In Philadelphia, the city most closely identified with Quakerism for 300 years, the Religious Society of Friends is showing signs of age. It is shrinking and going gray.
The size of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which coordinates Quaker congregations in four states, has been decreasing steadily.In 1957, 35 years ago, the yearly meeting listed 17,000 members in 90 weekly meetings in Eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware. In 1991, there were 104 Quaker congregations in that area, but only 12,757 members.
And, according to a 1990 reckoning, more area Quakers (4,069) were over 60 than were 30 or younger (3,082). The biggest age segment, which Quakers call "the bulge," was 41 to 50 years old (2,062).
Increasingly, those members live outside Philadelphia and its inner suburbs. At some city-based meetings, active members are outnumbered by those who are members in name only - people who live in the suburbs, the country or even other countries, but retain membership out of tradition and nostalgia.
No single event symbolized the problem better than the closing - or, in Quaker terms, laying down - of the Burlington, N.J., Friends Meeting last year. The meeting was the region's oldest, organized in 1678, four years before William Penn sailed from England for his first visit to the New World. When its doors closed on Aug. 3, it had only 10 active members.
According to the Metropolitan Christian Council of Philadelphia, nearly all religious organizations go through periods of declining membership, but most offset them with periods of energetic recruiting. Their membership patterns look like a graph of the stock market, with sharp peaks and valleys.
By contrast, the pattern of Quaker membership in recent years is a long, gentle, downward curve.
Edwin E. Staudt III, general secretary of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, wants to see the curve turn upward - and believes it can.
"As a member of the National Council of Churches, I know that all mainstream churches are in trouble," Staudt said. "But that doesn't mean that we have to stay in trouble."
One problem is that Quakers tend not to have big families. For as long as record keepers can recall, the number of Quaker deaths in a year has exceeded the number of Quaker births.
The second problem is that Quakers don't believe in proselytizing. They reject all forms of recruiting: no door-to-door visits, no advertising, no direct mail, no tent-revival meetings.
And even for those interested in Quakerism, the Friends don't make membership simple.
Instead of selling prospective members, the Religious Society of Friends expects prospects to sell themselves - by becoming known "in meeting," writing essays, meeting with committees. Only at the end of that process is an application for membership considered.
The Quakers' cherished beliefs in consensus and individual conscience complicate any attempt to increase membership. A prospect may be accepted into meeting only after all members agree. And many Quaker parents, following the axiom "No Quaker may speak for another," do not automatically enroll their newborns in meeting, bypassing an opportunity to give them what is known as birthright status.
"They prefer to let their children make their own decisions about membership when they are grown," said Elizabeth Cunningham, assistant secretary of the yearly meeting.
Before World War I, most Quakers were birthright members, "born into meeting." Now, only a third qualify for birthright admission, said Helen J. File, director of the Arch Street Meeting, a Center City Philadelphia landmark now undergoing a $2 million renovation.
The others are "convinced" members, people drawn by what the Quakers call "the inner light."
Staudt, 47, is a convinced member. He and his wife, Rosemary, were United Church of Christ ministers. Eventually, Staudt said, he came to feel hemmed-in by doctrine and uncomfortable with the heavy spiritual dependence that congregations placed on him as pastor.
The Staudts felt at home with the Friends' individualism and their reliance on revelation and meditation in worship.
After three years as coordinator of Quaker meetings in the Bucks County, Pa., area, he felt ready for the challenge of the yearly meeting post.
He believes solutions to the membership decline can be glimpsed in pilot programs aimed at opening the Quakers to diversity - mainly programs of outreach to youth and urban residents.
Staudt has sought a "reorientation of the staff" toward such grass-roots programs. After 18 months in the post, he said, he believes that real progress has been made. Then he quickly added, "There's still a long, long way to go."
Change, he said philosophically, tends to come slowly to religious communities, which sometimes equate stubbornness with love of tradition.
And love of tradition comes easily to a group with a history as rich as that of the Religious Society of Friends.
Quakers were in the Philadelphia area before there was a Philadelphia. Their settlements lined the banks of the Delaware years before William Penn won a charter from King Charles II for a "holy experiment" in a province that was eventually named Pennsylvania.
Members of the Religious Society of Friends - many of them tradesmen, pub owners and innkeepers - became leaders in government and business.
Elizabeth Foley, development director of the yearly meeting, said of the early Quakers: "They came to do good and they did well."
"With a well-earned reputation for honesty and integrity, everyone wanted to do business with them," she said.
Pennsylvania and neighboring areas of New Jersey became, in essence, Quaker provinces.
But in the second half of the 18th century, the Friends divided on matters of war - first the French and Indian War and then the Revolution - as well as on matters of faith. Splits created then in some cases linger to this day.
So does the Quaker estrangement from government, an uneasiness that began with the Revolutionary era, when the Quakers opposed both British taxes and the war those taxes triggered. Instead of serving in government, Quakers traditionally have served as community consciences, standing in protest to racism and militarism.
Though principled citizenship remains a tradition, Quakers no longer fit another part of their colonial image - as a wealthy merchant class.
Now, more than a third are teachers.