Report on Willamette Quarterly Meeting
Saturday, October 4, 2014 at Multnomah Meetinghouse

Theme: Earth Stewardship: Quakers moving from words to action

Following worship, our Plenary speaker Robin Hartwig, Pastor at St Andrew Lutheran Church in Beaverton and also staff member for Eco-Faith Recovery, an ecumenical group in Portland, spoke to us about our hunger for spiritual practices to ground and anchor our activism. She noted that strengthening our spiritual practices both individually and corporately will help us progress beyond the limitations we invariably run into when we go it alone.

Eco-Faith Recovery has identified six practices that have proven effective in supporting activists to overcome feelings of despair and frustration and isolation and denial:

  1. Spiritual Grounding – to re-orient us as people of the Earth
  2. Relational Practices – one-on-one sharing to help us pass through the stages of denial and despair to be able to take courageous action
  3. Telling our Stories – claiming our own stories to learn to share them to inspire and connect, your ‘elevator speech’
  4. Rhythms of Engagement – recognizing the ‘seasons’ of Action – Reflection – Evaluation – Sabbath so that we avoid burnout
  5. Mentoring – intentionally looking out and caring for one another
  6. Conscious Leadership Development – helping us wake up to our sense of vocation no matter what our age or life status

Eleven Friends are taking part in the 8-week Eco-Faith Recovery program this fall. More information is available at www.ecofaithrecovery.org.

In the afternoon, in small groups, we considered some queries and the large group feed-back ranged broadly from concerns about fossil fuel transportation through Oregon to an observation that nothing great is built with guilt to affirmation that we need support structures to avoid burnout to share more about what our Meetings and worship groups are doing on the local level to encouraging more engagement with larger Quaker organizations such as FCNL, QEW, AFSC to asking our young what the older folks can do to support them and our need for a shared, uniting vision of the Quaker niche relating to earth stewardship.

We then identified areas of interest for Quakers to get involved with and ‘signed up’.
All are invited to join.

  1. Oregon Climate Declaration [350.org] and Divestment from investments in fossil fuels
  2. Fossil Fuel Blockages [train, river, direct action, support]
  3. Sustainable Building Codes
  4. Transportation Policy Issues [intracity, hightway speed limits]
  5. Campaigning against coal as a source of energy on the grid
  6. Water Utilization and Policy issues
  7. Training to talk with ‘unlike minds’
  8. Learning how to tell our stories more powerfully
  9. Establishing an Oregon Committee on State Legislation

Each group is asked to consider:

  1. how are you going to follow up?
  2. what practices would make this more powerful? And
  3. how can we ask other Friends to support this work?

If you are interested in getting involved, the lists are elsewhere on this website and you can contact the people who want move forward – and spread the word in your Meeting or Worship Group!

May 3, 2015 at the spring Quarterly Meeting gathering which will again be held at Multnomah, we will have Part II of this new direction. Plan on being there.

The Winter Gathering of Willamette Quarterly Meeting will be Saturday, February 7, at Corvallis Meeting. We will have our annual business meeting in the morning, lunch hosted by Corvallis Meeting, and a workshop led by Marge Abbott on ways we can support each other using clearness committees and peer support groups – as described to us at Annual Sessions by Friend in Residence Ken Jacobsen.