FGC Friends: Growing and Changing
By Deborah Haines
Rachel Davis DuBois of New York Yearly Meeting traveling in the field for FGC, 1960. In the 1950s and 60s,FGC’s services to meetings included sponsoring Rachel Davis DuBois’“Quaker Dialogues,” to help meetings develop deeper sharing among members. From 1958–1964, Rachel Davis DuBois led dialogues in over 300 meetings.After that time, the Religious Life Committee, which was established in 1963 to support the spiritual life of meetings, inherited the program.
Above: Poster for the General Conference in Traverse City, Michigan, 1963.
Maps showing the geographic growth of Friends General Conference, ca. 1984.
When FGC was organized in 1900, it was made up of seven yearly meetings, extending from the northeast—New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore-to the upper midwest—Ohio (later laid down), Indiana, Illinois and Genesee Yearly Meeting (western New York state and Ontario, Canada). A hundred years later FGC is affiliated with fourteen yearly meetings and associations covering the eastern half of the United States and all of Canada, with a small but lively west coast anchor in Alaska.
How did this growth come about? The answer lies largely in the “independent meeting movement,” which began in the 1920s and 1930s, and is still going strong. “Independent” meetings are those for whom the nineteenth century Quaker schisms simply have no meaning. They are not “Hicksite” like the six yearly meetings that gave rise to FGC or “Gurneyite” like pastoral meetings of Friends United Meeting (FUM) and the Evangelical Friends International. They are not “Wilburite” like the independent “conservative” yearly meetings that separated from the Gurneyites over issues of written creed and programmed worship. Virtually all of the independent meetings of the twentieth century practice unprogrammed worship. They find God in the living silence. They know Quakerism experientially, not on the basis of tradition and established practice. They are inclined to fiercely protect the flame they have lighted from outside interference.
But they are not separate from the larger body of the Religious Society of Friends. The independent meeting movement in the 1930s resulted mainly from increased geographic mobility among Friends, especially those involved in education. Quaker teachers or students transplanted to a college town with no meeting (or no unprogrammed meeting) nearby, might very well look for other Quakers interested in holding a silent meeting for worship. A cluster of a few families or committed individuals is all that is needed to start a worship group, which may blossom into an established meeting. From Cambridge, Massachusetts to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in dozens of smaller communities in between, college meetings took firm root in the 1930s. Retirees and other Quaker migrants in some of the southern states played a similar role in seeding new meetings.
Often these small meetings or worship groups receive invaluable assistance from larger Quaker bodies. In 1930 AFSC created what became known as the “Fellowship Committee” expressly to nurture independent meetings. The plan was to correspond with and officially recognize meetings that had no yearly meeting affiliation, thus giving their members membership in the Religious Society of Friends. Although AFSC regional staff was in a good position to get to know independent meetings in their area, not all Friends were convinced that AFSC had the standing or the right to concern itself with membership issues. In the mid-1930s Rufus Jones undertook to shift this responsibility from AFSC to a nominally independent Fellowship Council. From 1937 on, the Fellowship Council shared office space and staff with the newly created Friends World Committee for Consultation (Section of the Americas), which subsequently took over formal responsibility for its work.
Friends General Conference was also interested in reaching out to independent meetings. Barnard Walton, who served as FGC’s general and “advancement” secretary from 1915 to 1951, traveled tirelessly, seeking out isolated Friends and new meetings as well as those affiliated with FGC. After his retirement in 1951 he became a traveling field secretary for FGC. His repeated visits to new meetings in Florida, three of which had been established in the 1940s under the care of the Friends World Committee, helped bring Southeastern Yearly Meeting into being in 1962. His contribution is commemorated in the annual Walton lecture.
