A Manual on the Need, the Organization, and the Discipline of Cells for Peace

This is a short practical handbook by the Quaker philosopher and Haverford College professor Douglas V. Steere, published in 1947 under the auspices of the Friends World Committee for Consultation. It came out of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Steere had traveled through devastated Europe on relief and reconciliation work for the American Friends Service Committee and seen both the scale of the ruin and the thinness of the structures meant to repair it. The manual asks a plain question: what can ordinary people do, where they live, to become a source of peace rather than waiting for governments and institutions to produce it?

Steere's answer is the small group. He proposes that a handful of people, meeting regularly, can form what he calls a cell for peace, and he treats this as a spiritual undertaking before he treats it as a political one. The manual argues that lasting peace cannot be built on organization alone, because the sources of war lie in the dispositions of persons: fear, grasping, the habit of seeing others as enemies. A cell therefore begins with the inward life. Its members commit to a shared discipline of silent worship, prayer, and attentive listening to one another, and only from that ground do they take up the outward work of study, correspondence, hospitality across divisions, and service to those in need. The book sets out how such a group is gathered, how large it should be, how it meets, and how it keeps itself honest over time. Its distinctive move is to join the contemplative and the practical without letting either swallow the other. Prayer is not offered as a substitute for action, and action is not allowed to run ahead of the interior transformation that makes it trustworthy.

The manual belongs to a longer line of Steere's writing on the unity of devotion and social concern, a theme he developed in his better-known devotional work and in his later ecumenical labors. It remains useful because its central conviction has not aged: that small, committed, prayerful communities are a primary way peacemaking becomes durable, and that the quality of a group's inner life shapes the quality of its witness. It also preserves a clear picture of mid-century Quaker practice, in which silence and organized service were held together as a single way of life.

Who should read this: Readers who want a concrete, modest guide to forming a small group for prayer and peacemaking, and pastors, Friends meetings, and lay communities looking for a model of contemplative practice tied to public concern. It is not for those seeking a systematic theology of war and peace, a history of the postwar peace movement, or a strategy for political change at scale; it is a handbook for beginning small, and it assumes readers are willing to begin there.