Welcome to Multnomah Friends Meeting

Meeting for Worship is held every Sunday at 8:15 am, blended, and 10 am both blended and in-person only. Zoom and blended Meetings will always be available at this link at 8:10am or 9:55 am. Meeting ID: 705 774 465. Passcode: 923550. Please mute your audio unless you have a message to give. Meeting for Worship for Business will be held blended with online access at the same link. Dialing in by phone?

Midweek Worship Group Meeting for Worship is held Wednesdays at noon using Zoom. Click this link at 11:55 am.  Meeting ID: 325 077 955. Password: 337283

Check out our Publications page for this week's Bulletin of events and notices and our latest Newsletter.

Meetinghouse COVID Protocols

• For Sunday Worship, including Meeting for Worship for Business on 3rd Sundays, masks are required but may be removed while speaking during worship and announcements. Masks are recommended but not required at other times in the Meetinghouse.
• Maskless eating and drinking are allowed in the social hall (on Sunday mornings as well as other times).
• We continue to use air purifiers, but allow them to be turned off during spoken ministry and announcements.
• There are no COVID-based restrictions on the number of people in the Worship Room and Social Hall.
• COVID vaccination is not required for children and youth.
• COVID vaccination is still required for adults.

Multnomah Friends Meeting, a Quaker spiritual community, welcomes all. We are a member of the community of welcoming congregations.

Like all Quakers, we call ourselves Friends; we are formally known as the Religious Society of Friends.

We value our radical diversity.  Our core belief is that the Divine Spirit is accessible to all. Most Friends are Christians, but many are not. We come to Friends from many faith traditions. Most of us began our spiritual journeys in some other tradition or no tradition at all.

We call our gathering place a Meetinghouse.  Striving for simplicity, our place of worship is plain. We sit together in a circle or rectangle.  Recognizing that the Divine Spirit is accessible to all, we gather without reliance on formal creeds, sacraments, or clergy. Our worship is grounded in silence.  All present are free to speak out of the silence if they are genuinely moved to do so. Spoken ministry should be for the others gathered as well as for the speaker.

The community gathers in a monthly Meeting for Worship for Business to consider together what actions we might take.  We do this recognizing that the Divine Spirit is present to guide us to decisions which are appropriate for this community at this time.

Individually we each strive to live in the Light of the Spirit which leads us to lives based in simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality. These are our testimonies and we find that in trying to live up to them, our lives are changed.

Multnomah Monthly Meeting Land Acknowledgement

This Meetinghouse occupies homelands belonging since time immemorial to the Chinook-speaking peoples of Multnomah, Clackamas, Cascade/Watlala, and the Kalapuya of Tualatin.  Throughout Oregon, land was stolen from tribes through the use of treaties and land grants. In 1850, the land on which the Meetinghouse sits became part of such a land grant. We understand it is incumbent on us to lean into this uncomfortable fact and consider its implications for the Meeting.        

We grieve the involvement of earlier Quakers with Indian boarding schools and as Indian agents, and the intergenerational harm inflicted. In an effort toward healing the injustices of the past and present, we commit to educating ourselves about current and historical Indigenous perspectives. We have committed to ongoing financial contributions to the Chinook Indian Nation and support their struggle to regain federal recognition. We join in the call to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery as the “theological” justification for colonialism, land theft, and the brutal and dehumanizing treatment of Indigenous people. We are actively discerning the next steps toward Right Relationship with Indigenous Peoples and the land, and welcome all to join us.

Click here for more background, guidelines, and resources on the creation of our Land Acknowledgement and the creation of yours.

Multnomah Friends News

MFM Library Resumes Lending!

Multnomah Friends Meeting Library is once again lending books and some pamphlets, using COVID-safe procedures. Read more.

Multnomah Meeting Friends For Racial Justice Statement

Dear Friends:

Multnomah Monthly Meeting reminds Friends of our Minute on Racial Justice. In this time of universal mourning for the lives of black citizens who have been killed by and in the criminal "justice" system, we ask that friends take action to live our Minute. In addition to any specific action you are taking in response to the latest police killings of unarmed Black people, we especially encourage our white friends to please review this excellent article entitled "75 Things White People Can Do For Racial Justice." The Meeting's Friends for Racial Justice Planning Committee asks each of us to commit to doing one or two things from the list by a certain date. 

Please share the things you commit to doing (and updates on your progress) either on the Meeting’s Racial Justice Facebook page or by emailing the information to Lori Patterson (mamaknitty@gmail.com), who will post it on the Facebook page. These are concrete things we can do to work against racism in our own community and beyond. You can access the page by joining Facebook and searching for Multnomah Quaker Meeting Racial Justice Study and Action Group. You will see a link that says "Join Group."

Here are additional resources that you can access to find ways to support people of color and anti-racist work: Friends Committee on National Legislation; Black Lives Matter; Don't Shoot Portland; Campaign Zero; and My Brother's Keeper.

Justice & Peace,

Friends for Racial Justice of Multnomah Monthly Meeting