I wrote this mon­th’s Friends Jour­nal intro col­umn, “A Hum­ble Band of Prophets”:

I’ve been think­ing a lot about that phone call [from a mem­ber of a strug­gling meet­ing] and about this month’s lead arti­cle by ​​Andy Stanton-Henry, who urges us to think about what it would mean to focus our atten­tion on a radius of ten miles. This exact mea­sure­ment comes from a rous­ing line from twentieth-century Friend Thomas Kel­ly: “Such bands of hum­ble prophets can recre­ate the Soci­ety of Friends and the Chris­t­ian church and shake the coun­try­side for ten miles around.” Kel­ly in turn got it from seventeenth-century Quak­er founder George Fox, who said that any­one raised up as a mod­ern prophet might “shake all the coun­try in their pro­fes­sion for ten miles round.”

Ten miles seems like such a tri­fling­ly small dis­tance to us today. It’s a few min­utes at high­way speeds. The U.S. Cen­sus Bureau tells us the aver­age work com­mute is 27 miles; the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion cal­cu­lates that U.S. dri­vers aver­age 36 miles per day.

Per­son­al elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion has made dis­tance even more mean­ing­less, and it’s easy to build and main­tain friend­ships unbound­ed by any geog­ra­phy. There’s a mea cul­pa in this: I’m one of those extreme­ly online peo­ple who spends their days in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peo­ple well out­side of a ten-mile radius. This can be pro­duc­tive, and yet: those ten miles.

You can read the whole arti­cle by fol­low­ing the link.

A Hum­ble Band of Prophets 

Learn how to revi­tal­ize a Friends Meet­ing by focus­ing out­reach efforts with­in a ten-mile radius of your community.

Friends Journal