As the war in Gaza continues to escalate and reverberate throughout the Middle East, increasingly more Quaker churches and meetings have issued minutes to express their concern for the conflict. There are more than 70 Quaker minutes on our website.
Each minute is a distillation of Friends’ grief, fear, confusion, and concern into a collective and corporate statement of belief and action.
“In alignment with the individual and collective message of the Divine Spirit and guided by love and the Inner Light, we call for the work of waging a just and permanent peace. Through peace, we open the bridge to reconciliation,” writes Whitewater Monthly Meeting (IN).
These minutes are also powerful tools for advocacy. Meetings and churches often share them with their members of Congress, include them in articles to their local newspapers, and share them publicly in their meeting spaces.
These collective statements, along with the more than 680,000 letters to Congress, facilitated by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, have made inroads in Congress.
As of June 30, more than 90 members of Congress are calling for an end to the Israel-Palestine war.
“Peace-making is the work of a lifetime,” wrote the Brooklyn (NY) Monthly Meeting. “Quakers have been at it for more than 350 years. This is no time to be discouraged by this and other worldly conflicts. Rather, we must continue to speak truth to power on behalf of all earth’s people and living creatures.”
If your Quaker community approved a minute on the war in Gaza, please email it to quakers@fcnl.org.
