There is a road on the estate where my parent’s care home is called ‘Meetinghouse Lane’. They can’t remember whether or not there ever was a Meetinghouse. Maybe it’s become one of those meaningless names that developers use, like having a ‘The Avenue’ with no trees. Haven’t thought about meeting houses in a long time. Some American university bought the archives when Friends House was sold, didn’t they? Maybe they’ve digitized everything by now. I’ll check when I get home.

I was a teen-ager when Yearly Meeting made the decision to start selling meeting houses, the ones that were left, anyway, and I do remember all the excitement about the reparations fund and even accommodating refugees in the former houses. Which is fine if it’s an old one which was a pub or a house before, or if it has a warden’s flat in it. Not so much with a modern purpose-built one. How long did that last before they were turned into flats for commercial rent? Or demolished. All in all I think that the great sell-off raised about a hundred and fifty million pounds, which sounds like a lot of money, it certainly was celebrated. It soon got spent, though. And the thing about money is you can only spend it once. But a building you can use again and again.

Friends felt good about spending money, especially if they could believe that it came from selling things which were tainted. Sure, you couldn’t do anything with a meetinghouse that you didn’t own. You couldn’t host like-minded groups. You couldn’t use it as a collection point or a distribution point, or a ‘warm bank’ (which was a thing back then), or build any sort of connection with your town or borough with a meetinghouse that you’d sold. But you would have a splash of cash to spend. Once.

The plan was to spend all the cash by a couple of years ago, I think, but it went much sooner than that. I was about 30 when it suddenly looked as if the fund wasn’t going to go anything like as far as anyone thought (surprise! inflation!) and Friends House was sold off in a bit of a panic. Well, it’s now the nicest hotel and conference centre on the Euston Road, so there’s that. I’ve been there for a trade show.

Britain Yearly Meeting still exists, and it still owns a few of the really old listed meeting houses. It’s like a sort of miniature National Trust. You can be a ‘Member’ and go along for a cup of tea and a biscuit and a look around and there might even be some worship. And of course it is still a charity. Regular group worship is all on-line now. When it happens at all. After five years of on-and-off again pandemic we got out of the habit of meeting face-to-face, so they say. I was about ten at the time. I did go to a few Young Friends events, but those sort of faded away, too. Yealand, was it we went to? It was near the sea, I remember that. Meeting houses were centres. Friends House was the centre, although it never was the top. But the centre could not hold. Then things fall apart.

So the Society ended up kind of atomised. We met online for worship, none of us had a meeting house to go to if we wanted to. Not even for Yearly Meeting, eventually. Since we worshipped more and more at home, online but alone in our room, or maybe just with family. And then just alone in our room. Why start the call? We all know that we’re all worshipping, right? Now some say that this is just fine, and it doesn’t matter if there’s a Meeting House to go to so long as there are Quakers and they worship, somehow, somewhere. And some say that it wouldn’t matter whether or not there’s a Religious Society of Friends to be a Member of, so long as you ‘are a Quaker’ and do the work. And some even say that it doesn’t matter whether or not anyone ‘is a Quaker’, so long as you do the work anyway. Maybe so.

And for a while the numbers of people doing the work, and coming to on-line Meetings and being Quakers did go up. I remember some huge on-line meetings. And there was more diversity, which we desperately did need, which was good. Did that follow from the tiny contribution we made to the vast current material inequality born of old structural injustices? Maybe. Good, if so. And yet…it’s the Religious Society of Friends, not the loose affiliation of solitary thoughtful good-doers. Or it was. Did we really use to have a United Nations office? Did we really used to get called on from around the world to go help build peace? Where would you go now, who would you ask?

Each of us does what good we can in our home, our job, our street, our town. But what about the big problems, the ones that need a big organisation? We got out of the habit of being big, of being substantial in the world, of there being something at the end of Meetinghouse Lane worth finding.

And is it spiritually healthy for regular worship to be at home, and usually solitary? Quaker worship was collegiate and communal and collaborative from the start. Until Covid, you went to a Meeting for Worship at a Meeting House and the journey maybe was part of it. You left your home and went out into the world, walking the face of the Earth, passing strangers and friends, seeing the sky, feeling the breeze and maybe that did something. Primed us for the Spirit, somehow. And we met, a realy meeting, handshake at the door, the vestibule or anteroom, and then stepping across the threshold into the shared silence. Into the atmosphere of love breathed in and out by the Friends there before you. Well, that’s how I heard it went, anyway.

And yes, it certainly is a boon that since those pandemic days that those who have mobility problems, or who can’t leave their home for some other reason, can join in what collective worship there is left.

When BYM decided in 2025 to detach Membership from the Area Meetings it was at first a liberation. There was a surge in Membership from peripatetic Friends, many of them young, some not so much. And then, Members attending Area Meetings for business started to fade away. Because, well, why would you? And then, more and more often on a Sunday morning Friends didn’t bother to open the call because, well, why would you?

So now we sort-of are the thing that critics accused us of being. We all do whatever seems individually good and right for us each to do. We don’t get our spiritual sharp edges rounded off by rubbing against other Friends, face-to-face where we can read the body language and hear the breathing. We don’t experience that blaze of soul-warmth when a room full of people gather into the Spirit. If we don’t ‘meet’ is it ‘worship’? I’m not sure the quality of our discernment has survived now that it’s always mediated by technology. But what else will we do, detached from place as we are now?

One thing my dad does remember was that when Friends House was sold there was a lot of talk about how it was immoral to have this big asset sitting there when it could be turned into cash to do some good with. And he says that he said at the time: that’s Judas Iscariot talking.