Jonathan Dale has been much involved in the work Britain Yearly Meeting has done over the last thirty years on social questions, particularly housing and poverty. He has been Clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting’s social responsibility department’s central committee, and, with Rachel Carmichael and others, was deeply involved in Britain Yearly Meeting’s exercise on Rediscovering our Social Testimony (ROST). This exercise was stimulated also by his 1995 address on social testimony to the Conference which commemorated the famous 1895 Manchester Conference and by his 1996 Swarthmore Lecture Beyond the Spirit of the Age. In turn the ROST exercise culminated in the publication of Faith in Action in 2000, for which he wrote a substantial introductory section. Although this process of reflection had started in the twenty years he spent as a university lecturer in French at St Andrews, it was deeply nourished by a calling in 1983 to retrain as a community worker. He then moved from Scotland to Manchester. He now lives with his wife, Emily, in a tough inner-city area of Salford where he works for a grass-roots housing co-operative. His three children do their best to remind him of the imperatives of a radical analysis of the powers-that-be, and of radical responses.
This pamphlet is a slightly rewritten version of a paper he was asked to give at Pendle Hill, in May 2001, entitled, “The Prophetic Voice in Public Life: reclaiming the Quaker Social Testimony. It encapsulates in a briefer format a good deal of the reflection which form the bases of the two books mentioned above.