History of Illinois Yearly Meeting

1833–1875: Before the Yearly Meeting was Formed

The roots of Illinois Yearly Meeting may be traced to the 1830s, when Quaker farmers settled along Clear Creek, near what is now McNabb, Illinois. At that time, this was a frontier area, ceded to the U.S. by the Peoria Nation in 1818 and Kickapoo in 1819, but just outside the disputed region over which the U.S. had recently fought the Sauk and other nations in the Black Hawk War. European-American settlement of the McNabb area began in the 1820s, with the first Quakers arriving about 1833; most of them came from eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

A notable early member of the Clear Creek community was Benjamin Lundy. He had been touring the United States, speaking against slavery and publishing the abolitionist newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation since 1821. After fellow abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois in 1837, Lundy resolved to move to Illinois. His own belongings were destroyed by a mob in Philadelphia before he arrived at Clear Creek in 1838, joining his son and daughter who were already there. Unfortunately, he fell ill and died just a few months after arriving; his grave is in the Clear Creek Cemetery.

By 1841 the community had grown enough to request formal establishment of a monthly meeting. The nearest suitable meeting to receive the request was Honey Creek Monthly Meeting, located more than 150 miles to the southeast near Terre Haute, Indiana. Abel Mills describes the journey, made on horseback in midwinter by his father Joseph Mills:

Father started alone. He rode the horse “Dave,” one of the two that brother Henry drove to Illinois, a horse well built and with fine spirit. He moved in a canter under the saddle, which was not a hard gait on the rider. On the way, father fell into company with a stranger who was also on horseback. They arrived at the edge of an eight-mile prairie without a dwelling thereon. The day was very cold, which made it necessary for the travelers to ride lively. They passed over the eight miles in forty-five minutes. The stranger’s ears were frozen. Father was favored to continue his journey to the end in safety. He attended the meeting at which there was a committee appointed in accordance with the request sent, Father returning safely.

Honey Creek Monthly Meeting responded favorably to the request, forwarding it to Blue River Quarterly Meeting, which approved the establishment of Clear Creek Monthly Meeting in Eleventh Month 1841. Clear Creek Meeting thus became part of Blue River Quarterly Meeting and Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting (known at that time as Indiana Yearly Meeting, though not to be confused with the meeting that now bears that name).

Blue River Quarterly Meeting had itself been established in 1819 and originally consisted of meetings in southern Indiana. The addition of Clear Creek Meeting, far to the west of other monthly meetings, led it to serve as an anchor point and “parent meeting” for other Quaker settlements as these were formed across Illinois. All through the mid-19th century, Illinois meetings were added to Blue River Quarterly and Ohio Valley Yearly Meetings. Simultaneously, some of the older meetings in Indiana began to decline, and Blue River Quarterly gradually came to lie predominately in Illinois.

Further to the west, Quakers were also settling in Iowa. But with no suitable quarterly meeting nearby, and even Blue River Quarterly Meeting too far away to attend, they applied for establishment of monthly meetings to the quarterly meeting most of them had belonged to before coming to Iowa: Fairfax Quarterly Meeting of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. After Fairfax established two monthly meetings in Iowa, it became practical for Iowa Friends to have their own quarterly meeting, and Prairie Grove Quarterly Meeting was established as part of Baltimore Yearly Meeting in 1863.

The establishment of Prairie Grove Quarterly Meeting caused open friction between Ohio Valley and Baltimore Yearly Meetings. The usual practice to that point had been for new meetings on the western frontier to become part of the westernmost yearly meeting, which would have placed the Iowa meetings in Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting. Ohio Valley sent a letter of complaint to Baltimore, which responded with a report outlining the circumstances which had led to its action. The original minute establishing Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting had described it as “for the states of Indiana, Illinois, and the western part of Ohio,” a description repeated in Ohio Valley’s own discipline. Baltimore therefore regarded Iowa as outside Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting’s territory. Moreover, a pair of Baltimore Friends had attended two sessions of Blue River Quarterly Meeting, and found it in weak condition, and not open to the addition of new meetings in Iowa. Prairie Grove Quarterly Meeting thus continued as part of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, and added a third monthly meeting shortly afterwards.

