The Association of Evangelical Friends: A story of Quaker renewal in the twentieth century (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES55 Beginning in 1940, Errol Elliott was asked to undertake extensive visitation with Friends overseas, first in Europe, and later around the world. After taking a leading part in die Friends World Conference at Oxford, England, in 1952, he was later named chairman of the Friends World Committee for Consultation. He has written very little about what really happened during the years he headed the staff of the Five Years Meeting (Friends United Meeting). This is clearly one of the most sensitive, and most influential positions in American Quakerism, and he may be reluctant to publish a frank evaluation of that experience at this time. He has been much more introspective about his service as editor of the American Friend, now renamed Quaker Life. After a forthright discussion of the problems he faced he wrote, "Perhaps The American Friend reflected more tensions among Friends than had any other Quaker journal." His description of his visit to European Friends in 1940 and in 1946 during the crucial war-time period is sensitive and perceptive . His later visits to European Friends and to Quakers around the world are also portrayed in a most interesting manner. The volume concludes with an epilogue: "The Unfolding Present," in which this Quaker statesman of ripe years and experience discusses the immediate future of the Society as he views it today. Haverford CollegeEdwin B. Bronner The Association of Evangelical Friends: A story of Quaker renewal in the twentieth century. Newberg, Oregon: The Barclay Press, 1975. Pp. v, 58. This is an important publication for it is actually a study of evangelical Quakerism in the United States for the past half century, and fills an important void in the history of Friends. Arthur Roberts has performed an important service to historians and to Quakers generally by compiling this brief volume. He has selected the year 1926 as the beginning of this study, because in that year Oregon Yearly Meeting (now Northwest Yearly Meeting) decided to withdraw from the Five Years Meeting. Believing that the larger body was failing to live up to the orthodoxy concerning theology, the Scriptures, and missionary programs which had been agreed to at the 1922 sessions of die Five Years Meeting, Oregon, under the leadership of Edward Mott, chose to withdraw. A schism took place in Western Yearly Meeting that same year, when a small group headed by William Smith broke away to form Central Yearly Meeting. A small conference of evangelical Friends met at Cheyenne, Wyoming, in August, 1927, with Mott as chairman. The gathering did not have any great impact, and Edward Mott's hopes that this would be the beginning of a series of evangelical conferences did not materialize. A similar conference was scheduled for June, 1942, at Colorado Springs under the leadership of Byron L. Osborne, president of die Cleveland Bible College (now Malone College). World War II prevented this gathering from taking place, but such a conference did meet at Colorado Springs in June, 1947. The Colorado Springs Conference was the first of eight such gatherings convened on a triennial basis until 1968. It was a gathering of 150 individual 56QUAKER HISTORY evangelical Quakers, from nine yearly meetings, for a time of study, inspiration and spiritual refreshment. Edward Mott gave two addresses, including one in which he carefully traced the history of the evangelical emphasis in Quakerism from the seventeenth century to the present. When these Friends gathered three years later at Wichita, Kansas, in June, 1950, they had taken the name the Second American Conference of Evangelical Friends, but it was not until the fourth sessions, held at Denver, m 1956, that a constitution was adopted. It was at the fifth sessions, held at Newberg, Oregon, in 1959, that Everett Cattell delivered an address titled "Passion for Unity" in which he called for evangelical Friends to adopt a new approach to those who differed from them. Without surrendering any of the essentials of the evangelical belief, he urged his listeners to be willing to associate with others whose beliefs might not be the same. At die same time he expressed the hope that liberal Friends would listen to evangelicals, and proposed that a true dialogue...