User Contributed Dictionary
Old French
Extensive Definition
Friends United Meeting (FUM) is an association of
twenty-six yearly
meetings of the
Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in North
America, Africa, and the
Caribbean. In
addition there are several individual Monthly
meetings and organizations that are members of FUM. FUM's
headquarters is in Richmond,
Indiana, and has offices in Kisumu, Kenya.
There are three other main branches within
Quakerism, two of them represented by parallel organizations
(Friends
General Conference and
Evangelical Friends International); the third (Conservative
Friends) has no single unifying organization. Of these four
branches, FUM has the largest number of individual members. FUM is
responsible for much of the growth of Quakerism in Africa and Latin
America.
History
Five years after the signing on the Richmond Declaration in 1887, Five Years Meeting was established in 1902 by a collection of orthodox yearly meetings.After World War
I, growing desire for a more fundamentalist approach began to
split Five Years Meeting. in 1926, Northwest Yearly
Meeting withdrew from the organization, leading several other
yearly meetings and scattered monthly meetings. In 1947, the
Association of Evangelical Friends was formed, which led in
turn to the 1965 formation of the Evangelical Friends Association,
a precursor to today's
Evangelical Friends International, formed in 1989.
During the 1950s many yearly
meetings in North
America reunited and became joint members of Five Years Meeting
and Friends General Conference.
In 1963 Five Years
Meeting was renamed Friends United Meeting.