The Iowa meetings were pioneers of activist Quakerism, thanks in part to the influence of Joseph and Ruth Dugdale. The Dugdales were potentially divisive figures—they had been leaders of the Progressive Friends movement and had played a central role in precipitating schisms in both Ohio Valley and Philadelphia Yearly Meetings, with Joseph serving as first clerk of the separatist Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting. But Friends in Prairie Grove Quarterly accepted them as members and ministers without apparent controversy. The Dugdales were charismatic opponents of the Quietism which had dominated Quakerism for decades; they were leaders in the movements for peace, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and Native American rights. It was probably due to their leadership that Prairie Grove Quarterly Meeting proposed to Baltimore Yearly Meeting in 1869 that women’s and men’s meetings for business have completely equal disciplinary authority—a proposal which was adopted the following year.

The location of Prairie Grove Quarterly Meeting nearly 800 miles from Baltimore presented an obvious obstacle to Friends who wanted to attend yearly meeting. Even in Blue River Quarterly Meeting, distance was a problem: Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting was held alternately at Richmond, Indiana and Waynesville, Ohio, both a long way from Clear Creek and the other Illinois meetings. Abel Mills describes his father’s early attempt to attend yearly meeting, traveling down the Illinois River to the Mississippi, down the Mississippi to the Ohio, up the Ohio to the Little Miami, and up the Little Miami to Waynesville:

The Ohio River was very low. His way was by Cincinnati. They were many times delayed by sandbars. Leaving Cincinnati, he went up the Little Miami bottom, I think, by stage. He reached Corwin, less than a mile from the meeting-house, with a steep hill to climb. He arrived as the last session of the Yearly Meeting closed. This experience was an exceeding trial to father. The delay on the boat was the cause. The round trip was six or seven hundred miles.

By the 1870s, with two quarterly meetings and multiple monthly meetings well established in Illinois and Iowa, it became practical to contemplate starting a new yearly meeting, to be held at a location close enough to make attendance more practical. Blue River and Prairie Grove Quarterly Meetings joined together in proposing such a meeting in 1873, to be called Illinois Yearly Meeting and held at Clear Creek. Ohio Valley and Baltimore Yearly Meetings both minuted their concurrence with the proposal in 1874. A large new meetinghouse was built about a mile and half east of the original Clear Creek meetinghouse, and Illinois Yearly Meeting held its opening session there the 13th of Ninth Month, 1875.

1875–1890: The New Yearly Meeting

At the time of its establishment, Illinois Yearly Meeting, like most Friends meetings, consisted of three separately sitting bodies: a men’s meeting for business, a women’s meeting for business, and a meeting of ministers and elders, which included both men and women. The men’s and women’s meetings met concurrently over a four-day period, on opposite sides of the meetinghouse; sliding dividers were shut to create separate rooms. Occasionally the dividers were opened for joint sessions when reports or other business required the attention of both sexes. The meeting for ministers and elders was held two days prior to the main sessions, with a public meeting for worship on the intervening day. Operations of the yearly meeting were initially guided by the discipline of Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting; Illinois Yearly Meeting adopted its own discipline in 1878.

Between sessions of the yearly meeting, any pressing business was handled by the Representative Committee, consisting of three men Friends and three women Friends appointed by each quarterly meeting, plus 21 Friends of each sex appointed directly by the yearly meeting.

Closely associated with the yearly meeting was the Illinois First Day School Association, which was established at the same time to coordinate religious education efforts. This was nominally an independent organization, but held its sessions in the yearly meeting house in conjunction with the yearly meeting, and published its minutes in the yearly meeting minute books.

Yearly meeting sessions were well-attended. In 1879, many more people were present than the meetinghouse could accommodate, even though there were reported to be enough seats for eight to nine hundred.

