Where We Stand
Minute on the Israel Palestine War
As members of the Quaker community in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, we are spiritual heirs to 375 years of testimony and action against all war and violence. We reaffirm the Quaker Peace Testimony of 1660 which states: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fighting with outward weapons, for any end and under any pretense whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world.”
We are aggrieved by the attacks on Israel by Hamas and the retaliation by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. As shown by the long and complex history of this conflict, war will not bring peace or justice but only more violence.
Quakers believe in the sacred worth of all individuals. This belief underlies our Peace Testimony and leads us to acts of compassion and support for anyone who is suffering. Quakers continue to be present in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, undertaking courageous acts of peace. As Gunnar Jahn, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, said in 1947 when awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to British and American Quakers:
“The Quakers have shown us that it is possible to translate into action what lies deep in the hearts of many: compassion for others and the desire to help them – that rich expression of the sympathy between all men, regardless of nationality or race, which, transformed into deeds, must form the basis for lasting peace.”
Therefore, we urge the United States government to:
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- Push for a permanent ceasefire and the release of all hostages and prisoners of war. Stop the killing now.
- Terminate military aid to Israel when used in violation of the international rules of war, which Israel does by targeting civilians and basic infrastructure — hospitals, houses, schools, water, electricity, and food delivery. Such gross violations of human rights only serve to break down the trust and mutual understanding that is needed for lasting peace and justice.
- Increase funding for humanitarian assistance and for rebuilding safe and just communities.
- Support locally-led peacebuilding efforts to end the inequities and injustice of occupied territories and to act in ways that will bring long term justice and peace. These efforts must logically include Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, displaced Palestinians, and the neighboring countries.
Adopted by the Shepherdstown Friends Meeting, WV, on Jan 14, 2024
Minute on Reproductive Health Care Freedom
Preface for Discernment on Reproductive Health Care
In the United States, strict restrictions on abortion ended with the 1973 Supreme Court’s decision known as Roe v. Wade. That decision came to be regarded as “settled law” until 2022 with the Dobbs decision last year. States were given the power to regulate and severely restrict reproductive health care. In this new era, the Friends Committee for National Legislation has asked Friends Meetings to discern whether they are in unity about reproductive health care, including abortion. The Shepherdstown Friends Meeting has been engaged in exploring possible unity on these issues.
Minute on Reproductive Health Care Freedom
We, the Shepherdstown Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, draw on our Quaker value of compassion and our core belief that each of us has access to the Divine Light. We hold these values as our guidance when seeking discernment on the issue of reproductive health care.
We are in unity on the issue of reproductive health care freedom for women. We are not for or against abortion. We support the right of individuals to make healthcare decisions free of intimidation and legislative interference. A pregnant person considering an abortion should be free to make a decision that aligns with their spiritual beliefs and their personal situation without restrictions and with full access to medical advice and supportive care.
We are in unity in opposing any action by the government at the federal, state or local levels that bans or restricts access to reproductive health care, including abortion. The government and society should support women and families in ways that nurture the healthy growth and development of all members. This includes access to health care, childcare, affordable housing, and education that addresses human sexuality.
As Quakers, we believe in continuing revelation, trusting that more will be revealed through spiritual discernment about women’s reproductive health care freedom. We recognize that individuals will make different decisions. As Friends, we support their freedom to make their decisions and we strive to withhold judgment and to respond with compassion and respect for all.
Adopted by the Shepherdstown Friends Meeting, WV, on Sept 10, 2023.
Minute on Black Lives Matter
We Quakers declare — as a matter of conscience and with the promptings of the Inner Light — that Black Lives Matter. The members of Shepherdstown Quaker Meeting are grieved and heartbroken by on-going racism which destroys lives and crushes the fabric of families and communities throughout our nation.
The brazen, public murder of George Floyd by police after years of similar killings of Black persons clarifies for us that racial oppression is systematic in our society. Born of slavery 400 years ago, it continues today in forms that are endemic, insidious and appallingly overt. Locally, an unarmed man in Martinsburg, Wayne Jones, was shot in the back 22 times by police for jaywalking while black.
