About Us

      Providence Meeting has three locations. The largest 0f these is located at 99 Morris Avenue on the East Side of Providence. Somewhat smaller, the Saylesville group meets in the 1704 meeting house in the Saylesville section of Lincoln. The Conanicut Worship Group meets during the summer in the 1787 meeting house in Jamestown and during the winter at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown. These three sites vary in size, style, and location but together constitute the Providence Monthly Meeting of Friends. Meeting for worship occurs every Sunday throughout the year.

     We are called a Monthly Meeting because we hold our business sessions once a month, whereas Meeting for Worship occurs weekly throughout the year. We are part of the larger body of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (NEYM), which holds annual sessions for five days once a year, usually during the first week of August. Monthly Meeting and Yearly Meeting are open to all and are conducted with the aim to reach “unity of the Spirit” on all points.

     We meet for worship every Sunday at 10:00 am (Providence) or 10:30 am (Conanicut & Saylesville). See individual Meeting pages for more details.

A Little Local History

     The history of The Religious Society of Friends in Rhode Island began during the summer of 1657, when the ship Woodhouse arrived in Newport, to the considerable alarm of the local authorities. While the Quakers (originally an insulting term for Friends) were not welcomed in Rhode Island, they did not face the arrests, imprisonment, whippings, and hangings that occurred in neighboring Massachusetts. Over the next few years Friends slowly established themselves and by 1672 there were sufficient Friends in the area to warrant a visit by George Fox, a founder of Quakerism, and the establishment of New England Yearly Meeting.

     By 1699 Friends Meetings were established in Newport, Narragansett, and East Greenwich, and subsidiary Meetings began to spread up the Bay. In 1718 Providence Monthly Meeting was established as a Meeting in its own right, and soon a meeting house was erected on what is now Meeting Street in Providence. The meeting house burned in 1758, and a new meeting house was built on North Main Street. In 1953 the Meeting moved to its current location adjacent to Moses Brown School.

     Friends prospered in colonial Rhode Island and came to be influential in commercial and governing circles. The preponderance of Friends in the legislature markedly slowed Rhode Island's participation in the Revolutionary War. Friends, many of whom were merchants, suffered greatly during the war, since many felt they could not, as part of their testimony of nonviolence, participate in the war and were therefore heavily penalized. Families were split by conflicting loyalties and convictions and some members left or were read out of Meetings. Over the next century Friends underwent a number of theological and doctrinal controversies and splits. While these are still to some extent present, Friends worldwide are now generally a cohesive group.