I have not been to yearly meeting in four years. In August of 2008, I packed up my car and drove 2,500 miles to central Kentucky for seminary. With that, I left behind the only kind of church I had ever known and I stumbled into a vast wilderness of baptists, methodists, christians (the restorative movement, not the general religion), baptists (did I say that already? There are SO many different types of baptists!), and countless others. When I finally found a church I decided to settle on, I ended up driving by nine other churches every Sunday before getting to mine. I had certainly landed in the Bible belt.
I loved that church, still do, but I longed for quiet. I longed for room in worship, moments of silence and stillness in transitions, prayers without musical soundtrack, and long spaces of communal silence and centering. Lexington has a local Friends meeting house, and I attended a few times. It was the friendliest group of people I met in Kentucky, and I loved it, but desiring a common denominator of faith in Jesus Christ drew me to the nearby Christian and Missionary Alliance church which I discovered because the pastor's wife was the campus pastor at Asbury. Even as I grew to love that church, I really grieved the lack of a church that understood how to marry distinctive Quaker ideology and disciplines with a Christocentric view of faith and practice.
By a landslide, the United Methodist church is the most represented denomination at Asbury Seminary. Other historically Wesleyan churches make up the next largest representations. As a Wesleyan/Holiness based school in the South it was a foreign world to me culturally and religiously. It turned out to be an impressively painful and incredibly healing and life-giving experience, but one of the things it taught me, or perhaps reiterated for me, was the reality that I am a Quaker in my soul. No matter where I live and what church I may be attending, I will always favor the Friends way of being, and I will always call myself a Quaker when people ask.
Asbury is not officially affiliated with any denomination. It is an institution controlled by a dusty hierarchy which has no real structure of accountability. In 2008, I arrived at a school that was in the midst of administrative turmoil that had reverberated to every sector Asbury touched and had left nothing unscathed. A president had resigned on the day of orientation the year before, and the divisive weeks and months around that event had left a spirit of contention on the campus so clear that I felt it even a year later. Far beyond the time it should have taken, Asbury finally found a new president in the Spring of 2009, and when he and his family began work in July, the school seemed to exhale for the first time in a few of years and was finally able to really heal.
For the first time in my life I was able to place my experiences with George Fox University, where I had received my undergraduate degree and begun my seminary degree, and with the Northwest Yearly Meeting, where I was born and raised, in a larger context. We college students liked to complain about Fox, and there are certainly things to complain about, but after moving, I saw what the accountability of George Fox with the yearly meeting meant and why it mattered. I thought about who that accountability really was to--not to the paid administrative powers that be in the yearly meeting, but to every member of the yearly meeting, because Quakers believe all have a voice that matters. I imagined the uproar in the July yearly meeting business meetings, where everyone is encouraged to attend, every voice is given the chance to be heard, and no decision is made until common ground and consensus is reached, if this had happened at George Fox. I began to understand in a deep way the spiritual wisdom of the Quaker way of business and why it's necessary, and I discovered the sandy foundation of power without accountability.
Despite these issues, Asbury is full of broken people whose greatest desire is to seek out the truth and freedom of Jesus Christ. I do not regret my time there, and made some of my best friendships at Asbury. Though it took my stubborn and willful soul three years to finally be comfortable with it, I find myself reflecting warmly on the high church liturgy in chapel and wondering at the tangible vulnerability of receiving communion from my peers and mentors (I'm so thankful it wasn't the sterile disposable-plastic-cup-and-single-wafer-wam-bam-thank-you-ma'am way of communion). But there were countless times when I wanted to sit there in silence in my Quaker practice of communion, a communion where we all partake in the quiet together and invite in the presence and voice of the holy spirit in community. At the very least, I wanted them to turn off the music. Imagine the heightened awareness of vulnerability if communion were given and received in silence. I still would like to see that happen.Being at Asbury taught me just how foreign my common Quaker understandings and practices are to the greater protestant world. Seminary was the first time I saw discernment discussed as an individual practice. I couldn't understand the idea of healthy personal discernment without a stronger value on community discernment. I still don't believe it's possible. And the idea of having a rich faith without practicing bread and wine/juice communion was absolutely incomprehensible to some. My world was as strange to many there as their's was to me.
Learning about the different facets of Christianity was eye opening for me. Attending a capital "H" Holiness school while coming from a background that pre-dated it exposed me to what it must be like when outsiders come into the Friends church which is full of practices, structure, and language that is unknown to people outside of the Friends world. In the end, I found myself simply wanting to teach everyone the value of Quaker theology (because its Biblical basis makes it really more than just an ideology), and I admit I delighted in telling people that Richard Foster was a Quaker and had, in fact, pastored my church at one time, albeit before I was born.
I left Oregon with no plans of coming back. The only reason I did was because I ran out of money after graduation. I came back kicking and screaming, really. On my return, I wanted to try to plug into a new church, make my own new start. I found a place in Portland, but after a few months I discovered no matter where I tried, I craved my Quaker worship. I ended up getting a job that worked me on most Sundays, but on my first Sunday off, I gave into my need for some good Quaker silence and fellowship and made quite the nutty trek via bicycle and bus to one of the Northwest Yearly Meeting churches in Portland. Even though I had never been there before, it was like finally coming home. My soul really rested for perhaps the first time in nearly four years. I love my Methodist friends, my Catholic family members, my second home CMA folks, among others, and I find great value in their traditions, but my heart will always be with my yearly meeting Friends.
This past week, walking up River Street heading to my first business meeting since 2008 was a homecoming I hadn't realized I had longed so much for.
