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 Newsletter.

The Nominating Committee is looking for folks to help with the life and work of the Meeting! Visit our Committees and Positions page for more information about the work our committees do, and how you might be able to contribute. Then fill out the survey by the end of February to let the Nominating Committee know your thoughts and interests for the upcoming year. You can also contact us directly at nominating@multnomahfriends.org, which you can also find in the email contact list down the right side of this page.

ARE Presents: See In A New Light, with Eddy Marie Crouch, February 26, 6:30-8pm, Online 
Explore what “hold in the light” means to us as individuals and as a community as we bring “new light” to this topic. Arrive on Zoom at 6:15pm to experience silent “Hold in the Light Worship” as we bring to mind people and situations we want to surround in the healing light of love. The program officially starts at 6:30pm.    

Join the Zoom Meeting: bit.ly/3bE8E38; Meeting ID: 873 8913 9729; Passcode: 162171

Current COVID Protocols for the Meetinghouse

The Ad Hoc Committee on COVID Concerns continues to agree that the current surge makes it necessary to continue requiring full vaccination and high quality masks in the Meetinghouse. To further reduce the risk of infection, all air purifiers in the building must be on their highest setting in any space where people are present. As long as the purifiers are on high, windows may be open or air conditioning on, depending on outside conditions. We continue to recognize that during the surge the risk of gathering is higher, but those who are comfortable with that risk are welcome to enter for worship.

To protect yourself and those who will worship at your side, we require vaccination (including the latest bivalent booster) for all who are eligible (per current CDC recommendation, if it's been at least two months since your last shot). We also require all to wear N95 or KN95 masks (available at the door). This will provide greater protection against the spread of infection and provide comfort to those who are still more susceptible to infection due to age, underlying conditions, or compromised immune systems. There is a 25 person occupancy limit for worship in each of the upstairs and downstairs worship spaces. Children under six months old are not medically eligible for vaccination, and as such are welcome to stay in the nursery during Meeting for Worship.

In order to continue and maintain the best level of safety for all in our community, we continue to require proof of vaccination for all who enter the Meetinghouse for worship and other Meeting community activities. Two shots of Pfizer or Moderna, or one shot of J&J, along with the latest bivalent booster (if it's been at least two months from your last shot), will be required. Please be prepared to show vaccination card or facsimile, including an image on your phone, before entering. Once you have done so, you may choose to be added to our vaccine registry so that you won't need to show your card on subsequent visits. More detailed information regarding our revised policy can be found here.

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