Iowa Yearly Meeting Changes

Martha Hampton

Your question about how and why things have changed in Iowa Yearly Meeting is something we have been aware of in Ministry & Oversight Committee. Before two generations ago we were, for the most part, made up of rural monthly meetings. Most people who attended were members and many were birthright members. Many of the members had grown up in the Yearly Meeting. There was not so much movement away from the meetings because:

These were farm families and people stayed on the farm when they grew up
If young people did go to college they often came back to their home community
Transportation was not as readily available before WWII.

When you grew up, Jeff, your parents were part of a large group of Quakers about the same ages who had grown up through the Young Friends activities in Iowa Yearly Meeting. Many of these young friends found their marriage partners within this group. These couples got together to have fun activities, like camping, after they were married and continued to do this after they had families. Thus, you were born into this community and looked forward to going to Scattergood where you could be with your friends whom you met along the way.

Now two generations later, what do we have in Iowa Yearly Meeting? Most of the monthly meetings are urban. Most of the members of these meetings came from other places and from other religious backgrounds. There are few birthright members. The parents of these families do not have a common or similar background. For some, there is not the attachment or interest in the Yearly Meeting. The Monthly Meeting is their spiritual family and home. Our lives are more complicated. People today are involved in more concerns and committees (all good and important issues) but in our busy lives we have trouble trying to schedule a time to get together with family and friends. We all have cars and can get places in a hurry but there still isn't enough time in our schedules. Our young people go away to college and many get married or find jobs and they don't come back. Our older members who were the mainstay of the Yearly Meeting have either died or are less active than they were. Also, until recently, for a period of time there were few children in our Yearly Meeting. Our daughter, Ruth, was the only child born in the Yearly Meeting in 1966. Thus, there was not a strong group of young friends to carry on this intervisitation among families which Jeff wrote about. Not only has our Yearly Meeting community changed but society as a whole has changed and one reflects the other. Is it possible to go back????? I wonder.

About 15 or 20 years ago these couples I spoke about had an interest group at Yearly Meeting trying to see if there were some way we could build our own retirement community to continue living, playing, working and worshiping together after we had retired. Some of the ideas centered around Scattergood as an area where we might develop such an community. But any such project would take a lot of money and hard work to make it a reality and we did not continue to pursue the idea. Many of us are still looking for some place to go where we would have an ideal retirement community. This is not exactly what Jackie and others were writing about but it is along a similar vein.