Messages

  • The concept of the 200-year present

    “A favorite concept of mine is the 200-year present, a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reached their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today. If you take that span, you and I will have had contact with a lot of people from different parts of that span. So think in terms of events over that span and realize how long change takes.”

  • How early Quakers envisioned the future

    “After we are gone, this same Life of Jesus shall rise up others who shall come after us, and no power of persecution shall be able to stop it. For the path of the just… shall shine more and more until the perfect day. And the testimony we presently bear shall be found true, and many in after ages shall set their seal to it, and the children that are now playing upon your streets shall come set their seal to our testimony, that it is true, and is of God.”

  • Look beyond the temporal

    “[Look] forward beyond the things that are seen which are temporal to the things that are not seen which are eternal. Hold fast our faith and the profession of it without wavering, seeing that he is faithful who has mercifully called us.”

  • What is a human being?

    “We need to construct a wider vision of what a human being is, opening up each person’s human potential so that we hold each person as a human soul. Let us live a life that gives expression to the possibilities of the soul. Let us develop that alongside understanding the science of how the world works, but crucially, in ways that uphold the integrity and beauty of the world…..”

  • Living a life of risk

    “We pray for both the personal and inner strength as well as the corporate strength of a shared calling that will empower us to face all the trials that we will necessarily encounter. We have no illusions about the fact that to truly live a Christian life in these cataclysmic times means to live a life of great risk.

    We call on Friends to rediscover our own roots in the vision and lives of early Friends whose own transformed lives shook the unjust social and economic structures of their day…. And we call upon Friends across the earth to heed the voice of God and let it send us out in truth and power to rise to the immense challenge of our world today.”

  • Nothing outlasts the truth

    “Do not think that anything will outlast the truth, which standeth sure…. For the good will overcome the evil; the light, darkness; the life, death; virtue, vice; and righteousness, unrighteousness. The false prophet cannot overcome the true; but the true prophet, Christ, will overcome all the false. So be faithful, and live in that which doth not think the time long.”

  • Quakers Envisioning the Future (with guest editor Jon Watts)

    November 2026: We are all crafting the future together, whether we know it or not. Early Friends trusted that in the end, truth would prevail. In honor of our “Future of Quakerism” Campaign this month we hear from Quakers past and present imagining the future and discerning their role in it. These are messages of hope and prayerful determination.

  • The cloudy origins of famous quotes

    “The silence we value is not the mere outward silence of the lips. It is a deep quietness of heart and mind, a laying aside of all preoccupation with passing things — yes, even with the workings of our own minds; a resolute fixing of the heart upon that which is unchangeable and eternal.”

  • Be not afraid

    “The core message of all the great spiritual traditions is ‘Be not afraid.’ Rather, be confident that life is good and trustworthy. In this light, the great failure is not that of leading a full and vital active life, with all the mistakes and suffering such a life will bring (along with its joys). Instead, the failure is to withdraw fearfully from the place to which one is called, to squander the most precious of all our birthrights — the experience of aliveness itself….”

  • Art thou in darkness?

    “Art thou in darkness? Mind it not, for if thou do it will fill thee more, but stand still and act not, and wait in patience till light arises out of darkness to lead thee.”

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