1947Friends Service Council (The Quakers), American Friends Service Committee (The Quakers)
Friends Service Council (The Quakers) – History of Organization*
Established in 1927 by the amalgamation of the Friends Foreign Mission Association (FFMA) and the Friends Council for International Service (CIS), the Friends Service Council (FSC) is the standing committee responsible for the overseas work of the Religious Society of Friends in Great Britain (London Yearly Meeting) and in Ireland (Ireland Yearly Meeting, formerly Dublin Yearly Meeting). Although essentially interwoven, three primary strands - missionary activity, international service, and relief work can be distinguished in the development of the Quaker service abroad.
The first strand, that of missionary activity, did not appear until two hundred years after the Society itself had come into being, for Friends long remained aloof from organized foreign missions. The Quaker testimony against a paid ministry led to hesitations about full-time missionaries, and the traditional reliance on the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit led to distrust of deliberate planning. Accordingly, although a provisional committee had been working for a few years previously, it was not until 1868 that the FFMA was formally set up. Even so, the FFMA remained an independent organization for fifty years, becoming a committee of London Yearly Meeting in 1918.
The main fields of action were in Mid-India (1866), Madagascar (1867), Szechwan Province, West China (1886), and Ceylon (1897-1921), with the work of a Friends Syrian Mission (1874) being incorporated in FFMA in 1898; the Friends Industrial Mission in Pemba - the creation of which in 1897 arose from the long tradition of Quaker antislavery sentiment - was, added in 1918.
This missionary effort has focused on organizing and maintaining schools; and hospitals, as well as on forming and sustaining new Quaker groups. During most of this century a policy of devolution has been followed, and I responsibility has been steadily handed over to indigenous management.
The second strand is that of international service. From early days Quakers have been concerned not only to uphold by personal witness a peace testimony, but also to undertake what projects they could to promote international peace and understanding. Thus, in 1678, Robert Barclay, one of the early Scottish Quaker leaders, wrote an address, «wherein the true cause of the present war is discovered, and the right remedy and means for a firm and settled peace is proposed», to the ambassadors negotiating the Peace of Nijmegen. Similar efforts were made through personal visits to the plenipotentiaries engaged in concluding the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748; they have been repeated on other such occasions.
The same concern for international understanding led FFMA in 1910 to open the International Friends Institute in Chungking; it inspired Carl Heath, the British Quaker leader, to write his Quaker Embassies (1917); it brought about the Quaker «Outposts» Conference of 1918, which proposed, by using the contacts made in relief work during World War I, to establish a continuous and extended service of fellowship and to set up the Council of International Service as an official committee of British Friends. It was consequently the CIS which inaugurated and, with the cooperation of AFSC, developed the Quaker International Centers, the concrete realization of the conception of «Quaker embassies». These centers, besides offering the Quaker message, provide neutral and friendly ground for exchange of information and viewpoints between people of different nationalities, a focus for various activities that aim at spreading goodwill and understanding, a base from which Quaker ambassadors of peace can operate during crises - in short, they constitute an attempt at constructive peacemaking. Most of the centers are in Europe where the years between the two world wars saw a new growth of Quaker groups, resulting in new, if small, yearly meetings for Germany (1925), The Netherlands (1931), France (1933), Sweden (1935), and Switzerland (1944); those in Norway (1846) and Denmark (1875) had already been instituted.
At the present time FSC cooperates with AFSC and other Quaker bodies in running conferences for diplomats and others, in holding seminars for young leaders, and in maintaining international affairs representatives in key cities in various parts of the world and at the United Nations.
Relief work, the third strand of Quaker overseas service, was organized on a number of occasions during the nineteenth century - for instance, in famine stricken Ireland in 1847-1848 and in Finland after the Crimean War - but the first official Friends War Victims Relief Committee (FWVRC) was appointed in 1870 and, through the agency of some forty Quaker commissioners, undertook relief work in towns and villages devastated in the Franco-Prussian War. This was the first time the red and black star, the badge of the Quaker relief worker, was used and the first time the basic principle of «no discrimination» was made really explicit. War Victims Relief Committees were revived in 1876 for eastern Europe, in 1912 for the Balkans, and in the years 1914-1923 for France, The Netherlands, Russia, Germany, Austria, and Poland. An official committee was also active in South Africa after 1900, more particularly among Boers in internment camps.
