Bethany Lee

Bethany Lee was drawn into community with Quakers in her early twenties. She and her husband, Bryan, had just returned to the Willamette Valley after a few years of living and working in Anchorage, Alaska and they, along with their two young children, found a home at Newberg Friends Church. Bethany quickly found a place there to offer her gifts of music and leadership and over the next few years, she began to be more and more involved in ministry, leading worship regularly, facilitating retreats, offering spiritual companionship, and writing.

Over time she grew to recognize this work as a vocation and a calling. While continuing to develop skills in public ministry, she began to feel a call to deeper spiritual practice and spent several years in intense spiritual formation.

Though she has studied healthcare and Scripture and has a wide background in music with training in classical music, church music, and jazz, much of Bethany’s training has been practice-based. Her writing practice, her spiritual practice and her work as pianist, harpist, composer, arranger, and accompanist all combine to support the work she does.

As a parent, she honed many important skills of non-judgmental presence and community building. She continues to mine the rich depth of the tools and patterns she developed as a mother, as there are many similarities to the work of a minister who cares for the spiritual well-being of her community.

When her children were in middle school, Bethany and her family embarked on a year-long sailing adventure aboard a small sailboat. They traveled across the Columbia River Bar, down the Pacific Coast of the United States and Mexico, and back again, stopping often to reprovision and explore.

Now back on dry land, she often draws on the knowledge and abilities she gained in the years of practice before and during this sailing sabbatical—how to navigate in uncertain times, how to read the weather, how to handle storms, how to stay kind under pressure.

As her children neared high school graduation, Bethany went back to school, studying to gain expertise as a therapeutic musician through the Music for Healing and Transition Program. This training gave her a chance to blend her heart for pastoral care with her musical gifts and her lifelong interest in healthcare and hospice.

Over the next few years, as the structures within Newberg Friends Church and Northwest Yearly Meeting began to crumble, Bethany often found herself leading groups in times of grief, loss, and uncertainty. The knowledge and skills from her varied life experiences helped her to bring a calm presence to the spaces in which she was regularly leading.

As the landscape shifted in the following season, Bethany grew more certain of her call to ministry, even as the institutions she had served changed or ceased to be. The Quaker practices that first drew her to the community continued to be a vital part of her life and through the clarifying season that followed, she came to rest more firmly in Love and grew more certain of the ways she was called to offer Love to others.

Bethany continues to make it her primary goal to offer gifts from her deep personal practice, to do the work to become and be an integrated person—more and more whole, body, mind, and soul—and let Spirit lead her to act in ways that are healing and loving in the world. These gifts flow out in many ways—both within church settings and beyond—through her writing, speaking, worship leading, therapeutic music, retreat leading, grief tending, spiritual care and listening.

In recent years, her work as a poet, author, and musician has taken her into unexpected places. She has traveled in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska sharing music, poetry, and spiritual care. All along the way, no matter what the medium or setting, people respond to her centered presence and the way she uses her skills to make space for healing and the wind of Spirit which always brings freedom and transformation.

Though you can’t predict or control the way this wind blows, it is Bethany’s great desire to see Spirit move her into more ministry among the churches of Sierra Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends.