Through the Flaming Sword

Liberal Quakerism gains momentum

After the Manchester Conference in 1895, in the years leading up to the First World War, Friends, especially young Friends, kept finding new avenues for their interests, new ways to express their growing confidence in a progressive Christianity.

Seebohm Rowntree formed the Friends Social Union in 1903, which claimed to be the first Quaker group to undertake a systematic approach to social concerns, focusing on housing, poverty, unemployed and unemployable labor, constructive philanthropy, and labor colonies. It published a guide, “How to Form a Social Services Committee” and other pamphlets, organized a lecture series, and otherwise encouraged the study of social problems among Friends.

Young adult Friends had formed the Friends Christian Fellowship Union (FCFU) in 1874 on the model of the YMCA and began including women in the mid-1880s. In 1910, FCFU organized a separate meeting for young Friends alongside LYM sessions, then a young Friends conference at Woodbrooke, and then the first National Conference of Young Friends in 1911.

In 1909, London Yearly Meeting formed an enlarged Peace Committee in response to the growing militarism of the British public. In 1912 the Committee presented to the yearly meeting a document entitled Our Testimony for Peace, the first official document in Quaker history to state explicitly that the peace testimony “follows necessarily from the foundation principle on which the Society . . . is built . . . our belief in and experience of the Light Within.” (Kennedy, p 309) This document became the foundation for resistance during the Great War.

Then in 1914 their fears were realized and Friends on both sides of the Atlantic were thrown into a crucible that would seal for the rest of the century the changes that had been developing over the past twenty years.