Northwest Yearly Meeting

The  Northwest Yearly Meeting is an Evangelical Friends institution and remains firmly Christian in faith and practice.  It began as simply the Oregon Yearly Meeting, but merged with Friends churches in Washington and Idaho to create the broader Northwest Yearly Meeting. Evangelical Friends have adopted  practices that draw from the example of Christ and the promptings of the Holy Spirit. While Friends are inherently similar to other evangelical traditions, they continue to hold to Quaker distinctives such as peacemaking

What became George Fox University has remained close to its founding denomination since the institution was founded in 1891. Historically, most of the faculty of the college have been Friends, and four-sevenths of the members of the Board of Directors are required to be members of the Friends Church.  Because of the Friends leadership, over the years the college held close to its core Christian values and often relied heavily on yearly meetings both in the Pacific Northwest and further East to stay financially afloat. However, the university’s relationship with the meeting has changed somewhat over the years as the percentage of Quaker employees and students as decreased.

At times when most faculty and students were Friends, tensions in the Yearly Meeting could influence the college.  For instance, in the 1930s and ’40s, the Oregon Yearly Meeting struggled between focusing on evangelistic efforts or more traditional social justice issues in order to create a more Christ-like world. Then college president Emmett Gulley was an advocate for the position of social justice, but the Yearly Meeting and student body were advocating for a more evangelistic focus. This culminated in 25 Pacific College students attending a board of directors meeting to petition for more spiritual, evangelistic chapels. The students also requested that more PhDs were hired onto the staff. As a result of that meeting and the tensions surrounding the different directions that the Yearly Meeting was being pulled, Gulley resigned from the presidency that same year.

This exemplifies the historical connection between the Yearly Meeting and the university; students cared about what the Yearly Meeting thought and practiced so much that they were willing to go to the Board with their concerns. Recently, however, there has been less involvement in the Friends church by the student body as there is now only a small percentage of the students who belong to the Friends tradition. Despite an ongoing restructuring of the Yearly Meeting, student opinion on this matter has been little expressed.

The Yearly Meeting continues to be involved in the administration and direction of the university, but the university has become very open to influences from other denominations. The merger with Western Evangelical Seminary, a Wesleyan institution, in 1996 showcased the increasing openness to evangelical denominations, a move that the Yearly Meeting approved of and propelled the college into university status.