Friends Service Council (FSC) was the standing committee based in the United Kingdom (UK) and in Ireland that, until 1978, supervised the international work of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) Together with its sister organization, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the FSC received the 1947 Nobel Prize for peace on behalf of Quakers worldwide, for their humanitarian work.
The FSC was founded in 1927, through the merger of the Friends Foreign Mission Association (FFMA) and the Friends Council for International Service. Its main areas of activity were missionary work, including setting up schools and hospitals, promoting international peace and understanding, and providing relief for the needy.
The Quakers first came into being in the 1650’s. The first committee to organize missions outside what is now the United Kingdom was set up in the mid-1800’s. In the late 1840’s, the Quakers helped organize famine relief in Ireland. In 1868, the Friends Foreign Mission Association was formally set up in the United Kingdom to coordinate the missionary work that was already going on in India and Madagascar. Over the next 50 years–to the end of World War I (1914-1918)–the FFMA extended its overseas missionary work to western China, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Syria, and the Indian Ocean island of Pemba.
In 1870, the year of the Franco-Prussian War, the Quakers set up their first Friends War Victims Relief Committee. Wearing their now familiar badge, the black-and-red star, for the first time, Quaker relief workers brought aid to towns and villages destroyed in the war. Other war victims relief committees were set up to bring aid to war victims in eastern Europe in 1876, in the Balkans in 1912, and in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia during World War I and up to 1923. From 1933 to 1948, various relief committees, including the Friends Committee for Refugees and Aliens and yet another Friends War Victims Relief Committee, carried out relief work in various war-affected countries. An unofficial Quaker ambulance service operated during World War II (1939-1945).
In 1910, the FFMA opened its first international institute in Chongqing, China. This event inspired the British Quaker leader Carl Heath to write a book in 1917 entitled Quaker Embassies. It called for setting up places throughout the world where people could meet in an atmosphere of friendliness, settle their differences, and learn to understand one another. Heath’s idea was born directly out of the Quakers’ personal belief that love can “take away the occasion for all wars.” Heath’s work led to the 1918 Quaker Outposts Conference, which set up the Friends Council for International Service (FCIS). This British committee of Quakers, working with AFSC, brought into being the first International Quaker Centers.
In 1978, the Friends Service Council and the Friends Peace and International Relations Committee merged to form Quaker Peace and Service as the international department of the Religious Society of Friends in the United Kingdom. A similar organization, Irish Quaker Faith in Action, operates in Ireland.
