Likely the greatest impact of technology on Quaker corporate experience over the past few years has been the introduction of online technology into our meetings for worship. This was viewed by most as a saving grace, permitting Friends to worship together during COVID.
Many Quaker meetings continue to support an online component in meeting for worship. My own small meeting in Idaho has especially experienced benefits from meeting online. Our few members are dispersed over a wide geographic area, and we do not own a meetinghouse, so online worship is much more accessible than in-person worship for many of us. Clearly, no travel time or gas cost, and lower carbon consumption, are benefits. Due to circumstances, we now have a regular attender from the East Coast as a welcome addition to our worship.
Online worship is not for everyone, and worshiping together physically in the same space has a different feeling. “Blended” or “hybrid” meetings attempt to bridge the gap, permitting a choice of physical togetherness or online participation. In our small meeting, the need to be physically together for worship, at least periodically, has outweighed the online benefits. Once a month we hold a hybrid meeting.
Other meetings have addressed the “not for everyone” issue by holding an early service that is strictly in-person, followed by a hybrid meeting for worship. For large meetings, that can be a good solution to address everybody’s spiritual needs and sensibilities.
There are a number of negative aspects to holding meeting for worship online, including: interruptions occur in a household (pets, the phone, the door . . .), it is not conducive to receiving a message from a speaker who is on mute, and for some a “gathered meeting” does not exist when it is online.
In our meeting, an after-meeting weekly check-in online has helped draw us closer together. One by one, each person has time to share highlights of their past week and their personal concerns. This has some advantage over our after-meeting fellowship in person, when we tended to break into smaller groups over cookies and missed hearing everyone’s story. One disadvantage of this online fellowship, however, is that you cannot take another person aside who appears to need support and put an arm around their shoulder.
For some members of our meeting, the disadvantages of gathering together online outweigh the advantages. Some believe we are paying a spiritual price for a convenience. In our business meetings, for example, our clerk is finding it is harder to gauge the “sense of the meeting” online and believes we are losing an element of Quaker “good order.”
Another difficulty with gathering online is simply the effort required to manage it. Support of technology often falls to a limited few and ties them to that role. If special equipment is required, it puts further pressure on limited human and financial resources. While these difficulties might not directly pertain to the Quaker corporate experience, they can have ramifications.
Beyond the level of our monthly meeting, online technology is also transforming Quaker corporate experience at the levels of quarterly/regional and yearly meetings. These larger bodies are served by committees comprising members drawn from several states. Meeting online makes good sense for them. Here too, time, travel expenses, and carbon footprint are major concerns.
Online gathering is generally capable of serving the communication needs of a committee. We can see each other for a personal connection. Reports can be shared online for accessibility and can be screen-shared for highlighting details during discussion. Many committees make good use of shared document technology for editing, disseminating, discussing, and archiving reports and minutes.
Another advantage of conducting committee business online is that it frees up time for committee members during in-person quarterly and yearly meetings. It has been common practice for us to find times to hold committee meetings during those large gatherings. By meeting online prior to quarterly or yearly meetings, committee members find they have more time for fellowship and worship during those gatherings. Even so, some committees still choose to hold an in-person meeting during the larger gathering, typically over lunch. Such meetings have always excluded committee members who could not attend the larger gathering. Now, however, they have an option to be more inclusive by simply meeting online prior to the session.
Ever since COVID, our arrangements committees have continued to develop our capacity to engage participants “remotely” in our quarterly and yearly meetings. In some cases, we steward the limited technological resources available for our gathering by organizing parallel sets of experiences, in-person and online. The best example here might be worship-sharing groups, although we have also had some success organizing interest groups to run in multiple formats. Plenary sessions are now standardly run as hybrid meetings. The online technology makes it easy to record sessions and post the videos for future access.
One area of our quarterly and yearly meetings where we have not tried to incorporate the hybrid meeting model is in our children’s program, which has been strictly in-person. Even so, online technology has eased some of the burden on our children’s program committees, by providing automation to the background checks that we now require of all volunteers who work with our children.
Similarly, North Pacific Yearly Meeting (NPYM) as a whole is continuing to identify and develop technological resources that support the ongoing administration and function of our meeting throughout the year. Our main website, npym.org, is one of the most public faces of NPYM. It advertises coming events and provides links to resources and other Quaker-aligned entities. It contains “State of the Meeting” reports and Memorial Minutes from meetings and worship groups across NPYM. It contains committee pages to advertise and share what is occurring under the committees’ care. It provides online access to our book of Faith and Practice, our newsletter, and more.
NPYM has an internal website that is accessible in a controlled manner, somewhat separated from the main website. This internal site provides access to information of a more sensitive nature to anyone within the NPYM community. This includes our directory of members and attenders, contact information for meetings and committees, a document archive of minutes and reports from many years of NPYM, and guides for carrying out the many processes that sustain NPYM.
We have other auxiliary websites that provide access to specialized information for NPYM. The site as.npym.org serves as the main web portal to our annual session. Each year, this site communicates our theme, schedule, transportation assistance, links to reports and minutes, and other details. We use a software package called Cognito Forms (CognitoForms.com) to collect registrants’ preferences about room requirements, worship group choices, and job choices. We use other tools to organize that information and to handle the actual logistics of making assignments.
Clearly, Quaker meetings are investing in a broad range of new technologies, including video cameras, audio equipment, computers, and innumerable online platforms and other software packages. All these tools are having direct and indirect impacts on the Quaker corporate experience. We hope that they will result in positive answers from our members and from seekers to questions like: Did you find us easily? Did you find the information you needed? Did you have a Friendly experience with the people you met online? Do you feel supported in your spiritual journey?”
“Friends Everywhere” now have countless opportunities to become more aware of each other and to engage in Quaker fellowship in new ways.
John Gotts is a retiree from a life in information technology with General Motors, Electronic Data Systems, American Express, and Amdahl. He is currently the webkeeper for NPYM, Pacific Northwest Quarterly Meeting, and Pullman-Moscow Monthly Meeting, where he is a member.