Friends (Quaker)

Heritage

George Fox's preaching in 1650s England gathered the first Friends — "Quaker" began as a courtroom insult and stuck. William Penn's holy experiment made Pennsylvania a Quaker commonwealth from 1681. American Friends divided in 1827 (Hicksite and Orthodox) and again under revivalism's influence; the main branches today are Friends General Conference (unprogrammed), Friends United Meeting, and Evangelical Friends Church International (programmed, with pastors), alongside independent meetings. Some sources file Friends within a broader peace-church family; ARDA and the Handbook give them their own, and so does this map.

Theological family

The Inward Light — Christ's direct, present teaching in every person — with the branches ranging from firmly Christ-centered evangelical Friends to liberal meetings that include nontheists. No outward sacraments: baptism and communion are held to be inward and spiritual realities.

Who decides what

Meetings for worship with attention to business, deciding by the sense of the meeting rather than by vote; monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings; clerks who serve rather than preside over. Even where pastors are employed there is no ordained hierarchy.

What a first-time visitor would find

In an unprogrammed meeting, Friends gather in silence until anyone — anyone — is moved to speak; in a programmed Friends church there are hymns, a sermon and a pastor. Both branches call it expectant waiting on God.

What it has always cared about

The testimonies: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality; the anti-slavery conscience (the 1688 Germantown protest, John Woolman's patient persuasion); prison and mental-health reform; and women speaking in worship from the very beginning.

Its gift to the wider church

The peace testimony and the legal shape of conscientious objection; an abolitionist witness decades ahead of nearly everyone; the discipline of corporate silence, which contemplative Christians across traditions now borrow; and equality practiced early enough to form Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony.

Commonly confused with

With the Anabaptists — fellow peace church, entirely different roots, and opposite answers on baptism (none here, believers' baptism there). "Friends Church" and "Friends Meeting" are both this family, programmed and unprogrammed. The Shakers were a different movement altogether.

Range of views inside it

Famously wide: evangelical Friends churches in Ohio and the Northwest, liberal unprogrammed meetings on the coasts; the place of Christ-language itself varies by yearly meeting. The testimonies are the family's common tongue.

Where Friends (Quaker) churches are on the map

536 Friends (Quaker) congregations appear on The Church Map, across 44 states.

• Pennsylvania — 74
• Indiana — 47
• Ohio — 43
• California — 42
• North Carolina — 40
• New York — 27
• Oregon — 25
• Massachusetts — 23
• Virginia — 23
• New Jersey — 19

Bodies and networks in this family

• Religious Society of Friends, branch unspecified — congregational — 1,028 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (sum of 7 rows — our arithmetic, not an RCMS-published total), 2020)
• Evangelical Friends Church International — congregational — 235 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
• Friends United Meeting — association
• Friends General Conference — association

Moments that formed this family

• 1681–1683 — Penn's holy experiment

  William Penn received the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681 and opened his "holy experiment" to all who confessed God — Quakers first, and soon Mennonites, German Baptist Brethren, and other persecuted groups from across Europe. Germantown, settled in 1683, became the American cradle of the Anabaptist churches.

  Pennsylvania was the first American place where traditions that disagreed deeply chose to live side by side on purpose.

• 1688 — The Germantown protest against slavery

  Four Quakers and Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania signed the first recorded protest against African slavery by a religious body in the English colonies, arguing that people who fled oppression could not practice it. The petition was tabled — and kept — and its argument never went away.

  The conscience of the American church against slavery spoke first from its smallest peace churches, two centuries before the nation listened.

• 1786–1791 — Disestablishment: faith set free

  Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786 — pushed hard by Baptists and other dissenters who knew persecution firsthand — and the First Amendment in 1791 ended the era of state churches. No American denomination would be propped up by law; every one of them would live or die by conviction.

  Disestablishment is the shared inheritance of every American tradition: the level ground on which all of them meet.

• 1816 — The American Bible Society

  Delegates from dozens of local Bible societies — Presbyterian, Episcopal, Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker — founded the American Bible Society in New York in 1816 with a single object: Scripture for everyone, without doctrinal note or comment. It became one of the longest-running cooperative ventures in American church history.

  The traditions found they could not share a pulpit, but they could share a Book — and they have, for two centuries.

• 1831–1865 — The Underground Railroad runs through the churches

  The network that moved fugitives from slavery to freedom ran substantially through congregations: Quaker meetings and homes, AME and AME Zion churches (Harriet Tubman's church home), free Black Baptist congregations, and antislavery Congregational and Presbyterian churches. The Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) had barred slaveholders from communion since 1800.

  Decades before the denominations could agree about slavery in their assemblies, believers across a dozen traditions were already agreeing at midnight, at the river crossings.

• 2009–2016 — Repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery

  One after another — the Episcopal Church (2009), the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterians, the ELCA (2016), and others — American denominations formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, the centuries-old legal theology used to justify the seizure of Native lands, and began reckoning publicly with their own missions' entanglement in it, including the boarding schools.

  Repentance became something traditions did in each other's sight — each repudiation citing the others, a chain of confession running across the mainline.