Two Ways to Love a Neighbor: Friends Service and Disaster Relief

In the last article of this series I set down a method rather than a story: how a Christian weighs the Friends' social witness with truthfulness and charity at once. This time I want to put that method to work.

Two organizations carried the practical service of Friends into the twentieth century: the Friends Service Committee and the Friends Disaster Service. One received a Nobel Peace Prize. The other worked mostly in mud and sawdust and never went looking for a headline. Between them they show how Friends of every branch have tried to obey a very old commandment, and where Friends have not seen eye to eye about what obedience requires. I mean to report that range carefully, because a reader from any branch deserves to find his own convictions described fairly here.

A committee born in wartime, 1917

The American Friends Service Committee was founded in 1917, shortly after the United States entered the First World War. Young Friends faced a war they could not in conscience fight, and the committee gave conscientious objectors an avenue to perform humanitarian service instead of military service.

Rather than bearing arms, they rebuilt villages, fed civilians, and cared for refugees. They went toward the war, not away from it, carrying different tools.

None of it was invented in 1917. It reflected the historic Peace Testimony of 1660, and behind that a sentence from the Sermon on the Mount that Friends have never been able to get around: "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God" (Matthew 5:9).

When the guns stopped, the need did not. The committee expanded into famine relief, prison reform, and international reconciliation throughout Europe. Then came a second war, worse than the first. During and after it, AFSC workers assisted refugees, displaced persons, prisoners, children, Holocaust survivors, and civilian populations. Read that list slowly. There is not a comfortable assignment on it.

The prize of 1947

In 1947 the American Friends Service Committee and the British Friends Service Council jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize, on behalf of Quakers worldwide. That last phrase matters. The prize was given to a testimony, not to a staff or a headquarters. The Nobel Committee praised Friends for demonstrating practical love through humanitarian service during both world wars. Sit with that phrase, "practical love." Not sentiment. Love that shows up with a truck.

How Friends have received the Service Committee

Beginning in the 1950s, and especially through the 1960s and 1970s, the committee's work broadened into civil rights, anti-war advocacy, nuclear disarmament, economic justice, and immigration. Its humanitarian work remained extensive throughout. What changed was not that the relief stopped, but that the public advocacy became more visible alongside it.

That is the hinge, and here is where an honest historian slows down. The Religious Society of Friends does not have one answer to give you, and it would be dishonest of me to hand you one.

Liberal Friends. The committee has been most closely associated with Liberal Friends, and the association is warm and long-standing. Many Liberal yearly meetings support it financially, serve on its governing boards, and regard the AFSC as an important expression of Quaker witness. Its emphasis on peace, justice, and reconciliation matches priorities Liberal Friends have carried for generations.

Conservative Friends. Conservative Friends have generally respected the committee's humanitarian work while expressing varying degrees of caution. Many appreciate the refugee relief, the disaster response, and the peace work without hesitation. Others have questioned whether its later public policy advocacy extends beyond what Friends have been able to reach unity about, or reflects theological assumptions different from those of early Friends. Support varies from one Conservative yearly meeting to another.

Evangelical Friends. The relationship here has often been more distant, and it matters to say what that distance is not about. Many Evangelical Friends affirm peace, compassion, and relief work without reservation. The concerns some have expressed run in a different direction. They have to do with whether the committee's public identity has become less explicitly Christian, less evangelistic, more politically progressive, and more pluralistic in theology. Those concerns involve theology and public advocacy rather than any opposition to humanitarian relief itself. Many have therefore directed their support toward other service organizations that combine humanitarian work with explicit Christian witness.

Let me be plain about my aim. I am reporting a range, not refereeing it. I will not tell you whether the committee's advocacy went too far, or not far enough, or exactly as far as faithfulness required. Friends of goodwill have answered that differently, prayerfully, and out of the same Scriptures. Each of the three positions begins from a genuine Quaker conviction. A history that hands you a verdict on that question is not doing history. It is recruiting.

The other committee, with a truck and a crew

The Friends Disaster Service represents a different tradition, far less famous and, I think, no less Quaker. It developed after the Second World War, and its volunteers specialized in the least glamorous work imaginable: emergency shelter, cleanup, and rebuilding homes.

Its work became known after hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Which is to say, in the places where such things happen, to the people they happened to, and not much of anywhere else. That was not an accident of publicity. It was a conviction.

Its philosophy amounted to a small theology, and unlike the Service Committee it avoided political advocacy altogether. The instinct has a text behind it: "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" (Matthew 6:3). A crew that arrives Friday, tears out ruined drywall until Sunday, and drives home without leaving a sign in the yard is not being modest as a matter of style. It is obeying a verse.

In 1968 the Friends Disaster Service merged with the Mennonite disaster program to form Mennonite Disaster Service. Two peace churches had been working the same debris piles long enough to notice how much they held in common. Notice that the Quaker name did not survive in the title. Friends signed their work into a partnership and kept showing up, and MDS continues internationally today, with many Quaker volunteers still in it.

The place where all three branches meet

Look at who actually participates in disaster relief, and the divisions I described earlier largely disappear.

Evangelical Friends have participated enthusiastically, organizing volunteer teams and short-term disaster ministries, often connected with evangelistic witness and local church ministry. Conservative Friends have participated as well, emphasizing quiet service, local volunteerism, and cooperation with neighboring churches. Liberal Friends participate actively too, emphasizing community resilience, long-term recovery, and interfaith cooperation.

Notice both things at once. The emphases are genuinely different, and each branch carries its own convictions right onto the job site. And yet all three are there. A roof, it turns out, does not require agreement. It requires shingles, and somebody willing to carry them up a ladder.

Two ways to love a neighbor

Both organizations reflect authentic strands of Quaker history. Neither is a departure from the family. Neither, by itself, is the whole family either. The Service Committee's courage among the victims of war earned the prize of 1947, and its later advocacy divided the evaluations of Friends. Both are true at once, and an honest account keeps them in the same paragraph.

We are left with two complementary ways of obeying one commandment: organized humanitarian relief with a public witness for peace and justice, and practical volunteer service that restores homes and communities after a disaster. The commandment itself is old and short. When a lawyer recited it to Jesus he said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," and then, wanting it narrowed to a manageable size, asked, "And who is my neighbour?" (Luke 10:27, 29). The answer was a story about a man beaten and left on a road, ending with an instruction rather than an argument: "Go, and do thou likewise" (Luke 10:37).

Friends of every branch have gone. They have not always agreed about which road to take, or how loudly to speak once they arrived. But the Service Committee's workers in the rubble of Europe and the Disaster Service's crews in the mud of a flooded town were doing what the Samaritan did. They stopped. They got down off the horse. They spent what they had on somebody who could never pay it back.

I am content to let both of those be Quaker. And if your own branch is better represented by one of them than by the other, I ask only this. Before you weigh the other, remember whose obedience you are weighing. It is your brother's, offered in the same name, to the same Lord, for the sake of somebody lying by the road.