Chattanooga Friends Meeting

 

Friends in Chattanooga, some coming to the region from Philadelphia early in the 20th century to operate cotton mills, first began meeting on alternate Sundays in 1956.  In September of the following year, they selected officers (the first clerk was Alfred Thatcher, a transplanted Philadelphian), decided to meet weekly, and made as their first priority a First-day School for their three children of diverse ages.  Convening at first in a local pastor's study, they soon moved to a Seventh-Day Adventist Church where meetings could be held on Sunday mornings.  With people moving away and deaths, in the 1960s the meeting had to struggle, but members continued to participate regularly in the Southern Appalachian Association of Friends, the forerunner of SAYMA; by the end of the decade they were down to meeting monthly in one members home.  Meetings for business became infrequent, at best.

 

In the 1970s, after meeting two Sundays a month in the local YWCA, the meeting asked to be granted preparative status under care of West Knoxville; this effort culminated in full monthly meeting standing in September 1977.  With slow growth and a regular second hour forum program, the meeting ventured to buy a house for a meeting site and saw its endeavors crowned with success in November 1983; the first meeting for worship in the new location, Rogers Road at Crestway Drive, occurred with a few over a dozen people present on the first Sunday in January 1984.  Although located in a racially mixed area, which should have attracted a diverse membership, the meeting has remained all white, well-educated, and relatively well-to-do.

 

Over the years, the meeting has taken well-publicized stands for non-racial preferences in city employment, an alternative to the locally acclaimed Armed Forces Week celebrations in May, and draft counseling.  In the 1990s, the meeting grew substantially enough to have a regular weekly and very exciting First-day school, which serves to attract parents with young children; in 2005, there are sometimes eight children.

 

A well-done newsletter has come out since the mid-1980s but has now been replaced, for at least an interim period by this web-site. The meeting developed an attractive memorial garden behind the meeting house on its four and a half acre plot. In the summer of 2000 we fostered a community organic garden for both members and nearby residents; with a development grant from the city, it has its own water system and supplies delicious vegetables to many.  The meeting house boasts a full time resident and is open and used for community-wide gatherings of various sorts.

 

The meeting has occasionally been plagued with personal conflict, but members have found that with Quakerly maturity and forbearance even the most divisive of these can give way to unity in God's spirit.  At the present time (June 2005), the meeting is aware of the need for pastoral counseling and is exploring ways to meet it.  Although individual members are committed to peace, environmental, and racial issues, the meeting itself never had a formal peace and justice committee, a glaring omission in some eyes.  With recent increased weekly attendance, sometimes counting twenty-eight or nine, these gaps may be filled.  Still, all recognize that these constant ups-and-downs are likely to remain, and we rely on the presence of Christ's spirit to bring us to the unity that will make solutions likely.

--Larry Ingle

June 2005