Indeed, Quakerism was growing all across the territory covered by Illinois Yearly Meeting. In Chicago, a group known as Central Meeting had been informally organized as early as 1864. After Illinois Yearly Meeting was established, they sought affiliation, and became part of Blue River Quarterly and Illinois Yearly Meeting in 1879.

Far to the west, Friends who had worked at the Santee Sioux reservation under President Grant’s “Quaker Policy” remained in Nebraska after their work was finished, settling near the town of Genoa and starting a meeting there. A second Nebraska meeting was later added at Lincoln. These joined together to form Nebraska Half-Yearly Meeting—the equivalent of a quarterly meeting—as part of Illinois Yearly Meeting in 1889.

Several additional meetings were added, and although there were a few closures as well, the initial period of Illinois Yearly Meeting’s existence was one which Friends would later look back on as vibrant. The yearly meeting now covered an enormous area stretching from Salem, Indiana in the southeast to Genoa, Nebraska in the northwest: a distance of 645 miles.

The prevailing religious stance in Illinois Yearly Meeting during this period appears to have been a simple, undoctrinaire Christianity, with a heavy emphasis on “practical righteousness”—doing good in the world. A statement published with the 1885 minutes typifies this attitude: “We have no doctrinal creed; our religion is simple and practical, based upon love to God, which is evinced by loving all of our fellow beings.”

Efforts to improve society were a central concern of the yearly meeting, and the importance of coordinating such work was stressed especially by Jonathan Plummer, who served as clerk of the men’s meeting through its first nine years. Following Plummer’s suggestion in 1878, Illinois Yearly Meeting invited the other six Hicksite yearly meetings to hold a “general conference” at least once every five years, in order to “co-operate in labor, and increase our influence upon the various questions involving our testimonies.” A preliminary meeting was held in 1881, and the conference was formally organized the following year as the Friends Union for Philanthropic Labor. This organization formed the nucleus for the more broadly focused Friends General Conference established in 1900—now one of the main umbrella organizations for North American Quakerism.

A major improvement to the yearly meeting campus was made in 1885, with the construction of a dining hall. By serving meals on site, the yearly meeting could more practically hold morning and afternoon sessions on the same day.

In 1887, a significant change in practice was adopted: the men’s and women’s business meetings were combined, and all business was conducted in joint session from that point forward. For the next 41 years, the combined meeting regularly appointed a man as clerk and a woman as assistant clerk, until Luella Flitcraft was appointed as first female clerk of the joint meeting in 1928.

1891–1941: Modernization and Numerical Decline

As Illinois Yearly Meeting approached the 20th century, it was looking toward continued growth and expansion. A committee was appointed in 1896 to explore the possibility of starting new Quaker settlements in the far west. Over the course of three years, the committee visited and reported on several sites in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, New Mexico, and west Texas. But far from expanding, the yearly meeting was actually entering a long period of contraction and loss of numerical strength.

Several of Illinois Yearly Meeting’s smaller meetings fell inactive in the 1890s as their participants aged or moved away. The pace of closures accelerated, and soon, even previously large and robust meetings were closing in quick succession. Nebraska Half-Yearly was laid down in 1912, and by 1930, all the meetings in Prairie Grove Quarterly were inactive. Blue River Quarterly survived, but in severely reduced form. Illinois Yearly Meeting now consisted for practical purposes of just three meetings: Clear Creek Meeting near McNabb, Central Meeting in Chicago, and Highland Creek Meeting near Salem, Indiana—and Highland Creek was holding meetings for worship only irregularly. In the 1890s, the yearly meeting had peaked at more than 1200 members, and its constituent meetings reported an average combined weekly attendance reaching over 500. The reports for 1927 and 1928 show a membership of 490 and an average combined weekly attendance of just 38 people for the entire yearly meeting.

Several new meetings were organized in cities and college towns in the region during this era: in Madison, Wisconsin; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; and Saint Louis, Missouri. However, these meetings were initially established on an independent basis, rather than in affiliation with Illinois Yearly Meeting. They all later affiliated, but had substantial histories as independent meetings before they did so.

