External links
- Quakers Australia, the web site of Australia Yearly Meeting.
Australia Yearly Meeting is the body of members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia. Quakers within Australia Yearly Meeting generally follow the unprogrammed style of worship.
Australia Yearly Meeting comprises seven Regional Meetings: New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Canberra, Queensland and West Australia Regional Meetings. Regional Meetings, in turn, comprise Local Meetings, Recognised Meetings and Worshipping Groups. There are approximately 1,000 members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia and an additional 1,000 people (not in membership) are estimated to attend meetings in Australia.
The annual meetings of Australia Yearly Meeting rotate among the seven Regional Meetings. The Australia Yearly Meeting office is based near the Australia Yearly Meeting Secretary, the only full-time employee, at any given time.
Australia Yearly Meeting was established as an autonomous Yearly Meeting in 1964. Australia Yearly Meeting grew out of the previous Australia General Meeting which first met in 1902 as a component of London Yearly Meeting.
Friends United Meeting (FUM) is an association of twenty-six yearly meetings of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Its home pages states that it is "a collection of Christ-centered Quakers, embracing 34 yearly meetings and associations, thousands of local gatherings and hundreds of thousands of individuals." In addition there are several individual Monthly meetings and organizations that are members of FUM. FUM's headquarters is in Richmond, Indiana, and has offices in Kisumu, Kenya. Friends United Meeting is a member of the National Council of Churches in the United States of America.
The views of Quakers around the world towards homosexuality encompass a range from complete celebration and the practice of same-sex marriage, to the view that homosexuality is sinfully deviant and contrary to God's intentions for sexual expression. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is a historically Christian religious movement founded in 17th-century England; it has around 350,000 members. In Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, many Quakers are supportive of homosexual relationships, while views are divided among U.S. meetings. The majority (52%) of Quakers live in Africa and many there do not support homosexual relationships.
The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain, also known as the Britain Yearly Meeting, is a Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in England, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. It is the national organisation of Quakers living in Britain. Britain Yearly Meeting refers to both the religious gathering and the organisation. "Yearly Meeting", or "Yearly Meeting Gathering" are usually the names given to the annual gathering of British Quakers. Quakers in Britain is the name the organisation is commonly known by.
Quaker weddings are the traditional ceremony of marriage within the Religious Society of Friends. Quaker weddings are conducted in a similar fashion to regular Quaker meetings for worship, primarily in silence and without an officiant or a rigid program of events, and therefore differ greatly from traditional Western weddings.
Evangelical Friends Church International (EFCI) is a branch of Quaker yearly meetings around the world that profess evangelical Christian beliefs.
The Religious Society of Friends began as a movement in England in the mid-17th century in Lancashire. Members are informally known as Quakers, as they were said "to tremble in the way of the Lord". The movement in its early days faced strong opposition and persecution, but it continued to expand across the British Isles and then in the Americas and Africa.
There are about 196,800 members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, in Africa. African Friends make up around 52% of Friends internationally, the largest proportion in any one continent. Kenya has the largest number of Quakers in a single nation – about 146,300 in the year 2012.
Latin America contains approximately 17.5% of the world's Quakers. Latin American Friends are concentrated in Bolivia and Central America. Most of these Friends are evangelical and are affiliated with Evangelical Friends Church International. Friends World Committee for Consultation organizes among them through the Comité de Amigos Latinoamericanos CoAL del Comité Mundial de Consulta de Los Amigos CMCA FWCC.
Yearly Meeting is a term used by members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, to refer to an organization composed of constituent meetings or churches within a geographical area. The constituent meetings are called Monthly Meetings in most of the world; in England, local congregations are now called Area Meetings, in Australia Monthly Meetings are called Regional Meetings. "Monthly" and "Yearly" refer to how often the body meets to make decisions. Monthly Meetings may be local congregations that hold regular Meetings for Worship, or may comprise a number of Worship Groups. Depending on the Yearly Meeting organization, there may also be Quarterly Meetings, Half-Yearly Meetings, or Regional Meetings, where a number of local Monthly Meetings come together within a Yearly Meeting.
John Wilbur was a prominent American Quaker minister and religious thinker who was at the forefront of a controversy that led to "the second split" in the Religious Society of Friends in the United States.
Within the Religious Society of Friends, a clerk is someone responsible for various administrative functions within a meeting for worship for church affairs or meeting for worship with attention to business. The clerk is responsible for recording the discernment which is arrived at during such a meeting, in a minute, and is responsible for sending and receiving correspondence on behalf of the meeting. Within some branches of the Religious Society of Friends, the clerk may also create an agenda and may facilitate the meeting.
In the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), a monthly meeting or area meeting is the basic governing body, a congregation which holds regular meetings for business for Quakers in a given area. The monthly meeting is responsible for the administration of its congregants, including membership and marriages, and for the meeting's property. A monthly meeting can be a grouping of multiple smaller meetings, usually called preparative meetings, coming together for administrative purposes, while for others it is a single institution. In most countries, multiple monthly meetings form a quarterly meeting, which in turn form yearly meetings. Programmed Quakers may refer to their congregation as a church.
Baltimore Yearly Meeting is a body of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) headquartered in Sandy Spring, Maryland that includes Friends from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and West Virginia. It is one of the oldest yearly meetings in North America, first meeting in May 1672. It is also the only Yearly Meeting in North America visited by George Fox, who visited after a trip to Barbados. Its Presiding Clerk is Stephanie Bean. Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM) is part of both Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting –- two broader bodies of Friends. They are also part of Friends World Committee for Consultation and the Friends Peace Teams Project.
A meeting for worship is a practice of the Religious Society of Friends in many ways comparable to a church service. These services have a wide variety of forms, creating a spectrum from typical Protestant liturgy to silent waiting for the Spirit.
Quakers, also called Friends, belong to a historically Christian (Protestant) denomination known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of the various Quaker movements are all generally united by their belief in the ability of each human being to experientially access the light within, or "that of God in every one".
The Quaker movement began in England in the Seventeenth Century. Small Quaker groups were planted in various places across Europe during this early period. Quakers in Europe outside Britain and Ireland are not now very numerous although new groups have started in the former Soviet Union and satellite countries. By far the largest national grouping of Quakers in Europe is in Britain.
Central Yearly Meeting of Friends is a yearly meeting of Friends churches located in Indiana, North Carolina, Arkansas and Ohio. Central Yearly Meeting of Friends is part of the Conservative Holiness Movement, and originated in the Gurneyite wing of the Orthodox branch of Quakerism. Meeting for worship is programmed and led by pastors. It is an independent yearly meeting of Quakers, not affiliated with any broader associations.
A Book of Discipline may refer to one of the various books issued by a Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, setting out what it means to be a Quaker in that Yearly Meeting. The common name for this book varies from one Yearly Meeting to another and includes Book of Discipline, Faith and Practice, Christian Faith and Practice, Quaker Faith and Practice, Church Government and Handbook of Practice and Procedure. Each Book of Discipline is updated periodically by each Yearly Meeting according to the usual practice of decision making within the Religious Society of Friends.
New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or simply New York Yearly Meeting or NYYM, is the central organizing body for Quaker meetings and worship groups in New York State, northern and central New Jersey, and southwestern Connecticut.
Isaac Crewdson was a minister of the Quaker meeting at Hardshaw East, Manchester. He wrote A Beacon to the Society of Friends, a work published in 1835 which had a schismatic effect on English Quakerism.
