Social Concerns

• How do I express my faith in action?
• Is my sense of justice based in love?
• Do I endeavor to face the pain of the world and respond to it with forgiveness and comapssion?
• How do I avoid demonizing those who march against my concern?
• Do I take my full share of civic responsibility? Do I avoid partisan assumptions and rhetoric?

From Baltimore Yearly Meeting “Advices.”

Our testimonies are not the heart of our faith but are the fruits of our religious convictions. Assure that your actions in the world arise from your love of the Light in every person. Regard no person as your enemy. When opposing specific actions and abuses of power, seek to address the goodness and truth in each individual… Friends are aware that our tasks are founded on witness, not results; that our testimony to the world is the substance of our truth. Assert the transforming power of love and non-violence as a challenge to injustice and aggression and as an instrument of reconciliation.

Voices

“What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,’ and yet you do not give him what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.”
— James 2:14-17

“True godliness don’t turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavor to mend it: not hide their candle under a bushel, but set it upon a table in a candlestick.”
— William Penn, 1682

“When Joseph Hoag in 1812 was pleading his peace principles a man in his audience said, ‘Well, stranger, if all the world was of your mind, I would turn and follow after.’ Joseph replied, ‘So then thou hast a mind to be the last man in the world to be good. I have a mind to be one of the first and set the rest an example.'”
— Howard H. Brinton, 1967

“The great social movements of our time may well be part of our calling. The ideals of peace and justice and equality which are part of our religious tradition are often the focus of debate. But we cannot simply immerse ourselves in these activities. We need to develop our own unique social witness, in obedience to God. We need to listen to the gentle whispers which well tell us how we can bring our lives. into greater harmony with heaven.”
— Deborah Haines, 1978

“Jesus’s ministry made clear that acts of reconciliation, of healing, and of service nurture the Seed and extend the Gospel. He demonstrated that the religious life is incomplete without the religious act, the practice of worship sterile without the practice of loving concern for distressed people. The truth He demonstrated has caused Friends to make labor in the areas of their social concerns an essential part of their religious life.”
— New England Yearly Meeting, 1985

“Our witness will lack in power unless it springs from our deep spiritual communion with the divine presence and with one another. We were made for that community and it alone will satisfy the deepest longing of our hearts.”
— Marcelle Martin, 2003