Activity between the two world wars included that of the Germany Emergency Committee (later Friends Committee for Refugees and Aliens), which functioned from 1933 to 1948; relief operations in Spain, which also involved running refugee camps in southern France; and at the outbreak of World War II, work among Polish refugees. From 1940 to 1948 a fifth FWVRC, which, after 1943, became Friends Relief Service, operated in Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Austria, and Poland. The Friends Ambulance Unit, an unofficial body supported by British Quakers, also joined in the relief program in the Middle East, India, China, and northwestern Europe, its work in China and India being continued later by Friends Service Units. Since the Second World War, Friends Service Council, which took over the remaining relief duties, has, in cooperation with American Friends Service Committee and, increasingly, with similar committees of other Quaker groups throughout the world, sent workers to Korea, Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam, and Nigeria.
In all of this service, Quakers have been anxious to stress that the work they have felt able to undertake has been of modest proportion and that they have been more concerned with personal relationships than with large-scale operations. They have stressed, too, that their service springs directly from the personal concerns and insights of individuals, tested by the corporate guidance and judgment of the group, and that they are drawn to this work as an expression of their peace witness. For this reason they believe that relief work is incomplete without international service and missionary activity, thought of in the broadest sense of that term - they believe, in short, that in every human soul there is a witness for God which can be appealed to and which, with God's grace, can be reached and made active.
Friends Service Council (The Quakers) – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture*, December 12, 1947
The International Service of the Society of Friends
Introduction
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to two Committees of the Society of Friends. These have their headquarters in Philadelphia and London but are representative of the activities of Friends around the world, whether the line be drawn round the northern hemisphere from Scandinavia, through the American continent, Japan and China to India, or south from Great Britain, through western Europe, Africa, and Australia to New Zealand.
The Society of Friends had its origin in England three hundred years ago, but the zeal of early Friends quickly carried their faith overseas to many places, notably to the new communities of settlers in America. Consequently the larger groups of Friends are still found in Great Britain and the United States of America. Numerically the Society is small, only totalling approximately 150,000, but observers have often remarked that its influence is quite out of proportion to its numbers. We have undertaken the work in God's name and we humbly offer thanks to Him if it has borne abundant fruit. We also want to give public recognition with gratitude for the devoted work done by very many men and women, not members of the Society, who have united in service with us because they shared our attitude towards suffering humanity. Without their aid and a great deal of generous financial support from the public, the work done in the name of Friends would have been very limited. Besides this help the Society owes a great debt to the cooperation of other bodies such as the Norwegian Fredsvenners Hjelpetjeneste [Friends of Peace Relief Service] and similar organizations in other countries. With all these people we share the honour that has come to us in the award of the Prize, and we hope that in any future work we may still have their support.
Appreciation is always encouraging, and this award has brought to us much that is pleasurable, not only in the recognition but in the expressions of goodwill from many of our friends. This is stimulating at a time when the need in the world is growing greater and material resources at our disposal become less and more difficult to obtain. But there also comes a great sense of responsibility to respond to the confidence shown in us. We are very conscious of our human inability to make an adequate response and we pray for strength if God desires us to continue in the work.
Because this responsibility has been laid upon us, I wish today to ask your understanding of the principles that lie at the root of the Quaker attitude to service and to show the resulting effect on the work undertaken.
Religious Foundation of Service
The full title of our Society is The Religious Society of Friends. Indeed it was the religious fervour of our forebears that caused them to "tremble before the Lord" that early won them the nickname of Quakers from the verb to quake or tremble. This nickname is no longer applicable to Friends in their quiet worship, but the name has remained although it has lost its original meaning.
The Society was born in a period when much that bore the name of religion was corrupt and very far removed from the teaching of Christ, and in the unrest of the times men were seeking for the foundation truths that would give them freedom of spirit. For years the young George Fox1, founder of the Society of Friends, had been seeking this freedom with an ever increasing sense of hopelessness. He could find no help from the formalism of the church of his time, and its religious leaders used argument or subterfuge that left him more and more conscious of his own inability to find a solution to the evil of the world. In 1647 the burden was lifted from him, not by a conviction that he was without sin, but that within his own soul he had the God-given capacity for Christ-likeness; that within him he had a measure of the same love and life, of the same mercy and power and of the same divine nature. He spoke of this measure of the divine in man as the "Light of Christ within". He found that the spirit of Christ could speak directly to him and evoke within him the power to choose his way through the evil of life when he was willing to follow the light. He found too that this capacity lay within every man and that the light could shine through all men. This did not make him believe that all that men did was good; this was obviously untrue, but that there was within every man something fundamentally good that could be developed.
