The Back of the Bus

As the EarthQuaker Bike Trip leaves Lancaster for Gifford Pinchot State Park, I am becoming increasingly intrigued by a debate that is dividing the Lancaster Monthly Meeting, both literally and figuratively:

Air conditioning.

The Lancaster meeting house, while it looks old, was only built in 1956. The room for worship is beautiful, filled with very old cast-off benches from meetings around the Eastern Pennsylvania area. There is no air conditioning in the old meeting house.

In the 1990s, the meeting grew exponentially and needed a new space for community programs that could accommodate more people and be wheelchair accessible. So they built an addition which looks exactly like the old building, complete with a fake chimney (an ornamentation that isn’t very Quaker).

The new building is air conditioned. Some in the meeting wanted to move the worship to the new addition, so that people who needed it for medical reasons would be accommodated. But most wanted to stay in the old building, as its environment is more conducive to worship and air conditioning a large space is terrible for the environment.

But Quakers do not operate by majority rule, and the meeting appointed a committee to find a solution. They ironically named themselves the “cool committee.” The best they could figure is that for the summer of 2008, the meeting for worship would be split in two, with congregants choosing where they would like to meet.

The vast majority meet in the old building, which is not cool, but is certainly not sweltering in the summer heat. The few that meet in the air conditioned wing have plenty of anger, some of which erupted at yesterday’s session of joys and concerns.

One man, who grew up in the South, compared his experience to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. “I’m sitting at the back of the bus, and it hurts,” he said tearfully.

His analogy was extreme, but his emotion was certainly seconded by others in the meeting. I talked to quite a few members of the meeting, and some were equally as heated, or cynical about the whole situation. The one thing that they could all agree on, however, was that it was severely hurting the unity of the meeting.

This controversy is unique because the institution is not being divided by ideological differences which are affecting many other Quaker meetings, such as same-sex civil marriage and Christo-centricity. This is something purely physical and mundane. In a way, that makes it more difficult. There can be no middle ground; it’s either air conditioning or not. Someone has to give in.

But how can they? Some say they need air conditioning for medical reasons, and even if the normal room is 75 degrees, that’s still too hot. For others who care about the environment, being in air conditioning is too detrimental to what they stand for.

Can a meeting worship in unity in two separate rooms?