The independent scrutiny of membership of the Religious Society of Friends is about to enter its final stage with a new questionnaire for Meetings. Ben Pink Dandelion, honorary professor of Quaker Studies at Birmingham University, and Quaker Bill Chadkirk, embarked on a study of the national Quaker headcount in 2006, and repeated it in 2008. Now they are carrying out the third and final phase of their study, Present and Prevented, asking for attendance at Meeting for Worship on 9 May. Questionnaires have been improved in order to get more accurate information.

Bill, a Farnham Friend, explains that the longitudinal study is not an official view, although findings to date have supported the Britain Yearly Meeting tabular statement conclusion that declining membership would render the Religious Society of Friends extinct between 2030 and 2040. The tabular statement is a ‘headcount’ of members and attenders.

But the independent scrutineers have spotted what might be a hopeful sign. ‘We hope our questionnaires might just begin to shed some light on these issues,’ says Bill, ‘indeed, in the 2008 results there were some very slight indications that confidence may be returning and there are signs that this might be reflected in the tabular statement for 2010.’

The pair has had some success with their study, with an eighty per cent response rate in the first year and seventy per cent in the second. And interesting facts have come to light: ‘in the course of this exercise we discovered that similar exercises were carried out in 1851, 1904, 1909 and 1914. There appear to be about seventy-five Meetings that returned answers to all surveys from 1851 to 2008!’ says Bill.