International Fellowship of Reconciliation

The International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) is an international faith-based nonviolent movement created shortly after the First World War, in 1919, to draw together national Fellowships of Reconciliation that had been founded during the war.

Origins in wartime

The first body to use the name "Fellowship of Reconciliation" was formed as a result of a pact made in August 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War by two Christians, Henry Hodgkin (an English Quaker) and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze (a German Lutheran), who were participating in a Christian pacifist conference in Konstanz, southern Germany (near Switzerland). On the platform of the railway station at Cologne, they pledged to each other that, "We are one in Christ and can never be at war".

To take that pledge forward, Hodgkin organised a conference in Cambridge in 1915 and founded the "Fellowship of Reconciliation". In this Cambridge conference have been set out the principles that had led them to do so in a statement which became known as "The Basis". It states:

• That love as revealed and interpreted in the life and death of Jesus Christ, involves more than we have yet seen, that is the only power by which evil can be overcome and the only sufficient basis of human society.
• That, in order to establish a world-order based on Love, it is incumbent upon those who believe in this principle to accept it fully, both for themselves and in relation to others and to......
...

Read More