Mrzzy! You have fallen in with Evangelical Quakes! My first gut responce is to make a joke about their being so like other Evangelical faiths, but they have no sence of humor and they may passive resist me to death! No, really, our meeting in New York, was origionaly a Hicksite (Liberal inner-light) meeting which in 1960 merged with an Orthodox (Christocentric - inner light + Christ only) meeting. Orthodox (Wilberite and Gurneyite) is a rather misnomer, baised on the contention that they alone are origional Quakerism, when in fact, I would say the combination of the two comes close, eliments of both traditions held together by belief in individual inspiration ... Well, then a wee bit of history, in the 1820's we split into two separate religions, which re-merged in 1955... Now, these traditions are "unprogramed" ie no ministers or priests worshiping in silence. Today there are some "programed" meetings, most comon in Africa, but also found in Ohio and a number of other places in the US, often Evangelical and hard to distinguish in my eyes from Baptists... We also have a programed meeting which meets in our meeting house in New York. On a happy note, we don't shoot each other, but rather we share the meeting house, well hell we even share the meeting house with Menonites (nice folks!) to get back to the origional post, we don't have to fight over sharing the meeting house or the planet... lots of room for all!
I, as you may guess, am a Hicksite - but some of my best friends are Wilberites and Gurnytes.
:-)
Larry