Faith and Change: The Enduring Lesson of Stephen Grellet

People, states, and nations can change. He was a modest man, a French soldier in the late 1700s. By 1795, after a soul-shaking conversation, he was a Quaker missionary in America, ministering in jails and hospitals. He was Stephen Grellet.

Why bother remembering this man, born in November 1773, as we approach November 2026? What gems could he have left worth our time? He was a gem.

Imagine his life: one of the French king’s “musketeers,” a swordsman, horseman, and fighter, sentenced to execution during the Revolution, then escaping to America.

One day he heard “an awful voice, proclaiming the words ‘Eternity! Eternity! Eternity!’ It reached my very soul – my whole man shook – it brought me like Saul to the ground.” He began reading William Penn’s “No Cross, No Crown.”

The combined experience changed him. He centered his life on others, not himself, not a government, but on people. He began praying. One night, it crystallized.

In his words: “I spent a night of watchfulness unto prayer, like Jacob, wrestling the whole night for the Lord’s blessing, and toward morning the light of His countenance did very graciously arise upon me. My trust and confidence are renewed in Him; bless and praised be his adorable name!”

Extreme, unusual, uncommon? Perhaps, but the warfighter encountered God, and he changed. For the rest of his life, he sought higher purpose. He gave of himself to others every day, as if it were his last, until it was. He died in November 1855.

Why is he relevant? In a time of profound cynicism, moral ambivalence, and interpersonal indifference, his voice echoes. In a time of self-satisfied tribalism, government-ism, let-someone-else-fix-it-ism, he spoke of responsibility and faith.

Why bother with this 200-year-old, almost forgotten Quaker missionary? Three reasons. First, he was what we can be: deliberately purposeful, faithful, focused morning to night on others. This is what gives him the greatness worthy of recall.

Second, he was an example – for individuals, states, and nations – of how we can all change, how introspection, reference to heart, refreshes and restarts us.

Third, in the simplest way – why he is still remembered – he was a man who reshaped himself for good, started over, from hopeless to hopeful, taking to giving.

He stopped the “turning world” to ask whether God existed, and then what his loving God expected. I am reminded of Micah 6:8.  “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” That was Grellet.

His most poignant words, brightest remembered gem, was a simple observation on life, almost a prayer. “I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Grellet reminds us we can reorient from blur speed to stillness, that people – like states and nations – can change. If we can internalize that idea, there is great hope.