In the Hyde Park neighborhood near the University of Chicago campus, a group of Friends who were affiliated with Western Yearly Meeting began meeting for worship about 1921. This group showed special interest in reconciliation among the divided branches of the Religious Society of Friends, and invited Central Meeting to join with them in forming a new monthly meeting. Central Meeting accepted the invitation, and the two groups merged together as Fifty-Seventh Street Monthly Meeting in 1931. Fifty-Seventh Street Meeting affiliated simultaneously with Illinois Yearly Meeting and with Western Yearly Meeting—one of the first dually affiliated meetings anywhere.

Central Meeting had traditionally hosted one of the four annual sessions of Blue River Quarterly Meeting. Fifty-Seventh Street Meeting now took on this responsibility—and was also responsible for hosting one of the four sessions of Chicago Quarterly Meeting of Western Yearly Meeting. This dual responsibility presented an opportunity for further reconciliation, and in 1939, the two quarterly meetings began holding one session per year together.

The first several decades of the twentieth century were a time not just of reconciliation among Friends, but also of changes and modernization in Quaker practice, and Illinois Yearly Meeting was no exception. At the turn of the century, meeting discipline—though markedly relaxed compared to a hundred years earlier—still called for the appointment of overseers whose responsibility was to initiate disownment proceedings against Friends who were guilty of unrepentant immorality or rule violations. Regular queries, to which meetings were expected to provide written answers, included questions about how members dressed, and whether their personal finances were in order. Meetinghouses included a ministers’ gallery, and meetings officially recognized specific individuals as ministers or elders. “Plain speech,” using the pronoun thee and its related forms, was still widely used. All this disappeared over the course of a few decades.

During this period, Illinois Yearly Meeting found its 1878 book of discipline to be increasingly outdated. ILYM joined with the other six yearly meetings then constituting Friends General Conference (FGC) to produce a uniform book of discipline, which it adopted in 1927. By this time, it had become unusual for meetings in ILYM to record a Friend as a minister. Adoption of the FGC uniform discipline brought an official end to the recording of ministers and elders, and replaced the ministers and elders meetings at all levels with ministry and counsel committees. The facing benches in the yearly meeting house were taken down, and the risers covered over with a platform in 1930. The role of overseers was reconceptualized to coordinating pastoral care. Disownments— already rare by the turn of the century—virtually ceased.

Illinois Yearly Meeting dropped its expectation of written query responses in 1928, moving entirely to unminuted oral responses instead. In 1936, consideration of queries during the ILYM business sessions was discontinued entirely. However, the new discipline had replaced the old queries for the ministers and elders meetings with free-form reports from the ministry and counsel committees. These reports came to function as general State of Society Reports, and effectively replaced the old queries as the yearly meeting’s primary method for receiving information about the condition of its constituent meetings.

In 1906, the yearly meeting established a committee “for the advancement of Friends principles”—understood primarily as promoting vitality and life in ILYM constituent meetings. In 1912, the opportunity presented itself of hiring a “field secretary” jointly with Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting, for the purpose of “holding conferences, starting study circles and awakening interest among the younger people in the mission of their society.” The field secretary position later received extensive support and involvement from Friends General Conference in addition to the two yearly meetings. Illinois Yearly Meeting discontinued its field secretary program in 1950, but revived it in 1991. Since then, the position of field secretary has been an ILYM-internal position.

In 1919–1920 the Representative Committee (corresponding to our current Continuing Committee) was renamed the Executive Committee, and was reorganized so that all of its members were appointed directly by the yearly meeting, rather than some by the yearly and some by the quarterly meetings as before. The requirement that it include equal numbers of both sexes was dropped at that time. In 1923, the yearly meeting began appointing a “minute clerk”—what we now call a recording clerk. Previously, the recording of minutes had been the responsibility of the presiding clerk.