As Quakers, we honor and hold dear the dignity and sacred worth of each person. Our Meeting has been struggling with the poison of racism for years and this has energized our resolve to speak out and to act now. We commit ourselves to challenge the intersecting mechanisms of societal oppression, economic exploitation, mass incarceration, inadequate education and militarized policing. We resolve to understand how our own unconscious biases help perpetuate racial oppression in our society. On an individual level we will engage in one anti-racist act each day.
May Divine Light open our hearts and minds as we discern the way forward. We stand in solidarity with our Brothers and Sisters of color and pledge to create needed change in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation. We dedicate ourselves to justice, working to create a beloved community that honors the dignity and divinity in every single person. Indeed, our common humanity demands it.
Adopted by Shepherdstown Friends Meeting, WV, July 26, 2020.
Minute on Climate Crisis
We support the Climate Change Statement developed by Quaker Earthcare Witness, Friends Committee for National Legislation and Quaker United Nations Office over five years ago. However, we regret the alarming lack of progress made during those critical years, and we add the following:
We recognize that climate change is now an emergency that poses a severe threat to life, peace and equality on earth, and that the ravages of this crisis fall more severely upon poor people than upon the more affluent.
As people of faith, we are called to act with urgency to avert and mitigate this looming disaster. Actions we can take include strong advocacy at all levels of government; divesting from fossil fuel companies; reforming agriculture to sequester carbon in the soil; lowering our personal fossil fuel use; and, for some, nonviolent civil disobedience.
Locally, the struggle for a livable and just world comes to us as a call to stop the planned burning of fossil fuels delivered via trucks and proposed pipelines to a heavy industry park under construction in Jefferson County. If allowed to operate, Rockwool, the first of several factories planned for the area, will burn an estimated 84 tons of coal and 1.6 million cubic feet of gas every day. It has rejected the option to use an electric furnace instead of a fossil-fuel driven furnace. Rockwool would expose young school children to dangerous levels of toxic air pollution; risk contaminating local water supplies; and jeopardize our agricultural, equine and tourism economies.
We oppose Rockwool and any other planet-heating and polluting industries, not only in our backyard, but in anyone’s backyard. We call for shifting the world’s economies to fossil-fuel free energy sources with utmost urgency and for support to meet basic needs in those communities least able to withstand the market adjustments of the transition process.
Adopted by the Shepherdstown Friends Meeting, WV, on January, 2020.
Our Position Against Gun Violence
Thou shalt not kill. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other cheek as well.
These are profound commandments of moral action present in the Bible. In Quaker tradition, the testimonies of peace and non-violence counsel us to abhor violence of any kind. Thus we wholeheartedly support pleas for meaningful action on reasonable and rational gun-safety legislation, such as the Friends Council on Education letter of Jan 14, 2013.
Quakers include Democrats, Republicans and independents. We do not oppose gun ownership. Yet unfortunately, guns are often used to enforce one individual’s will against others through violence or threats of violence. We do oppose permitting guns in public areas where there are children. We oppose access to weapons that are never appropriate for civilized use. According to the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, 80% of all gun deaths and 87% of all child deaths by guns occur in the US.
Jesus’ instruction to turn the other cheek is one of the most difficult commandments — difficult precisely because it runs counter to our instinctive nature when we are attacked by another person. Quaker testimony expresses Jesus’ transcendent conviction that the answer to violence is not more violence. It is not an eye for eye, nor a tooth for a tooth. Instead it is a path that turns away from fear, hate, and vengeance; that turns instead towards love, hope, forgiveness, compassion, and kindness.
Great religious leaders and philosophers throughout the ages teach essentially the same thing. We Quakers find that message in our heart to reject violence. Peaceful conflict resolution practices are an attainable ideal. When our forebearers from out of the wilderness laid the foundation of the civilization they could only dream of, they agreed — even in the mythic “Old West” — to leave the guns outside the doors of civil society. In a democratic society, we affirm, under the rule of law, we will seek justice and the remedies to grievances of every kind through civil means, not shoot it out in the street.
This present epidemic of gun violence has deep roots involving many social issues: mental health, culture, social inequalities, poverty and more. These issues must be addressed. Peaceful conflict resolution is a sober process of distinguishing the positions people take from their real interests. It requires wisdom and patience to see common ground amidst apparently irreconcilable positions.
