Forging Beloved Community with Friends: A Journey through the Refiner’s Fire

By Bridget Moix. Pendle Hill Pamphlets (number 488), 2024. 24 pages. $7.50/paperback.

Author Bridget Moix is the general secretary of Friends Committee on National Legislation and author of Choosing Peace: Agency and Action in the Midst of War. Moix, a member of Friends Meeting of Washington (D.C.), has 25 years of experience working in international peace and U.S. foreign policy.

The pamphlet Forging Beloved Community with Friends contains the text of the 2023 Stephen G. Cary Memorial Lecture delivered at Pendle Hill study center in Wallingford, Pa. What drew me to this text is its use of metaphor to describe the kind of radical and profound personal transformation that Friends associate with convincement. When I see a reference to the refiner’s fire, I think of Malachi 3:1–2 in the Hebrew Bible, which challenges us to open unflinchingly to the power of the Spirit that burns away our hyperindividuality and forges us into beloved community:

Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come, says the Lord Almighty. But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or like fullers’ soap.

George Fox drew on this metaphor to recount his experience of purification in the crucible of Spirit; after he saw his “troubles, trials, and temptations more than ever,” and “all was manifest and seen in the Light”:

there did appear a pure fire in me; then I saw how he sat as at a refiner’s fire and as the fuller’s soap; and then the spiritual discerning came into me, by which I did discern my own thoughts, groans, and sighs, and what it was that did veil me and what it was that did open me.

Moix poses these queries for Friends today: What will be forged in us and through us from today’s crucible? What is the great refiner’s fire exposing in us and how can it transform us and our world to new possibilities?

The second metaphor Moix uses is the natural metamorphosis from caterpillar to cocoon to chrysalis to butterfly. At first, this image is more peaceful, and yet on further consideration, we realize that the caterpillar must “die to self” to be reborn as a butterfly. Moix emphasizes that the “space” between the caterpillar and the butterfly is liminal, that is, it occupies a dimension of uncertainty and unknowing.

Friends too are in a liminal space and time right now. Current intractable problems, from climate change to wars and violence, to racism and injustice, threaten to overwhelm us. We may not see any way through the polarizing intractabilities, but we must start by discerning what Spirit shows us: our complicity, our collusion. Moix mentions a painful history we must remember: Friends’ involvement in the creation and maintenance of Indian boarding schools.

Nevertheless, Moix wants to leave us in a hopeful frame of mind. Friends are equipped to be in this liminal space and move forward through the fire together to do the work we are called to do in the name of beloved community. We are not powerless. Our powers are our testimonies, truth-telling, and continuing revelation. We must seek the Light in others, embrace our diversity, and commit to the hard work.

Moix asks the question, how are we as Friends called to transform ourselves so we can help transform the world? In (partial) answer, Moix points to the Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racism’s instructive document on patterns of racial wounding and racial justice in Quaker communities.

I highly recommend Forging Beloved Community with Friends for anyone who feels hopeless and impotent in the face of the daunting realities of 2025. This pamphlet will light your fire.


Barbara Birch is a member of Strawberry Creek Meeting in Berkeley, Calif., and a board member at Ben Lomond Quaker Center. She is the author of Lectio Divina: Revelation and Prophecy, newly released in the Quaker Quicks series.

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