Upon this basic truth all the principles and actions of the Society of Friends are founded. Each man is seen as having intrinsic value, and Christ is equally concerned for the other man as for me. We all become part of the divine family, and as such we are all responsible for one another, carrying our share of the shame when wrong is done and of the burden of suffering. In this way a brotherhood is founded which renders impossible a lack of regard for others, and, as in a family circle, it is the weakest or the most in need that calls out the greatest desire to help; so the forgotten and suffering people of the world appeal to the hearts of Friends. It must not be thought that we flatter ourselves that we have this sense of oneness with humanity to such an extent that we are always alert to the needs of the situation, or that we have power to meet all the needs that we recognize. We do however believe that, in responding to the call of God by using the little sympathy that we have got, more will be given us. The great American Quaker, John Woolman2, who worked untiringly for the freedom of slaves, speaks of training oneself to "enter into the condition of others". For this reason Friends have been prominent in social reform and in relief in times of special emergencies.
Personal Relationships
If Friends are to enter into the condition of others, it will be seen that, when undertaking relief work, they are not satisfied when only administering large impersonal schemes of feeding, clothing, and housing, but naturally desire to have personal contact with those in need. If this work is to be done abroad, there is always a danger that foreigners entering a country intent on helping may by their enthusiasm impose methods that are alien to the tradition and background of the people. Friends have aimed at entering into the life of the people. Often they have lamentably failed, but we rejoice to know of one of our workers who, feeling estranged from the working people of Germany by reason of her relief-team status, served as a tram conductress for a week, living, eating, and sharing the problems of her comrades. Or of another English girl, a midwife, who has donned a sari and is living with her students in the slums of Calcutta, quietly living down bitterness and racial animosity, with the result that at a meeting of Hindu men a shy young Indian student-midwife faced the group and condemned the method of retaliation, pleading for forgiveness and tolerance.
The same principle of belief in others that leads to this intimate sharing of life for the sake of understanding and better cooperation also forms the basis of the democratic methods of the Society of Friends. We strive to find corporately the right course to take, and as true progress is the result of man falling in with the will of the Creator, thus the periods of worship are the centre of all the work. Here in silent waning upon God we seek for direction and, in fellowship with each other, try to interpret His will, whether it be in the conduct of business, the planning of a relief project, or the unravelling of difficult problems of personal relationship. Even when our work lies with peoples of different or of no faith, we invite them to share this search for divine direction, and many find themselves thus strengthened.
Self-help and Voluntary Service
The desire that others should share the knowledge that there lies within themselves a potential answer to evil, leads Friends to aim to draw out from those with whom they are in contact the will to strive for the betterment of their own conditions. We are therefore more convinced of the rightness of our work when first-stage relief has given place to rehabilitation.
At the close of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Friends found themselves crossing the Pyrenees into France with the streams of refugees. At first little could be done for these people beyond endeavouring to supply the bare necessities of life. The workers were too fully occupied searching for medical supplies, blankets, and food to get much personal touch with individual refugees. Even this kind of work can lead to helping individuals to make readjustments, but it was years before the opportunity came for the most constructive work to begin. Much unemployment and misery were caused by the great number of men who had been disabled by the war. A small workshop was therefore established by British and American Friends for the manufacture of artificial limbs. One by one, the disabled men found new hope as they were able to become independent; by means of special appliances they were employed in the factory itself.
Or again in 1943 in Bengal, a small company of Friends was stationed in Calcutta at the time of the devastating flooding of the Ganges Delta, quickly followed by the famine. The country people flocked into the city, believing that there they would find food, but instead they lay starving and dying on the pavements. The Quaker team saw that the only satisfactory solution to the problem was to persuade the people to return to their villages, but their usual means of livelihood had gone. They would need to be established there in some form of productive work so that they might buy their own rations and look forward to an independent future. Thus a small mixed team of Indians and Westerners went to live in one village in order to set up temporary canteens, stimulate the reconstruction of the native mud-and-thatch houses, and establish a cooperative weaving industry. Many of the people were widows and did not know the craft, but, with a supply of looms and a skilled teacher, they soon became proficient and the village could be left to re-establish its life. The small number of Quaker workers could not deal with the whole problem of Bengal's starving people, but by this and other demonstrations they helped to stimulate wider efforts of self-help.