This era also saw changes in the way religious education was handled, and in the children’s activities at the yearly meeting sessions. The Illinois First Day School Association laid itself down in 1917; its responsibilities passed to the First Day School Committee of the yearly meeting, which later evolved to the current Children’s Religious Education Committee. There was a modest children’s program at the annual sessions starting in 1888; by 1927 there was a full-scale “Junior Yearly Meeting” with clerks, minutes, and epistles.

1942–1975: Re-expansion and Reconfiguration

A most dramatic event occurred when requests were heard [in late 1942] from two meetings to affiliate with Blue River Quarterly and Illinois Yearly Meetings. These requests from Peoria and Oak Park literally overwhelmed Friends. Expressions of pleasure and appreciation were followed by a long and deep silence, then comments took a humorous turn and someone said “We have just witnessed the birth of twins in the Society, and an even greater miracle, the twins were born more than a hundred miles apart.”

ILYM Advancement Committee Report, 1943

The addition of Peoria and Oak Park Meetings to Illinois Yearly Meeting marked the end of ILYM’s long period of numerical decline, and the beginning of a new era of expansion and rejuvenation. In the space of a few years, Illinois Yearly Meeting returned from the brink of extinction to become a large and robust organization, as new meetings were formed and existing independent meetings sought affiliation. By 1975, ILYM was sizeable enough that a portion of it was set off as a new, separate yearly meeting.

The previously independent monthly meetings in Madison, St. Louis, and Urbana-Champaign affiliated with Illinois Yearly Meeting in the mid-1940s to early 1950s. Monthly meetings were also established in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Downers Grove; and preparative meetings at several additional locations.

It soon became practical to have two quarterly meetings again, and in 1952, the northern part of the yearly meeting was organized into Fox Valley Quarterly Meeting, with the southern part remaining as Blue River Quarterly Meeting. Fox Valley Quarterly included Fifty-Seventh Street Meeting, and therefore took over Blue River Quarterly’s previous pattern of holding one session each year jointly with Chicago Quarterly Meeting of Western Yearly Meeting; this increased to two sessions in 1956.

As yearly meeting sessions became more heavily attended, the facilities required updating. In 1949, a basement was excavated under the west side of the meetinghouse for a new kitchen and dining room. The old dining hall was converted to dormitory and educational space as the “Junior Yearly Meeting House.”

Traditionally, members of Clear Creek Meeting had provided accommodation in their own homes for almost all Friends attending the yearly meeting sessions; but this became impractical, and many Friends began to camp on the yearly meeting grounds, or sleep in cots in the meetinghouse. It was clear that the existing facilities were inadequate, and Illinois Yearly Meeting moved its 1958 and 1959 sessions to Camp Wakanda, near Middleton, Wisconsin. In 1960 a dormitory was built next to the meetinghouse, allowing the yearly meeting to return to the McNabb campus. A lot across the road from the meetinghouse was purchased for use as a campground in 1969, and a showerhouse erected in 1975.

In 1960, the ILYM meetings in Wisconsin and Minnesota were organized into Northern Half-Yearly Meeting, the equivalent of a quarterly meeting. This left Fox Valley Quarterly as consisting just of dually affiliated meetings. Fox Valley Quarterly began to hold all of its sessions jointly with Chicago Quarterly Meeting of Western Yearly Meeting; a single set of officers served both quarterly meetings.

In 1962, Lake Forest Monthly Meeting, which had been organized ten years earlier as an independent meeting, requested affiliation with Illinois Yearly Meeting on the condition that it not be required to join either Chicago-area quarterly meeting until such time as they were to unite. Although the two quarterlies were meeting jointly, they had not formally merged; so Lake Forest was accorded direct affiliation with ILYM—the first monthly meeting to affiliate with the yearly meeting without belonging to one of its quarterly meetings.

The two quarterly meetings did finally combine to form Metropolitan Chicago General Meeting (MCGM) in 1970. But since MCGM included meetings which were not affiliated with both Illinois Yearly Meeting and Western Yearly Meeting, it did not fully function as a quarterly meeting of either yearly meeting. Rather, it met “for sharing, worship and concerns, with a de-emphasizing of business, except as the business of Friends is their concern with the social health of the World.” MCGM was laid down in 2013.

