On a late lunch, just fin­ished “Con­flict­ing Views on For­eign Mis­sions: The Mis­sion Board of Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing of Freinds in the 1920s” by Tesuko Toda from the Fall 2011 issue of Quak­er His­to­ry.

Sounds like a page turn­er, right? But it’s inter­est­ing his­to­ry that’s still res­onat­ing. Toda’s piece sheds light on a gen­er­a­tional sea change that hap­pened among the evangelical-leaning sub­set of Philadel­phia Friends (a minor­i­ty of the Ortho­dox year­ly meeting):

When the sto­ry begins, Friends inter­est­ed in mis­sion work have to orga­nize inde­pen­dent of the year­ly meet­ing. Over time they come into the fold but it’s right when younger Friends are giv­ing up the idea of bring­ing Chris­tian­i­ty to the hea­thens for the idea of inter­na­tion­al fel­low­ship (a sim­i­lar atti­tude change was hap­pen­ing through­out Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions).  Toda writes:

Young Philadel­phi­an Friends did sup­port for­eign mis­sions, but did not sup­port con­ven­tion­al ones. Actu­al­ly, none of them approved of for­eign mis­sions aimed at con­ver­sion. Although some point­ed out the advan­tages of Friends mis­sions, no one insist­ed on denom­i­na­tion­al mis­sions. What kind of for­eign mis­sions did young Philadel­phia Friends think was suit­able for the new era (the 1920s), then? The first point to be not­ed is that young Philadel­phia Friends unan­i­mous­ly had a neg­a­tive view of tra­di­tion­al missionaries.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth in the group but it final­ly fun­nelled its ener­gies into the still-new Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee. The AFSC had been set up to sup­port con­sci­en­tious objec­tors in World War I and there was no expec­tion that it might con­tin­ue after the war. That it did was because it bet­ter rep­re­sent­ed the inter­na­tion fel­low­ship model.

I’m not going to write a full review but those of you inter­est­ed in the soci­o­log­i­cal his­to­ry of that kind of bold, “let’s change the world” ener­gy in Friends should look it up, as should those curi­ous about how gen­er­a­tional shifts some­times play out in year­ly meet­ing politics.