The following article was published in ‘The Call’ in 2010.
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“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” Matthew 5:13

An English Friend, in a note written after travelling in Gospel ministry in the United States in the 1990s, said:

“During my travels I saw many periodicals in Friends’ houses which were from mainstream evangelical sources; and though the writers may well have been honest and tender – and the Friends certainly were – the doctrines in those periodicals were in many cases those which the first generations of Friends had been led away from, as being built upon sand.

I was invited once to watch an evangelical preacher on television. What struck me more than anything was not his preaching nor his doctrine, of which I remember little, but his white shirt, his immaculately knotted necktie, his orthodontistry, his winning smile, his neat hairstyle, and so on. There might have been life in his work, but I couldn’t see it.

However, I also visited a place where youngsters with learning difficulties gathered. I call them youngsters because they were each reckoned to have a mental age of five, though they were in their teens and early twenties mostly. At one point they were doing what they called their ‘craft’, which entailed coulouring and cutting out pictures of biblical figures, and attaching tabs to make them stand upright. One young man – lanky, and I guess rather unprepossessing – suddenly announced to his immediate neighbours ‘I have Jesus in my heart’, and then went round his friends asking each one “Do you have Jesus in your heart?’ At each affirmative answer he smiled and chuckled with delight, so much so that I was struck deeply by this, and the words of our ancient friend George Fox were recalled to my mind – ‘What canst thou say?’ And also the scripture words ‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou has perfected praise’.

Not many days after this episode, I was at present in a Meeting House for their business meeting. A concern was raised about reaching out to the local community, and ideas were expressed; it became like a brain-storming session, and less like a meeting in the Lord’s presence, and I began to feel very uneasy. I looked across to a good friend of mine, a faithful woman, and saw that she was deep in prayer.

Suddenly an elderly Friend rose. In his time he had been a greatly-gifted and recorded Gospel minister, but of late a stroke had quietened and weakened him, so that he did not often hold much conversation with folk, let alone speak in meeting. I do not recall the words that were given to him, but I do recall that they were powerful prophecy. When he sat down the meeting was quiet again, brought back under the Lord’s discipline, and business continued prayerfully.

On that occasion the words came to me ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’.

Great indeed is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of his holiness, and blessed is the LORD for letting me see such things. Small they may seem to those who go about in earthly greatness and splendour, but they are miracles.”

Although we do not preach up George Fox, but rather Christ the Head of the Church, we do find GF’s writing to be truly prophetic and worth reading and repeating. These lines from Epistle 318: “And keep your testimony for your men and women’s meetings, in the power of God, by which you are gathered out of the apostasy, and over it, into the everlasting gospel order, as was in the apostles’ days. Which gospel is not of man; but by Christ, the spiritual man” are such, when we consider the wreck that has been made of gospel order in some places – even some places that claim our society’s name. Rather than seeking the wisdom that is of the world, let us hope to be more like that naïve youth, and like that elderly man – such as the world counts as nothing, but who are loved and blessed by the Lord, and who praise and serve him.

Amen.

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