A Modest Proposal

by J. Brent Bill

The early Friends were fully assured that they had a message for all men -- not merely that one or other of their testimonies was specially relevant to their own time, but that message in its totality, in its wholeness, was god's good news for all sorts and conditions of men .... "Have you anything to declare?" is a vital challenge to which every one of us is personally called to respond and is also a challenge that every meeting should consider of primary importance. it should lead us to define, with such clarity as we can reach, precisely what it is the Friends of this generation have to say that is not, as we believe, being said effectively by others. What, indeed, have we to declare to this generation that is of sufficient importance to justify our separate existences as part of the Christian fellowship? If we regard the Society of Friends merely as an ethical society we have no message for a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow and suffering. It is insufficient to merely offer palliatives to physical suffering, important and necessary as they are. there are those whose needs are on a different level and we should covet to have these others at least an equal concern. Have we "good news" for them? -


Indeed, I believe, we do. Hence my starting this "Modest Proposal."

34 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 30, 2010

About the author

Brent Bill is a Quaker minister, photographer, and author. He is the author of many books and magazine articles. He lives in rural Indiana on Ploughshares Farm -- a wildlife retreat with woods and native prairie.