The Viet Nam era saw a flurry of new meetings: Decatur, Columbia, Northside, Springfield, DeKalb, Friends Hill, Thorn Creek, and Oshkosh Monthly Meetings, as well as numerous smaller preparative or allowed meetings. Evanston Monthly Meeting, which had been in existence since 1936 as part of Western Yearly Meeting, joined Illinois Yearly Meeting as a dual affiliate in 1972.

Northern Half-Yearly Meeting now included a large number of meetings across a broad region. Many of them were small and distant from the McNabb campus where Illinois Yearly Meeting held its sessions. Twin Cities Meeting in Minneapolis withdrew from ILYM in 1971 in order to pursue the idea of organizing a new yearly meeting to serve the Wisconsin-Minnesota area. This idea gained the support of other meetings; and in 1975, with the cooperation of ILYM, Northern Half-Yearly Meeting separated and reorganized itself as Northern Yearly Meeting.

All through the period of 1942–1975, much of the yearly meeting’s attention was taken up with responding to war. During World War II, the yearly meeting maintained a Civilian Public Service Committee, to support Friends engaged in alternative service. During the Viet Nam war, Illinois Yearly Meeting made a point of sending humanitarian supplies to all sides in the conflict, and many of its local meetings provided draft counseling and engaged in public protest. Many ILYM Friends were also involved in the Civil Rights Movement during this period, and in efforts to oppose racism more generally. The final years of this era were also marked by greater awareness of, and sensitivity to, issues pertaining to sexuality and gender identity. Workshops on sexual roles, mores and relationships were held at the annual sessions in 1970 and 1971, setting a process into motion which resulted in a 1974 ILYM minute opposing discrimination against homosexuals; stating that relationships should be judged on the degree to which they contribute to the growth of love, rather than on the basis of conventionality; and calling on Friends to examine their assumptions about sexuality.

This period also marked another change in Illinois Yearly Meeting’s book of discipline, or Faith and Practice, as such books were increasingly titled. After the 1927 FGC uniform discipline went out of print, ILYM adopted the 1955 edition of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice as a “temporary measure.” This “temporary measure” of using Philadelphia’s Faith and Practice turned out to last for more than 60 years.

In 1965, a major reorganization of the yearly meeting was adopted and outlined in the first ILYM Handbook. The Executive Committee was replaced by the Continuing Committee, with members appointed by the monthly meetings rather than the yearly meeting, together with the clerks of standing committees, and the clerk of the yearly meeting.

A trend which had begun earlier, but noticeably accelerated in this period, was a reduction in the role of quarterly meetings. Traditionally, these had formed a systematic intervening level between the monthly meetings and the yearly meeting; but over time, most of the functions of quarterly meetings were taken over either by the yearly meeting or by the monthly meetings. When Northern Half-Yearly Meeting separated from Illinois Yearly Meeting to become Northern Yearly Meeting in 1975, Blue River Quarterly Meeting was left as the only quarterly meeting in Illinois Yearly Meeting.

1976–2019: Recent Developments

From 1976 until the time of this writing, the size and geographic extent of Illinois Yearly Meeting remained roughly the same, but its component meetings experienced varying degrees of growth and contraction. New meetings affiliated, while others disaffiliated or were laid down. Monthly meetings added in this period include three in Illinois: Southern Illinois Meeting in Carbondale, Bloomington-Normal Meeting, and Fox Valley Meeting in McHenry County; and two in Indiana: Duneland Meeting in Valparaiso and South Bend Meeting. Several monthly meetings were laid down: Springfield, Decatur, Thorn Creek, and DeKalb—though Springfield Meeting continues as a worship group under the care of Urbana-Champaign. All through this period new worship groups and preparative meetings were formed. Many of these were short-lived, but several remain as valued parts of Illinois Yearly Meeting. Especially during the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for worship groups to participate in the life of ILYM without formally affiliating.

