State of the Meeting Report - 2002

This 60th anniversary year for Penn Valley Friends Meeting has been a rich mixture of joys, sorrows and challenges for the future. Our anniversary celebration was combined with our hosting of the annual Spring Fling of the Missouri Valley Friends Conference. In addition to an abundance of fellowship we heard an informative presentation about the Quaker roots of the recent "peace focus" of the Community of Christ Church (formerly RLDS) as well as an interesting update of the history of the Penn Valley Meeting by our own Reva Griffith.

Our collective yearning to deepen our spiritual roots was reflected in the active participation for a second year of about a dozen of us in the Spiritual Formation Program sponsored through IYM. This year we focused on a single book, The Quaker Reader, and found that to be quite enlightening. We also initiated an intense study of Quaker history, which has been well received and we continue our regular Bible Study Group. This focus on spiritual growth may well account for the welcome increase in vocal ministry during worship

The major challenge we must address as we face the next year comes from the fact that four very active and supportive families have moved from Kansas City this past year. As a result we suddenly find we have no young children at meeting and our income stream has been significantlv reduced. We have also laid down our first day school and our midweek worship and pot luck. We transferred one member to the Austin Friends Meeting. We celebrated one new birth only to have her parents relocate to Des Moines shortly thereafter.

We invite all of you to visit our very professional web page at www.quakernet.org thanks to the dedicated efforts of one of our members. Our library has also been reorganized with a listing of the contents available at our web site. The continuing interest in finding a new meeting house over the past 10 years or more has subsided due to the excellent renovation work over the past few years by our house upkeep committee, creating an aesthetically pleasing appearance each week as we gather together for worship.

We were delighted this winter to have several high school students not previously connected with the meeting begin to attend on a regular basis. We celebrate that they will all leave for college in the fall. Our Ministry and Oversight committee has been enriched by the participation of one of our own high school students and another one of our young members was named the outstanding woman student in leadership at KU this year. We are also pleased that another of our members having recently completed her doctoral work, will have the subject of her thesis published as a textbook shortly.

A major crisis drawing together the caring resources of the whole community was john Griffith's back surgery, followed shortly by Reva's broken hip, just after the worst ice storm in the history of Kansas City. It gave each of us the opportunity to reach out to a most beloved couple in our meeting. The ice storm also allowed us to get to know and appreciate more fully a next-door neighbor to the meetinghouse.