Friends Jour­nal’s May issue on “Mem­ber­ship” is out. In my open­ing col­umn I talk about some of the dif­fer­ent types of mem­bers, offi­cial and unofficial:

As the clerk of a small meet­ing, I find myself fre­quent­ly jug­gling these mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories of mem­ber­ship. When we had plumb­ing issues a few months ago, there were lots of emails with a core half-dozen reg­u­lars who I can depend on to help with logis­tics and con­tacts with local con­trac­tors (this group is so con­sis­tent that when I go to send a mes­sage to one, my email pro­gram asks me if I want to include all the others).

When there’s an event com­ing up, the email list expands to include a small group of recent new­com­ers who make it to wor­ship a few times a month. Every so often I look over this list to see if there’s some­one who’s dropped away, and I’ll take a minute to write them a spe­cial email ask­ing how they are and invit­ing them to attend. I would hate for a semi-regular to drop away and think we hadn’t noticed.

There’s also a wide con­stel­la­tion of peo­ple who attend once in a prover­bial blue moon. Some are mem­bers of near­by meet­ings who occa­sion­al­ly hit us up for a change of pace. Oth­ers are local his­to­ry buffs who will come to hear a par­tic­u­lar speak­er but make sure to come ear­ly because they like their once-a-year Quak­er wor­ship. Few of these vis­i­tors will ever become reg­u­lars but they prob­a­bly know some­one who might, and their word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tion could help con­nect a new seek­er with our small band.

When it’s time to send out the annu­al fundrais­ing appeal, I’ll reach out to anoth­er, rather spe­cial class of mem­bers, those at a dis­tance, many of whom I’ve nev­er met. They might hail from one of the found­ing fam­i­lies of the meet­ing; per­haps they grew up there them­selves and have fond mem­o­ries. It might be easy to for­get about these mem­bers but that would be a mis­take, as they remind us of the long line of faith­ful ser­vants who have kept this spe­cial com­mu­ni­ty going in the past.

“A Mem­ber­ship That Is Ever Flow­ing”

I even give a shoutout to the red-shouldered hawk fam­i­ly liv­ing in one of our sycamore trees.

Look­ing back in the archives, we’ve been putting out an issue on mem­ber­ship every four years: Mem­ber­ship and the Gen­er­a­tion Gap in 2012, Almost Quak­er in 2016, Mem­ber­ship and Friends in 2020. I’m actu­al­ly sur­prised at the clock­work pre­ci­sion of our issues, but there’s a good rea­son we keep com­ing back to it. The def­i­n­i­tion of who “we” are is an essen­tial part of our self-identification as Friends. Pret­ty much every­thing we do (or fail to do) reflects our implic­it assump­tions about who’s in and who’s out. Many, per­haps most, of the debates that roil Friends have mem­ber­ship as an element.