New England Yearly Meeting (officially the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends) is a body of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts that includes Friends from the New England region of the United States.
New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM) is part of both Friends General Conference and Friends United Meeting –- two broader bodies of Friends. They are also part of Friends World Committee for Consultation and the Friends Peace Teams Project.
Sixty-eight monthly meetings are associated with NEYM. Most of the constituent monthly meetings are in the unprogrammed tradition, which means that they meet for silent worship in which any participant may share whatever they believe the Spirit of God leads them to say. Others are in the programmed tradition, which means that they have a pastor who leads the meeting and plans ahead of time what will be said and done.
Yearly meeting sessions are held once a year, usually in the first week of August. Most recently they have been held at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Past locations include Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts; Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts; Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine; and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
NEYM publishes a quarterly newsletter entitled The New England Friend. The archives for NEYM are housed in the Rhode Island Historical Society Library in Providence, Rhode Island.
NEYM also runs a summer camp in South China, Maine called Friends Camp.
Famous quotes containing the words england, yearly and/or meeting:
“He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“... the yearly expenses of the existing religious system ... exceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown!... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)