Hello, Friends;:

Most of us probably understand what a witness is, but what is a corporate witness?

First I will offer that some of us may benefit from introductory material about the Religious Society of Friends (commonly known as Quakers). Local sources of this information may be local Friends Meetings, which in our Minneapolis telephone Yellow Pages are listed under Churches-Friends. Information by mail may be obtained from many sources, including: Quaker Information Center, 1501 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19102 (215/241-7250). The following Web address has much information and many links to other Web Pages of the many various Quaker organizations: http://www.quaker.org/.

Basically, corporate witness refers to a witness or testimony from a Friends Meeting. A Friends Meeting may be identified in one of several ways. Local meetings are known typically as Monthly because, in addition to weekly meetings for worship, they hold Monthly Meetings for Worship with emphasis on business. Likewise there are Quarterly and Yearly Meetings which are usually organized within geographic regions, such as Northern Yearly Meeting.

More information may not be helpful in this forum, but I would like to offer the following introduction to Chapter 24, "Our peace testimony", from "Quaker Faith & Practice (1995)", Britain Yearly Meeting,

THE CORPORATE TESTIMONY

The Peace Testimony [or witness] is probably the best known and best loved of the Quaker testimonies. Its roots lie in the personal experience of the love and power of Christ which marked the founders of the Quaker movement [mid 1600s]. They were dominated by a vision of the world transformed by Christ who lives in the hearts of all. Friends sought to make the vision real by putting emphasis on Christian practice rather than primarily on any particular dogma or ideological system. Theirs was a spontaneous and practical religion. They recognized the realities of evil and conflict, but it was contrary to the spirt of Christ to use war and violence as means to deal with them.

The Peace Testimony has been a source of inspiration to friends through the centuries, for it points to a way of life which embraces all human relationships. The following extracts trace the source of the Peace Testimony in the experience of the founders of the Quaker movement and illustrate its evolution over three hundred and fifty years in response to a changing world. As a Society we have been faithful throughout in maintaining a CORPORATE WITNESS [emphasis added] against all war and violence. However, in our personal lives we have continually to wrestle with the difficulty of finding ways to reconcile our faith with practical ways of living it out in the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that we have not all reached the same conclusions when dealing with the daunting complexities and moral dilemmas of society and its government.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, we as Friends face a bewildering array of social and international challenges, which have widened the relevance of the Peace Testimony from the issue of peace and war between states to the problems of tensions and conflicts in all their forms. Thus we are brought closer to the witness of early Friends, who did not draw a hard and fast distinction between the various Quaker testimonies, but saw them as a seamless expression of the universal spirit of Christ that dwells in the hearts of all.

[END OF QUOTE]

There follow many wonderful testimonies from early Friends (which are occasionally difficult to read) through Friends' testimonies of the late twentieth century.

Dan R. L.; dan_lundquist@compuserve.com