2017 Souhegan PM State of Society

Souhegan Preparative Meeting

State of Society Report for 2017 [1]

November of 2017 marked the end of our second year as a worshipping group.  During this year, we in Souhegan, and the monthly meeting, have felt that we are well-enough established to act as a preparative meeting.  We have appointed a clerk and a treasurer, and have met regularly for business every other month.  Except for weather-related problems, we have met for worship regularly. We offer child care to small children as needed (usually our sole resident little one).

Worship is generally solid and nourishing; we have had visitors from other meetings perhaps as often as once a month, for which we are always grateful.  Ministry is offered by several different Friends, though we have sometimes wondered whether more could be done to encourage more openness to the service.  During this year, we have begun to work on outreach, to make ourselves more visible.  We appointed a small committee (our first!) to help us work on this, and with their recommendation, we concluded that in-reach was a first task:  We are clear that our invitation to seekers must flow from a sense of our community's abundant life.  As a first step, we have undertaken regular monthly after-meeting study sessions, which help us to learn more about each other's spiritual lives.  The outreach committee occasionally brings brief spiritual exercises to our meetings for business.  We have also connected with Kathleen Wooten’s “digital ministry” project [2], and intend in 2018 to improve our presence on the Web and social media.  We have some hope that both the inreach and outreach work will encourage the individual spiritual growth, and mutual love, out of which fresh sensitivity to ministry will arise.

Several of our members and attenders are active in social concerns — e.g. conflict resolution, climate action — and a high proportion of us are educators.  Our “outside meeting” concerns make their way into the meeting life, though the meeting has not been led to any corporate witness yet.  We are also connected actively with Dover Quarterly meeting, and with Yearly Meeting activities.  We have tried to keep in regular touch with the Henniker portion of Weare Monthly Meeting, but the winter weather has made that more difficult (the meeting even had to cancel its Candlelight Carol Service for the first time in many years).  We hope with the return of spring that we will once more be able to have at least one Souhegan Friend at monthly meetings.