What is the NFF?

The New Foundation Fellowship (NFF), a loose association of Friends and others, is dedicated to reproclaiming the message of George Fox and the early Friends, through Fox study and discussion groups, by speaking opportunities as way opens, and by various publishing projects.

This work was begun by Lewis Benson, widely recognized as the leading Fox scholar of the 20th Century. But Benson was far more than a scholar unearthing a long forgotten body of knowledge. The message proclaimed by George Fox and the early Quakers was a living reality for him. For Quakers, this message was their heritage and his call was to reclaim their forgotten and discarded inheritance. For non-Quakers, this message was a call to return to the foundation of those first Christians.

Benson labored at this task, beginning in the 1930s, and continued for many decades, seeing few results. Then, in the 1970s, Quakers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. began to respond to his message about who Christ is and how he saves his people by teaching them and empowering them to accomplish the Father’s will.

Pointing his hearers to George Fox’s original message and experience, Benson spent the rest of his life explaining Fox’s message, traveling in the ministry, and exhorting people to return to their Teacher.

George Fox, commonly thought of as the founder of Quakerism, was born in July, 1624, at Drayton in the Clay, in Leicestershire. Fox, however, denied that he or any other human being had founded the Quaker movement that swept England starting in about 1652. Lewis Benson stated: “By the end of George Fox's life one in every hundred Englishmen had become convinced of the truth of the message that he and the first Quakers missioners had been preaching.”

The battle cry of the early Friends was “Christ has come to teach his people himself.” In 1675 Fox wrote,

“And so every one of you that has received Christ Jesus the Lord over all, in him (who is your Lord) walk,...and there all the living can praise God together; and the living gather in the name of Jesus, the name of him who was dead, and is alive again, and lives for evermore, who is the first and last. And here you all know, that there is no salvation in any other name under the whole heaven, but in the name of Jesus; who is a priest made higher than the heavens. So in his name keep your meetings, in whom you have salvation; and these are the true meetings, and true gatherings, who feel Jesus Christ in the midst of them, their prophet, their counsellor, their leader, their light and life, their way and their truth, their shepherd, that laid down his life for them, that has bought you, his sheep, who feeds you in his pastures of life; and your heavenly bishop, to oversee you, that you do not go astray again from God.” (The Works of George Fox Vol. 8, pp. 77-78)

This was the gospel which, with all its radical implications, confronted the denominations of that day with the choice between listening to their Teacher or continuing their usual religious practices. The choice is the same today.

To learn more about New Foundation Fellowship visit www.NFFQuaker.org

If you would like to be involved in our work, go to our Contact page and send us a message.