Most of the editions of this column have highlighted individuals' contributions to active nonviolence, although I have tried to set those individuals in the web of overlapping contexts in which they functioned. But nonviolence did not develop out of the contributions of discrete individuals -- it grew from diverse and intersecting movements for justice and peacemaking. So, the next few columns in this series will focus not on individuals, but organizations and movements: religious movements and churches, grassroots organizations, voluntary associations, think-tanks and research foundations, professional organizations, denominational peace fellowships and renewal groups, and more.

I begin with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and its national FORs, an organization that began as the first modern organization of ecumenical Christian pacifism and broadened until it is the oldest interfaith pacifist organization in continuous existence.¹

Throughout the 19th Century, peace organizations were growing in Europe and North America, many drawing on specific Christian sources. As the world moved toward the first World War in 1914, Christians throughout Europe and North America were alarmed and moved (though too late) to stop the war. An ecumenical conference was held in Switzerland to brainstorm ways to stop the move toward war, but the war broke out before the conference was even over and delegates had to hurry to return to their own countries. At a train station in Germany, two friends vowed not to let the war divide them since they were united in Christ and to continue to work for peace among the nations. One of those two men was Dr. Henry Hodgkin, a British Quaker. The other was Rev. Friedrich Siegmund-Schultz, a German Lutheran pacifist who happened also to be the chaplain to the German Kaiser.

When Hodgkin returned to England, he made good on his promise to Siegmund-Schulze by calling together an ecumenical group of Christians at Cambridge who pledged themselves to pacifism: to refuse to take up arms or endorse or support such, and to work for peace as a central part of their vocation as Christian disciples. That meeting was the birth of the British branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the oldest national branch. The next year (1915), a similar conference founded the U.S. branch of the FOR It took longer on the continent of Europe where the fighting was fiercest, but by 1917, Siegmund-Schultz had managed to found Versöhnungsbund, the German FOR² A branch was established in France in 1923 and the International FOR was founded in the same year. Its current international headquarters is in Alkmaar, the Netherlands. Today, IFOR has branches, sister groups, and affiliates in over 40 different countries on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

It was after World War II and the revelation of the Holocaust of the Jews that the U.S. FOR became the first branch to broaden its membership basis from explicitly Christian (though ecumenical) to interfaith. The U.S. FOR helped to create the Jewish Peace Fellowship as it had previously created or affiliated with peace fellowships of several Christian denominations. Soon IFOR also broadened its basis to an interfaith one. The Muslim Peace Fellowship and Buddhist Peace Fellowship, several Gandhian organizations, and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists all contribute to the interfaith nature of IFOR. However, several national branches remain exclusively Christian, especially in Europe. This is true of the U.K.'s FOR which has several times rejected broadening out to an interfaith organization, preferring to partner with non-Christian peace groups for common projects. This probably reflects the greater secularization in Britain and Europe with the greater loss of numbers of committed Christians. Christian pacifists, especially from groups that are not part of the "historic peace churches" are few enough to not want to risk losing the one specifically Christian pacifist organization they have.

The global history of IFOR has been remarkable and I can only highlight a few examples of its work, here. During World War II, a number of those few "righteous Gentiles" who worked to rescue Jews from the Nazis had connections to IFOR. For instance, the most famous of such rescues was the hiding of 2,000 Jews from the Nazis in the small village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in Vichy-controlled France. The Protestant (French Reformed) pastor of the village was Andre Trocme. Together with his wife, Magda, Trocme was a pacifist and a member of the FOR and he led the movement to give the Jews shelter.

Even before there was an FOR branch in South Africa or India, FOR members were interacting with Mohandas K. Gandhi and the movements he started. They first gave Gandhi a sympathetic Western audience and helped create a global context that would support Gandhi's nonviolent Satyagraha. FOR members worked to create nonviolent movements in Africa and Latin America. The Argentinean sculptor and artist, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, an FOR member, created SERPAJ (Servicio Paz y Justicia -- Service for Peace and Justice) and traveled throughout Latin America creating and linking nonviolent movements for justice. The various SERPAJ branches are considered a "sister network" to IFOR, today. IFOR trainers in nonviolence helped prepare the Filipino activists for their nonviolent revolution. They were also responsible for the training of many of the key activists in Eastern Europe who led nonviolent revolutions from 1989-1991.

In the rest of this article, I will highlight major accomplishments of the U.S. FOR, the branch that I know best. A thorough history of IFOR with attention to the work of all the branches needs to be written for us to understand the scope of its role in the development of nonviolence. Most of what follows comes directly from Deats' essay cited in footnote one, above:

• 1916-1917, the U.S. FOR helps to found the National Civil Liberties Bureau which becomes the American Civil Liberties Union. They fight to protect and support conscientious objectors to war and military service and help to gain legal recognition for conscientious objection. Many of the FOR members do time in prison or in civilian work camps for conscientious objection.
• 1920s, helps to form the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Sends a delegation to the nationalist leader Sandino (after whom the later Sandanistas will be named) in Nicaragua, supporting his aims but urging nonviolent methods.
• 1930s, supports the labor movement and works to keep it nonviolent while learning more about the active nature of nonviolence from labor struggles. IFOR creates Ambassadors of Reconciliation to visit world leaders and urge specific actions for peace. The most famous of these was IFOR "Traveling Secretary" Muriel Lester. (See my previous column on Lester, here).
• 1940s, while European members of IFOR were rescuing Jews and engaging in nonviolent resistance to the Nazis, U.S. FOR members were leading the fight against the internment of Japanese Americans. The continued support for conscientious objectors and, along with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) which had grown out of the FOR, sponsored the first "Freedom Ride" to test the desegregation of interstate travel. Also organized a long campaign to keep the Pentagon from extending wartime conscription into universal military training.
• 1950s, in addition to sending staff member Glenn Smiley and former staff member Bayard Rustin (by then Rustin worked for the War Resisters' League) to help advise Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (King soon joined the FOR and Corretta Scott King remains a faithful member), the FOR sponsored a Food for China program to combat famine in China, whose recent Communist revolution (1949) made it an enemy the U.S. government had no wish to help. The FOR also helped to form the American Committee on Africa to support African independence movements.
• 1960s, was a major force in the peace movement against the Vietnam War.
• 1980s, a major force behind the Nuclear Freeze campaign and the continued campaign for nuclear disarmament. Also worked to thaw relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. IFOR's training of nonviolent activists in the Philippines was noted above.
• 1990s-present: The FOR was a major voice against the first Gulf War with Iraq and, after the war, helped create the campaign to lift the economic sanctions that were killing the Iraqi people (but not hurting their target, Saddam Hussein). The Iraq Pledge of Resistance campaign and Iraq Pledge of Peace campaigns to stop Gulf War II were also FOR projects. The FOR, along with IFOR, worked to help victims of the civil war that broke up the former Yugoslavia. The Bosnian Student Campaign was an FOR campaign to bring Bosnian students out of the war zone and into U.S. homes. They also had programs in Kosovo during and after the war. The FOR continues campaigns in Israel-Palestine and Colombia. It helped close the Naval base in Vieques, Puerto Rico and is continuing to work to close the U.S. military base in Panama. The FOR is one of the founding organizations of the campaign to close the School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation) in Ft. Benning, GA which trains authoritarian governments in Central America in torture and terrorist counter-insurgency techniques.

One of the strengths revealed in this quick survey of the history of the IFOR is its skill in creating organizations with smaller focus and in forming a network of support for various peace campaigns and nonviolent struggles for justice. Few organizations succeed in making a just peace on their own. The FOR has linked many other organizations and movements. Its members, famous and unknown, have usually also belonged to other organizations working on specific projects. Another strength has been the FOR's spiritual basis: Starting with specific Christian commitment, it reached out to other faith groups and found common ground. The practice of nonviolence requires spiritual discipline and faith, but the FOR's members have discovered that such spiritual discipline and faith can be met in more than one faith-tradition. They have reached out to others without advocating a "lowest common denominator" religiosity. Most FOR members and staff are, rather, deeply committed to their own faith traditions -- even while open to insights from others.

We at Every Church a Peace Church, with our mission focused on reclaiming the nonviolent Christ for all churches (rather than the nonexistent Christ that permits violence and war), should not become interfaith because it would dilute our efforts to renew the Christian witness of the churches. But we still need the largeness of spirit of IFOR which allows us to join forces with those of other faiths or no particular faith for specific campaigns. We also need to learn how to foster such openness in the churches without diluting the strong Christocentric faith that will be needed for the recovery of Gospel Nonviolence. ECAPC and FOR's missions are not identical, but they overlap enough that we should become strong partners.

The last 100 years saw the explosive flowering of nonviolent direct action in struggles for justice and peace -- even in the midst of a century of unprecedented violence and war. IFOR was not directly responsible for all of those nonviolent movements, but it is amazing (but true!) that IFOR was involved in the very thick of most of those movements, both as an organization and through its individual members. That is a proud legacy and one that I hope IFOR continues to build upon in our troubled time. All of us peacemakers need IFOR to be strong and healthy.

To contact the U.S. FOR go to www.forusa.org and to contact IFOR go to www.ifor.org.

¹ There are several good sources for the history of IFOR and some of the national FORs, although a complete history of all the national branches has never been written. For more information on this amazing organization with which I have had the honor of being associated since I became a pacifist in 1982, see the following works: Lillian Stevenson, Towards a Christian International: The Story of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (London: IFOR, 1941), which needs updating and globalizing; Vera Brittain, The Rebel Passion (Nyack, NY: Fellowship Publications, 1964), on the early years of the U.S. FOR; Jill Wallis, Valiant for Peace: A History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1914 to 1989 (London: FOR, 1991) is an excellent history of the United Kingdom's FOR Church historian Paul DeKar is working on an updated history of the U.S. FOR In the meantime, read Richard Deats, "The Rebel Passion: Eighty-Five Years of the Fellowship of Reconciliation," in Peace is the Way: Writings on Nonviolence from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, ed. Walter Wink (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). Deats' essay is also found on-line at www.forusa.org/nonviolence/0900_63Deats.html.

² Siegmund-Schultze endured much persecution for his opposition to the Kaiser's war program. The German FOR grew during the aftermath of WWI, but dwindled again during the rise of Naziism, although Siegmund-Schultze remained true to his pacifism. He was eventually executed as a traitor by the Nazis for continuing to preach that Christians were to be pacifists and internationalists.

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