Violence is not only about guns, and gun violence is not only about mass killings. However the first step toward a commitment to peace, to an end to violence, is “leaving the guns at the doors” when we sit down to resolve conflict. That does not make the solution easy politically. But the absence of perfect solutions is no excuse for us to give up hope.
We ask that every political and faith leader go on record, now, and lend their voice to urgent effective action to reduce gun violence and ensure that current and future generations may live and learn in our country free from the threat of gun violence. Do not remain silent.
Adopted by Shepherdstown Friends Meeting, WV, on January 20, 2013
On Gender and Sexual Equality
Robert Barclay, Ester Biddle, and other early Friends of the 17th century quoted and paraphrased many times the opening verses of the First Epistle of John 1:1-4 to express their experience of the Divine Presence in their lives and the fruits of the Spirit in their communities:
We proclaim what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the gift of life. This gift was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it. This gift is a word that has spoken to our condition. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
21st century Friends in Baltimore Yearly Meeting find these words express our experience of the Light (the gift of life) shining through the lives of Friends whose sexualities do not conform to the expectations of general society, because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, and because they find that to live otherwise would be a lie. These dear Friends have worshiped and labored with us as vital members of our Monthly Meetings and our Yearly Meeting. We testify that their presence is a gift among us. We have witnessed the fruits of the Spirit that these treasured Friends have generously shared with us.
We Friends remember the persecution that our Quaker forbearers suffered in earlier centuries for their acts of nonconformity motivated by conscience and their commitment to the truth. Mindful of our heritage and in steadfast growing love, we in Baltimore Yearly Meeting stand in support of full equality – including marriage – for our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters, and work for the elimination of all policies and actions that diminish their dignity, malign their spiritual worth, or deny their loving relationships.
We acknowledge that many Friends elsewhere in the US, and the world, have not personally known gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender persons, and, lacking experiences akin to ours, have difficulty with this testimony. Many do not share our vision of equality, justice, and peace for nonconforming sexual orientations and gender identities. Because of these facts, we in Baltimore Yearly Meeting will continue to labor with other Friends on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Friends by participation in all our existing memberships in Friends’ associations – as imperfect as each of them is – towards a generous, compassionate vision of the loving community.
Adopted by the Shepherdstown Friends Meeting, WV, on Nov 21, 2010.
A Welcome to All People
Shepherdstown Friends extend a welcoming to the wider Shepherdstown community. We invite all who wish to join our Sunday morning Meetings for Worship regardless of religious affiliation and background, whether Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, or other religion, or no religious belief at all. A sincere desire—or simply a respectful curiosity—to join us in an unprogrammed meeting, based on prayerful meditation after the manner of Friends, is reason enough to attend.
For more than 350 years Friends’ tradition has affirmed the spiritual unity of all people. We cherish the belief that there is that of God in each person, leading us to respect the worth and dignity of all. The Light is present in every human and we seek to embrace it without distinction. This same Light enlightened Jesus of Nazareth and enlightened all great teachers of wisdom. This fact is true regardless of a person’s physical traits or cultural particulars—ethnicity, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, political belief, illness, ability or disability, legal status, or any other distinctions that are commonly drawn to divide people.
All of us are children of God. All are equal in the sight of God. American Friends witnessed this equality in the 17th century by recognizing both male and female ministers in their meetings—in the 18th century by peaceful and fair relations with Native Americans—in the 19th century by efforts to resist and abolish slavery—in the 20th century in the movement for woman’s suffrage and racial desegregation. In the present, Friends witness equality by welcoming gays and lesbians to full participation in society, including marriage. We welcome immigrants regardless of citizen status and affirm their human rights. In all centuries, Friends have opposed war and maintained a commitment to nonviolent engagement as the surest path to resolving conflict.
Shepherdstown Friends Meeting aspires to be a loving community inclusive of the wide diversity of the surrounding national community. Each member and attender has the responsibility to foster that welcoming spirit. We acknowledge that the achievement of our spiritual goals is a lifelong process. Our goal of seeking unity will succeed in proportion to our willingness as individuals to honor our differences as we seek unity and to resist prejudice, discrimination, and injustice. Our ability to do that will succeed in proportion to our ability to seek and find that of God in everyone.
Affirmed by Shepherdstown Friends (WV) Allowed Meeting, Jan 10, 2010.