Issues of reproduction, sexuality and gender were a recurrent concern throughout this period. Friends labored for several years over the question of abortion before uniting on a minute supporting abortion rights in 1992. A 1980 proposal to send an official ILYM representative to Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns (FLGC, now FLGBTQC) was approved in 1992. In 1995, a minute from FLGC urged meeting support for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Illinois Yearly Meeting did not come to unity on this issue, but Friends Hill Monthly Meeting was uncomfortable with the degree of support for same-sex marriage in the yearly meeting, as evidenced in part by the fact that several monthly meetings in ILYM had previously taken same-sex marriages under their care. Friends Hill withdrew from ILYM in 1997, citing that issue and a perceived anti-Christian attitude among ILYM Friends as reasons.

Several changes in ILYM’s committees and organizational structure took place during this period. In 1982, the Advancement Committee and the Ministry and Counsel Committee were merged to form the Ministry and Advancement Committee. The Handbook Committee was set up in 1983, and the Youth Oversight Committee in 1984. An ad hoc Environmental Concerns Committee was set up in 1987; it was made a standing committee three years later. The Peace Resources Committee was established in 2002, along with the Development Committee.

In 1989, the yearly meeting set up a Peace Tax Fund, into which Friends could redirect a portion of their federal income taxes, if conscience did not permit them to help pay for war. In 1995, the yearly meeting established the Quaker Volunteer Service, Witness and Training Committee, to coordinate and promote volunteer service opportunities, such as the work camps which in an earlier era had been organized by the American Friends Service Committee. This committee lasted until 2010, at which time it was noted that many of its goals had been met with the establishment of national organizations for coordinating such service.

The yearly meeting approved hiring an Administrative Coordinator in 2000, a Youth Coordinator in 2007, and a Children’s Religious Education Coordinator in 2016. Now with multiple paid staff positions, the yearly meeting established a Personnel Committee in 2009.

In 2004, Illinois Yearly Meeting was incorporated; previously it had been legally organized as a trust. The role of the trustees was taken over by the stewards after the trust was dissolved two years later.

This era also saw substantial changes to the ILYM campus. In 2000, the yearly meeting acquired a one-acre plot of land to the immediate west of the meetinghouse. The next year, an ad hoc Site Envisioning and Building Committee was set up, and began developing plans for new buildings, guided by a vision of expanded ILYM facilities as a “Peace House on the Prairie”—a regional peacemaking and retreat center. In 2005, in order to make room for planned new buildings, the dormitory was dismantled and the Junior Yearly Meeting House was moved across the road to the campground. Materials from the dormitory were reused to construct a set of cabins, also on the campground. However, the plans for new buildings were altered in 2009, when the opportunity presented itself for ILYM to buy the existing house, outbuildings and lot just west of the meetinghouse. The house was renamed the Clear Creek House of Illinois Yearly Meeting, and renovated to provide additional dormitory space, as well as much-needed winter meeting space and kitchen facilities for Clear Creek Meeting.

Concurrently with these changes it was becoming increasingly clear that official reliance on the 1955 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice was no longer serving the yearly meeting well. Illinois Yearly Meeting embarked on the project of producing its own Faith and Practice in 1992. After a long period of study and research, the first sections of new text were proposed to the yearly meeting in 2003. Each subsequent section was composed initially by the Faith and Practice Committee, and revised—usually multiple times—before being distributed to the wider yearly meeting community for feedback. Almost all sections were presented and discussed in workshops, during yearly meeting gatherings and/or at local meetings and worship groups. After being revised in response to feedback received, each section was submitted separately to a yearly meeting business session, at which time it was read aloud before the body. In some cases, additional changes were requested. Each section was approved by the yearly meeting for a provisional period ranging from one to five years. Additional feedback was received and additional revisions made during these provisional periods; each section was then approved for an indefinite period as its provisional period expired. At the conclusion of this lengthy process, the Faith and Practice Committee reviewed the entire document and then presented it to the yearly meeting for final approval, which was granted in 2019.

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