In 1971 when Southeastern Yearly Meeting finally chose to affiliate with a larger Quaker body, it chose dual affiliation with FGC and FUM. Only dual affiliation could adequately capture both the sense of independence and the range of concerns within the new yearly meeting. This ecumenical impulse is typical of the entire independent meeting movement, and it has had profound consequences for FGC. In 1900, FGC was an organization of Hicksite yearly meetings (with distinct progressive overtones). By now it is something entirely different, and the independent meetings are the primary cause.
In 1944 Cambridge Friends Meeting became FGC’s first new affiliate. Cambridge was itself a combined meeting. It began in 1910, when Friends General Conference brought together about thirty transplanted Friends from FGC yearly meetings who were living in the Boston area. The unprogrammed meeting for worship thus established also attracted quite a few refugees from the Gurneyite Boston Friends Meeting, which had become increasingly evangelical and resistant to lay participation over the previous two decades. The resulting group was clear that it was neither Hicksite, nor Gurneyite, but some combination of the two. In 1937 Cambridge created its own non-profit corporation to hold property for the meeting, and to give it a legal identity. When the Fellowship Council offered to extend recognition to Cambridge Meeting in 1940, the offer was refused. Cambridge Friends felt no need to be recognized by any outside authority, or to affiliate with any established Friends body, in order to justify its existence.
Cambridge Meeting did not, however, want to be separate from the larger world of the Religious Society of Friends. Very active in AFSC projects and peace work, cosmopolitan in outlook as a result of diverse membership, Cambridge Friends played a key role in the ecumenical movement which resulted in 1944 in the creation of a united New England Yearly Meeting, combining both the old Gurneyite (programmed) and Wilburite (conservative) yearly meetings, with the strong independent monthly meetings in Providence, New Haven, the Connecticut Valley and Cambridge. In that same year, Cambridge completed its formal merger with Boston Monthly Meeting. But being part of a united Gurneyite/Wilburite Yearly Meeting did not completely express Cambridge Meetings sense of ecumenical identify. It also affiliated, independently and directly, with Friends General Conference.
In the midwest the same kind of ecumenical spirit surrounded the creation of Lake Erie Yearly Meeting. Lake Erie had its beginnings in 1939, as an informal association of about a dozen unprogrammed worship groups, mostly in Ohio and Michigan, an area formerly served by Ohio Yearly Meeting (Hicksite), one of the founding members of the FGC. But Ohio Yearly Meeting had dwindled and died a decade or two earlier, and these meetings were not Hicksite, but independent. They were mostly in college towns. Many were nurtured by the Fellowship Council, and came under the care of the Friends World Committee after 1937. By the 1950s the Lake Erie Association included meetings ranging from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to West Lafayette, Indiana and from Morgantown, West Virginia to Kalamazoo, Michigan.
In 1957 several meetings in Michigan, including Ann Arbor, Detroit and Kalamazoo, organized themselves into Green Pastures Quarter, under the care of Friends World Committee, and began seeking ways to fit themselves into the ongoing concerns of the Religious Society of Friends. In this they received support from the Ohio office of the American Friends Service Committee, where Marshall Sutton was exploring ways to encourage ecumenical dialogue among Friends. The result was the Continuing Committee on Greater Unity, which brought together Friends from Wilmington Yearly Meeting (FUM), Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative), Indiana Yearly Meeting (FGC), and the Lake Erie Association.
For the next several years the Continuing Committee organized activities to bring Friends together across yearly meeting dividing lines. Peter Blood, whose family was active in Ann Arbor Meeting, recalls these get-togethers fondly. During a family camp at Barnesville, Ohio in the summer of 1961, he remembers, the evening folk dances, which were a tradition of Lake Erie Association gatherings, had to be called “folk games” out of deference to the Conservative Friends testimony against dancing.
Out of this ecumenical ferment, Lake Erie Yearly Meeting was born. Friends in the Lake Erie Association had gotten to know and appreciate the several yearly meetings in their region, but none fully suited them. They were not Gurneyite, or Hicksite, or Wilburite, but something new and different. They needed their own yearly meeting, reflecting the energy and spirit of the independent meeting movement. In 1963, most of the meetings of the Lake Erie Association joined the newly created Lake Erie Yearly Meeting. Four years later LEYM affiliated with FGC.
The ease with which this decision was reached reflected, in part, changes in FGC. New England Yearly Meeting, following the lead of Cambridge, affiliated with FGC in 1959, while maintaining the conviction that its primary identification was with Friends United Meeting. Baltimore and New York Yearly Meetings were also newly reunited, and maintaining dual affiliations with FGC and FUM. South Central Yearly meeting, covering a vast area in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, affiliated in 1962, anchoring FGC in the heart of the continent. By the mid-1960s FGC was far less parochial than it had once been, in terms of both theology and geography. It was no longer simply a Hicksite organization, and it was no longer confined to a small area radiating from Philadelphia. From 1963 on off-year conferences were held in the midwest or southwest, to express this new sense of identity.
By 1980 FGC had added five more yearly meetings or associations with roots in the independent meeting movement: Southeastern Yearly Meeting (1972); Piedmont Friends Fellowship (1975); Northern Yearly Meeting (1979); Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting and Association (1979); and Alaska Friends Conference (1979). In two of these instances, independent monthly meetings (Twin Cities and Friendship) had joined as directly affiliated meetings before their yearly meetings were organized or ready to affiliate. There are at present eight directly affiliated monthly meetings, in South Carolina, Kansas, California and Washington state, and the possibility that these will pave the way to further affiliations.
I would like to point out two major lessons that can be drawn from this story of affiliation over the years. First, affiliation with FGC often grows out of the ecumenical yearnings of Friends. Meetings do not come to affiliation out of a desire to separate themselves from other branches of Quakerism. Meetings come wanting to express their own true identity, which usually includes ties and formal affiliations with several different branches. Often, as in the case of Cambridge and Green Pastures Quarter, they come only after an intense period of building bridges and engaging with Friends of various persuasions and practices. The more ecumenical FGC becomes, and the more it supports and encourages bridge building and dialogue, the more likely it is to grow. But surface ecumenism is not enough. The independent meeting movement has fostered meetings hungry for real, vital, living Quakerism. The desire to build bridges grows out of a deeply felt need to engage with basic questions of faith and spiritual growth. This is a challenge all of us should embrace with joy.
The second lesson is that FGC has changed profoundly over the years, and that it will certainly change more. This is due in part to an influx of new seekers (even in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting “convinced” Friends now outnumber those born to Quaker parents) and in part to the spiritual revitalization movement now transforming liberal Quakerism across the country. But the independent meeting movement has also played an important role within the older yearly meetings as well as in the newer ones. FGC has grown and changed as it has embraced an increasing number of independent meetings monthly and yearly meetings. One barrier to affiliation has always been a fear of falling under the sway of “Philadelphia Quakerism,” but FGC has not been dominated by an old east coast Quaker elite for decades. Since at least the 1970s much of the leadership has come from the newer formerly independent yearly meetings. The vitality and spirit of the independent meeting movement, the sense of coming to Quakerism fresh and untrammeled, is very much alive in Central Committee and among the FGC staff.
A quotation from Rufus Jones, lifted up in the first session of the new Lake Erie Yearly Meeting, captures this vision:
The “open” type of religion for which I am pleading, the movement-type, is uncongealed, fresh, free, formative, and in vital contact with the creative stream of divine life.
This is the spirit of the independent meeting movement, and, I think, the spirit of FGC today. May we honor it and follow wherever it may lead.
Deborah Haines, clerk of FGC’s Advancement and Outreach Committee credits “The Modernist Revolution of Quakerism: The Independent Meetings in New England, 1920–1950,” Betsy Cazden’s masters thesis, as a major source for this article.
Related:
Benefits of Affiliation with FGC
Processes and Procedures for a Monthly Meeting to Affiliate with FGC
Processes and Procedures for a Yearly Meeting to Affiliate with FGC
