North and South America
| Country | Number of Quakers |
|---|---|
| Bolivia | 13,000 |
| Canada | 1,216 |
| Chile | 15 |
| Colombia | 8 |
| Costa Rica | 72 |
| Cuba | 535 |
| El Salvador | 472 |
| Guatemala | 20,730 |
| Honduras | 2,000 |
| Jamaica | 330 |
| Mexico | 861 |
| Peru | 1,700 |
| United States | 86,837 |
Quakers can be found throughout Canada. Some of the largest concentrations are in Southern Ontario.
Friends in the United States have diverse worship styles and differences of theology, vocabulary, and practice.
A local congregation in the unprogrammed tradition is called a meeting, or a monthly meeting (e.g., Smalltown Meeting or Smalltown Monthly Meeting). The reference to "monthly" is because the meeting meets monthly to conduct the group's business. Most "monthly meetings" meet for worship at least once a week; some meetings have several worship meetings during the week. In programmed traditions, local congregations are often referred to as "Friends Churches."
Monthly meetings are often part of a regional group called a quarterly meeting, which is usually part of an even larger group called a yearly meeting; with the adjectives "quarterly" and "yearly" referring specifically to the frequency of meetings for worship with a concern for business.
Some yearly meetings belong to larger organizations to help maintain order and communication within the Society. The three chief ones are Friends General Conference (FGC), Friends United Meeting (FUM), and Evangelical Friends Church International (EFCI). In all three groups, most member organizations, though not necessarily members are from the United States. FGC is theologically the most liberal of the three groups, while EFCI is the most evangelical. FUM is the largest. Friends United Meeting was originally known as "Five Years Meeting." Some monthly meetings belong to more than one larger organization, while others are fully independent.
Read more about this topic: Religious Society Of Friends, National and International Divisions and Organization
Famous quotes containing the words north and, north, south and/or america:
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)