved to remove folks from their rolls because the yearly meeting used a membership formula to calculate requests for contributions from the quarterly meetings, and meetings were then paying for “members” whom they never saw and/or who lived away from their area. I don’t remember when the quota practice was dropped, but I suspect that trying to reduce their covenantal commitment was a factor in the number of removals from membership that made the membership decline curve steeper in that period than later.

Resignations. In addition, in this same period, lots of Christ-centered Friends left the yearly meeting as individual meetings and then the yearly meeting itself gradually came to a new testimony regarding marrying same sex couples—another factor in the decline.

Meetings

Lets look at the number of meetings instead of the number of members. For this I’m comparing 2012 and 2021.

The number of meetings declined in this period from 63 to 61, losing three and gaining one. But the more important figures lie in the number of very small meetings.

In 2012, NYYM had 8 meetings with membership at 10 or less, with an average membership of 6.6, representing 12.7% of all meetings. NYYM had 9 meetings with between 11 and 20 members with an average membership of 16.1, representing 14.3% of all the meetings. Thus 27.0% of NYYM’s meetings had 20 or fewer members

In 2021, NYYM had nine meetings with 10 or fewer members, with an average membership of 5.2, representing 14.8% of all meetings—an increase from 2012 of 2.1%. Twelve meetings had between 11 and 20 members, with an average membership of 16.8, representing 19.7% of all meetings. Thus 34.4% of NYYM’s meetings had 20 or fewer members—more than a third. That’s a 7.4% increase since 2012.

Meeting summary: In the nine years between 2012 and 2021, NYYM lost a net two meetings, but the number of small meetings (20 and fewer members) increased by 7.4%. Meetings with 17 or so members (the average for meetings with 11 to 20 members) will hang on for a while, but they are likely to lose members, as the increase in the number of meetings with 10 members or less indicates. Meetings with just five members are probably in real trouble.

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 expected that meetings—meaning, mostly, yearly meetings—would have to radically restructure themselves or they would collapse. 

I’ve made a case study of New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM) to study these factors and trends. I chose NYYM because I know it well; I was a member for decades and was its communications director for several years, and in that role I wrote its annual reports, so I’m very familiar with its data-keeping format. Also, NYYM’s records are kept in the Quaker collection at Swarthmore College, which is easily accessible for me. Furthermore, NYYM’s Orthodox and Hicksite yearly meetings reunited in 1955, which provides a clean starting point for the data. My data field thus extends from 1955 through 2020/2021.

The results surprised me some. Membership has been steadily declining, and maybe more important, the number of monthly meetings that are inching toward collapse has been accelerating. The rate of giving by members to their meetings is more complicated, but shows a troubling trend over the last twenty years, especially when compared to fixed expenses.

In the next post, I look at the membership figures.