Finding Union in Membership

I began attending Multnomah Friends Meeting in August of 2023. Growing up queer in the Seventh-day Adventist Church led me on a long journey of faith and doubt, ultimately to study at Union Theological Seminary in 2020. I identified with liberation theology but not with any specific denomination. Working for the Kairos Center, leading Bible Study for their Freedom Church of the Poor, I was sent to lead a study at Baltimore Yearly Meeting. This was my first encounter with Quakerism. I was amused by the non-hierarchical culture, but I thought, “If they can all agree that war is bad then maybe these are my people.”

I returned to Portland, Oregon, after graduating and visited Multnomah Meeting. Being spiritually homeless, membership made sense. I’m 28 now, but since high school, I have felt a strong moral conviction against U.S. militarism. Figuring out that my first visit was August 2023 is ominous to me—months before the U.S.-backed genocide began in Gaza.

Worshiping in silence with atheists, Christians, and Buddhists at Multnomah Meeting, combined with the Quaker history of opposition to war, made membership an easy decision. As I began to learn more about Quaker views of Scripture, I felt emboldened in my own long held attitude toward the Bible. (Another moment of union: discovering historic Quaker theology validates and strengthens personal beliefs about the Bible.) I was amazed to learn that hundreds of years ago people like George Fox, Margaret Fell, and Elias Hicks felt the same way. The reason we have the Bible, even according to a fundamentalist, is the Holy Spirit working on human beings. At no point does the Bible say this prophetic movement of the Holy Spirit stopped when the Book of Revelation was completed. The Bible never says ancient people had better Holy Spirit WIFI connection than we do today.

Margaret Fell testifies to the preaching of George Fox:

“Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?”

Amidst the overwhelming stream of “Love thy neighbor” from the Torah to Jesus, amidst the echoes of the God of the Oppressed drowning Pharaoh’s army, there are indeed Bible passages that justify oppression, nationalism, homophobia, patriarchy, and even genocide.

I grew up in a church that does not affirm LGBT people like me. I grew up in a church—started by a woman prophet—that does not ordain women, let alone LGBT people. As a Quaker now, I think about the church that let a teenage girl, Ellen White, in the 1800s share her prophetic visions. This seems strange in a modern church, but perhaps not in Quaker Meeting for Worship or the Early Jerusalem Church. Ellen White herself wrote in 1911, “The promise of the Holy Spirit is not limited to any age or to any race.”

Along with lifelong friends and family, one thing I thank the Seventh-day Adventists for is growing up with the stories of Jesus of Nazareth. One day Jesus’s disciples tried to keep children away from him. He told them, “No, you need to become like the kids. First of all, let the kids come to me. If you don’t become like kids, good luck getting into God’s kingdom!”

In three gospels, this story is immediately followed by a rich man approaching Jesus. Jesus “loves” the man, but in the end says something similar: “Good luck to these rich people getting into God’s kingdom!” (Mark 10:13-27)

In high school, it was Jesus in the Gospels who radicalized me against capitalism (“You cannot serve God and wealth”). It was Jesus who caused me to stop being a Christian. At the time, I didn’t know there were anti-war or left-wing Christians. Jesus, nailed to a Roman cross, executed for protesting the occupation’s collaborating temple, is the ultimate refutation of the Christian empires, Christian genocides and slavery, and today’s Christian nationalism that take his name in vain.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John 15)

This is why the first Quakers called themselves Friends. Fox wrote that the term “Quaker” came from a mocking judge after Fox told the court to “tremble at the word of God.” Even this originally derogatory external name has spiritual significance to me. In Isaiah 66, God says he doesn’t notice elaborate temples. He notices people who are humble, “who tremble at my word.” I love sitting in Meeting for Worship with other people who want to be responsive to the movement of the Spirit.

To call ourselves “Friends” implies an intimacy with Jesus, in the case of John 15. Abraham is called a “Friend of God” three times in scripture. Abraham and God were close enough that when God told Abraham to leave everything, Abraham obeyed. (Genesis 12, Hebrews 11) Did Abraham hear God audibly? Did he have an “inward leading”? I cannot claim to have heard an audible voice from God, but I’m not prepared to rule out the possibility.

Can we aspire to the Friendship Moses had with God? In Exodus 33, it says God spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” In Numbers 11, Moses wishes “that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” Most of us know John 3:16, but I wish more of us knew I Corinthians 3:16: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”

For me, part of being a Quaker is political and spiritual opposition to oppression, to the violence of empire. Jesus shows us this is not easy; it is hard work and can result in persecution. The other element of my Quaker faith is this pursuit of Friendship with the Most High, the I AM. How do I live out an acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit within me? How can I more constantly take refuge in God? There is a spectrum of answers, from lighting incense or a candle, to walking in nature like Mary Oliver, to counting your breathing, to reading the great mystics, to Meeting for Worship, to music and dance. All of this, I think, can be prayer.

I asked myself once: What is the common thread between these two aspects of my faith: resisting empire and seeking the presence of God? Perhaps it is to combat a “hardness of heart.” Hearts hardened like Pharaoh cannot tremble at the movements of God. I pray for a tender heart to receive the Spirit. I pray for a tender heart to love my neighbor.

Zac White is an organizer with Next Up in Portland, Oregon and a member of Multnomah Friends Meeting (NPYM). They completed their MDiv. from Union Theological Seminary