Many value the friendships they have built over the years with their own groups, and with the ringers who welcome them in other cities or countries.

“You can walk into a tower anywhere on a practice night and someone will immediately say, ‘Are you ringing?’” said Andrew Evans, 65, an Englishman who usually rings at Gloucester Cathedral in England but was recently in Philadelphia for the annual Quarter Peal Weekend held by the Philadelphia Guild of Change Ringers. “They will say, ‘Yes, O.K., what do you want to ring?’ Then you have a ring and go to the pub.”

Mr. Evans, a retired research director for a French multinational company, said he used to play golf before he lost the sight in his right eye, and with it, the ability to putt. So he was looking for another social activity that gave him some exercise. He decided to revive his experience of ringing, which began when he was 15 and growing up in an isolated English village where there was not much for a teenager to do besides ring bells in the local church.

Ringing a “method” — the name given to a set pattern of notes — requires the participants to memorize the order in which their bells will sound in relation to all the others, a sequence that will change with each rotation of notes.

While each of the methods practiced at St. Mark’s on a recent evening contained a few dozen changes and lasted five to 10 minutes, the longest sequence commonly performed — known as a “peal” — contains 5,040 changes. It takes about three hours to go through the sequences, which can test the mental and physical reserves of the ringers.

The Quarter Peal Weekend drew about two dozen ringers who gathered at the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Groups of eight rang a series of quarter peals, each of which contained about 1,260 changes and took 40 to 45 minutes to complete.