History

Ours is a religion of experiencing the Life of Christ within ourselves and of allowing that Life to become our own.

God’s power over human behavior is exercised through His Voice, or Word, in our hearts, not by worldly coercion or recitation of a creed.

For centuries, the secular governments of Europe and the Catholic Church were intimately connected in the mutual support of each others’ power. The reformation, and the 17^th Century civil wars in England, broke this Church-and-State hegemony. During these civil wars, where Catholicism was the one true religion one day and Puritanism was the next, the land was racked by civil blood shed and spiritual confusion. Who was the true government? What was the true faith?

Many English lay people felt that they could not believe the clerics of any denomination’s rituals or theologies and sought Truth on their own. In 1647 one of these, 23 year old George Fox, realized that a scholarly degree did not by itself qualify a person to be a minister of Christ if Christ had not chosen and equipped him or her for that work. Fox also had his oft-quoted revelation, “And when all my hopes in them [ordained clergy] and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly [in the physical world] to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.”

Fox and others were amazed and transformed by the knowledge and experience of the Word of God, Christ, the light that enlightens every person (see the first chapter of John) within themselves. Individually and as a body, or meeting, they came before this present Anointed one in humble, waiting supplication for His help and true Lordship. He was, and for us still is, Truth, way, and life. Christ holds all the offices of this, His Church. He is bishop, shepherd, prophet, ruler, high priest, savior, healer, giver of life. As Friends then, and we today who keep, or “conserve,” this experience and knowledge, Christ within is the same Jesus which scripture documents, who came AND IS COME to deliver us, during this life on earth, from the power of evil and of death, to lead us by His example of complete submission to the will of God and to the cross.

Historic Atlas of Ohio Yearly Meeting

Produced in 2012, the Historical Atlas of Ohio Yearly Meeting provides an in-depth history of Conservative Friends and Ohio Yearly Meeting.