Though I am late posting this to the website, this is still a timely reminder of the importance of Friends speaking truth, particularly about their own experiences . Thanks to Minnesota Friends for sharing their concerns with all of us. -Kathy

REFLECTIONS BY SOME TWIN CITIES FRIENDS ON EVENTS SURROUNDING THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION IN ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS

We who have united in this statement are members and regular attenders of several Quaker meetings in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. Although our individual definitions of pacifism may vary, we have for years supported the traditional peace testimony of the Religious Society of Friends. We have exercised our right to protest massively but peacefully against the growing militarization of our country and against policies and practices that we saw as contrary to the Geneva Conventions and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have also defended the right of others to protest peacefully and to practice nonviolent civil disobedience in support of their convictions. [Read more →]

The theme for this weekend’s gathering of Willamette Quarterly Meeting (North Pacific YM) focused on “The Future of Friends.” One of the topics that surfaced along the way was membership, and so this seemed a timely reprint.

by Marjorie Sykes, Pacific Yearly Meeting (though living in India at the time)
March, 1975

A lot of people have been raising questions about the whole idea of “membership” in the Society of Friends, not only here in the U.S.A., but also in Britain and in India. And not only now, but for some time past. When I was asked to write for the Bulletin, I got out and re-read a paper I had written exactly twenty years ago, a paper which records the exercise of about twenty Friends (Indian, American, British) who came together in India to consider this subject “in a spirit of worship and of loving candour.” The wording of the record is my responsibility, but I believe it represents a genuine consensus:

“The religious fellowship of a Quaker Meeting for Worship is and should be open to anyone who seeks to share it. But when a person asks for membership a new factor enters in. The Society of Friends is not just a kind of religious club. It is a continuing organism, which was born of the union of the creative energy of prophetic religious insight with the spiritual environment of England in the seventeenth century. Like the physical organism it carries within itself the “genes” of its parenthood, and that parenthood is Christian.

” The origin of Quakerism in Christianity is undisputed historical fact, and it would be less than truthful to ignore or minimize it. This fact is not one of geographical accident but of spiritual kinship. We ought to expect inquirers to study the Gospel records and the treasures of the Johannean and Pauline epistles, not as an ‘authoritative scripture’ to be accepted, but as the story of a creative and healing power set free.”

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