The Fellowship (Christian Organization) - History

History

Fellowship Foundation was incorporated by Abraham Vereide in Chicago in 1942 as Fellowship Foundation, Inc. and also acquired the names International Christian Leadership (ICL), Fellowship House, and International Foundation as venues of global outreach ministry expanded. The Fellowship Foundation, Inc. does most of its business as the International Foundation, which is its DBA name.

The Fellowship was founded in 1935 in opposition to FDR's New Deal. Fellowship Foundation traces its roots to its founder, Abraham Vereide, a Methodist clergyman and social innovator, and a month of prayer meetings he convened in 1934 in San Francisco. Vereide was a Norwegian immigrant who founded Goodwill Industries in Seattle in 1916 to assist the city's unemployed Scandinavian immigrant population. Goodwill Industries soon occupied a city block, where they repaired and processed discarded clothing and furniture and converted "waste to wages". His work spread down the West coast and eventually to Boston.

In April 1935, Vereide and Major J.F. Douglas invited 19 business and civic leaders for a breakfast prayer meeting. By 1937, 209 prayer breakfast groups had been organized throughout Seattle.

By 1936, Vereide had already made his first entry into the White House.

In 1940, 300 men from all over the state of Washington attended a prayer breakfast for the new governor, Arthur Langlie. Vereide traveled throughout the Pacific Northwest, and later around the country, to develop similar groups. The non-denominational groups were meant to informally bring together civic and business leaders to share vision, study the Bible and develop relationships of trust and support.

By 1942 there were 60 breakfast groups in major cities around the country and Canada, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington and Vancouver. That same year, Vereide began to hold small prayer breakfasts for members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, meetings of informal fellowship, mutual prayer and encouragement. Vereide began publishing a monthly newsletter called The Breakfast Luncheon Fireside and Campus Groups that contained a Bible study that could be used by the groups, as well as information about activities of different groups and international meetings. He also published a newsletter through the years under various names, including The Breakfast Groups Informer (ca. 1945–46), The Breakfast Groups (ca. 1944–53), International Christian Leadership Bulletin (ca. 1953–54), Bulletin of International Christian Leadership (ca. 1954–56), Christian Leadership (ca. 1957–61), ICLeadership Letter (1961–66), International Leadership Letter (ca. 1967), and Leadership Letter (ca. 1963–70).

In 1942, the Fellowship was incorporated in Chicago, Illinois forming Vereide's center of national outreach to businessmen and civic and clergy leadership. Vereide had moved the group's offices from Seattle to the more centralized location of Chicago, headquarters of the businessmen's luncheon outreach "Christian Businessmen's Committee", which Vereide led with industrialist C.B. Hedstrom. That same year the Fellowship Foundation established a delegation ministry on Massachusetts Avenue at Sheridan Circle named "Fellowship House". Vereide later described it as the nerve center of the breakfast groups.

In 1944, Vereide held his first joint Senate-House prayer breakfast meeting. He held another breakfast on June 16, 1946, attended by Senators H. Alexander Smith and Lister Hill, and US News and World Report publisher David Lawrence.

In 1946, Vereide wrote and released a book with Reverend John G. Magee, chaplain to President Harry Truman entitled Together(Abingdon Cokesbury). In the book, Vereide explained his philosophy of visionary discipleship and gathering together in what he termed spiritual cells:

Man craves fellowship. Most of us want an opportunity to make our feelings known, to relate our personal experiences, to compare notes with others, and, in unity of spirit to receive renewal, inspiration, guidance, and strength from God. Such groups as we are thinking of have characterized every spiritual awakening. Jesus began with Peter and James and John. He had the twelve and the Seventy. At Bethany he established a cell... there you have the formula... faith embodied the same close informal fellowship... one common practice — gathering together in the name of Jesus.

In January 1947, a conference in Zurich led to the formation of the International Council for Christian Leadership (ICCL), an umbrella group for the national fellowship groups in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Hungary, Egypt and China. ICCL was incorporated as a separate organization in 1953. ICL and ICCL were governed by different boards of directors, joined by a coordinating committee: four members of ICCL's board and four from the ICL's executive committee.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower attended the Senate Prayer Breakfast Group. He was invited by fellow Kansan Frank Carlson. By that time, Vereide’s congressional core members also included Senators Frank Carlson, Karl Mundt, Everett Dirksen and Strom Thurmond.

By 1957, ICL had established 125 groups in 100 cities, with 16 groups in Washington, D.C. alone. It had set up another 125 groups in other countries. During 1958, a new small group mentor from The Navigators, Douglas Coe, joined Vereide as assistant executive director of ICL in Washington, D.C.

After over 35 years of leading the Fellowship Foundation, Vereide passed away in 1969 and was succeeded by Richard C. Halverson as executive director. Halverson and Coe worked side by side until Halverson's death in 1995.

In 1972, according to the Fellowship archives, after consultations among leaders in the prayer breakfast movement (including Douglas Coe, Richard Halverson, Dr. Wallace Haines and Senator Mark Hatfield and others) the organization was reprofiled to be "even more low key". The Fellowship archives reveal that, "in effect, the group adopted an even lower profile, serving as a channel of communication and a catalyst" of global outreach in the spirit of Jesus. The goal was to be less institutional in bearing and more relational and relevant to the global cultures, so that each geographic area had its own identity of personal ministry, not strictly metropolitan but relevant to ranchers, miners, people in jungles, deserts, villages and on remote islands. That they might experience fellowship in Christ in their own sphere of human identification.

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