About three dozen people came out to a community carol singalong at Cropwell Friends Meeting in Marlton, N.J., this past Sunday. The meeting hired three members of the Parson Brown Singers to perform a dozen Christmas classics and lead the group in a singalong of another ten crowd favorites. A highlight was a highly interactive “Twelve Days of Christmas,” for which participants were divided into twelve sets and each given a day to sing and represent in mime. The event finished with cookies, sweets, mulled cider, and conversation as Friends old and new shared stories in the fellowship section of the meetinghouse.
Winter seasonal events are a natural opportunity for community outreach, especially for a Friends meeting with an historical building. The wooden benches, roaring wood stove and singers in Victorian garb instantly set a mood.
The organizers listed the event on Google Events and Eventbrite, as well as Instagram and Facebook (where the meeting bought some event advertising). At the November meeting for business, members had deliberated whether to charge an attendance fee to recoup some of the cost for the singing group, but after discussion and careful discernment the sense of the meeting was that this would be an important outreach event and that expenses should be paid out of meeting funds to allow the event to be free for participants.
A special program is a great event to invite extended networks to visit the meetinghouse: regular Cropwell attenders brought along parents, adult children, neighbors, and friends. The meeting also reached out to lapsed attenders with an invitation to the festivities. It is hoped that some of these new and irregular visitors might come back for worship in the near future.
