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Quakers
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The highest concentration of Quakers are in Africa.[17] The Friends of East Africa were at one time part of a single East Africa Yearly Meeting, then the largest Yearly Meeting in the world. Today, this region is served by several distinct Yearly Meetings. Most of these are affiliated with the Friends United Meeting, practice programmed worship, and employ pastors. There are ... Friends meetings in Rwanda and Burundi, as well as new work beginning in North Africa. Small unprogrammed meetings exist also in Ghana and Nigeria.
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The Quakers were the single group most responsible for promoting antislavery and abolitionism in the 1770-1860 era. Sassi (2006) compares Anthony Benezet's influential 1771 antislavery tract, Some Historical Account of Guinea, with the sources from which he gleaned his information about Africa and the slave trade, the narratives published by European travelers to West Africa. Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker and humanitarian reformer, cited the travel literature in order to portray Africa as an abundant land of decent people. His purpose was refutation of the argument that the slave trade was a beneficial transfer of people from a land of barbarism and death to regions of civilization and Christianity. However, Benezet employed the travel narratives selectively, suppressing contradictory evidence as well as controversial material that could have been used to construct an alternative depiction of African humanity. Nonetheless, Benezet's research shaped the subsequent debate over the slave trade and slavery, as antislavery writers incorporated his depiction into their rhetorical arsenal and pro-slavery defenders searched for a rebuttal.[12]
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Quakers actually have a practice for this. It’s called a discernment committee: When someone wants to get clear, a group of congregants allow the person to speak his mind while the others just listen. Parker Palmer explores this process in his small but profound book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. By the way, this is where a professional coach can come in, well trained in the skills of listening and articulating.
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Here, next to the site of the Ale House, Quakers had their first BURIAL GROUND, the gift of Thomas Bayles in 1659. It was used until 1713, by which time there had been more than 360 interments and a new ground was needed. It was sold in 1802.
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Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) emerged in the north of England in the early 1650s as one of the many sects spawned by the Puritan revolution. George Fox (1624รข€“1691), the most prominent early leader, after seeking for certainty among many religious groups, experienced what he and other Friends described as the Inward Light of Christ, an unmediated contact with God. Quakerism was an attempt to communicate and institutionalize this encounter with divinity that was available to all women and men. Worship consisted of meetings held in silence in an unornamented room with preaching or prayer spoken under the guidance of the Light. There was no educated and ordained clergy, no liturgy, hymns, or Bible reading to come between a person and God. Friends refused to pay tithes, take oaths, or show deference to social superiors and denounced all other forms of worship as corrupt.
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Although Quakers revere the Bible and quote from it extensively, they do not consider it as authoritative as the Inner Light. They deny the special authority of an ordained clergy and reject all ritual in religious worship. They believe that a true church is created by the fellowship of man rather than a building people meet in to worship. Small groups of Quakers gather weekly for devotion in "meetings" where members usually sit together silently in a bare room, waiting for the Inward Christ to speak through one of them who may be inspired to "give testimony." There is no altar, no recitation of prayers, and no hymn singing at the meeting. The Bible is rejected as the authoritative word of God and replaced with the authoritative messages of the Inward Christ.
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