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:
“How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is last year’s snow to me,
Last year’s anything? The tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set—”
—Countee Cullen (1903–1946)
“No one has ever seen a Republican mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)