Whoa, the part of Indi­ana Year­ly Meet­ing that retained the name after the 2013 schism is leav­ing Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing. At one point Indi­ana was the largest year­ly meet­ing in the world, sec­ond only to Philadel­phia in its influ­ence on Amer­i­can Quak­erism but repeat­ed schisms and depop­u­la­tion of the rur­al Mid­west has hit it hard. 

The 2013 split cre­at­ed two bod­ies: the Evan­gel­i­cals who retained “Indi­ana” as their name and the Lib­er­als who became the New Asso­ci­a­tion of Friends. At the time I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised that both sides remained part of the Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing, the inter­na­tion­al umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion of what you might call churchy Friends. I thought it might be a sign that we had out­grown the kind of nine­teenth cen­tu­ry atti­tudes that forced every­one pick sides in splits like these. Appar­ent­ly not. 

Some Evan­gel­i­cal Friends have been dream­ing about a “realign­ment” of FUM since the 1980s, a con­cept that would split FUM down the mid­dle between Evan­gel­i­cals and Lib­er­als, push­ing every­one to decide between their respec­tive nation­al con­fer­ences, Evan­gel­i­cal Friends Inter­na­tion­al and Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence respec­tive­ly.¹ Some­how FUM’s been able to resist the cen­trifu­gal forces and main­tain a big tent approach that’s frus­trat­ed many² but some­how held togeth­er. What hap­pens to this bal­ance if the cen­ter of grav­i­ty for FUM Amer­i­can Friends piv­ots more toward its lib­er­al end?

FUM is an inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion and Africa’s the wild card. The largest pop­u­la­tion of Friends are there, with most of its year­ly meet­ings affil­i­at­ed with FUM. Even the decamp­ing Indi­ana Year­ly Meet­ing wants to find an arrange­ment with FUM to keep those ties going (met with guf­faws in some quarters). 

I don’t hear any­one talk­ing about realign­ment much these days. But in the U.S. con­text there’s an increas­ing num­ber of FUM Friends and FGC Friends³ who aren’t so very dif­fer­ent any­more. This pre­sum­ably is Indi­ana YM’s argu­ment for leav­ing, but it’s a chicken-or-egg sce­nario: the result of splits is often that each side shifts to fit the stereo­type the oth­er side accused it of being all along. In the mean­time there are a lot of Friends with deep fam­i­ly and child­hood ties to Indi­ana Year­ly Meet­ing who are griev­ing right now. 

1. A kind of corn-fed re-enactment of the par­ti­tion of Poland.
2. “Per­son­nel pol­i­cy” is a trig­ger­ing phrase in many Quak­er circles.
3. FGC also feels dis­tinct­ly less ide­o­log­i­cal, more of a sup­port orga­ni­za­tion than one cham­pi­oning any grand vision of Friends. Its mem­bers was large­ly obliv­i­ous to the ‘90s realign­ment debates.