The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
It’s 7:30am. I begin my morning sitting, looking out onto our back garden, with a clear blue sky and everything still. Ah, no! A neighbour’s black cat jumps down from the hedge at the bottom where he has been looking for birds’ nests. He sidles towards me heading for the side gate. I rattle on the window to show my displeasure. The cat slinks past me. I resume my sitting and ponder a while on the cat’s nature, which has not an ounce of empathy for the little birds.
In 2015 local Friends in Hexham organised an exhibition entitled ‘WW1 Voices and Choices’. It told the story of decisions made by individual men and women in Hexham, and its twin towns in France and Germany, in response to the first world war.
The exhibition represented the development of a distinctive Quaker concern, from an initial ‘still small voice’ in the mind of a Friend in Hexham Meeting over three years ago, through the joint endeavour of a support group that helped translate the vision into reality, to its ultimate fulfilment in reaching an international audience.
For the first time, Clitheroe in Lancashire has a Quaker Meeting house, right in the centre of town.
Quaker Life has launched a new undertaking with the first meeting last week of the steering group of the Engaging Young Adult Quakers Project. The group has been appointed by Quaker Life Central Committee and the members are all young adult Quakers who will help develop and guide the work throughout the three years the project is due to run.
London Link Group took thirty-eight people to Brighton on the weekend of 11-12 March.
Only Fairtrade bananas will be served on the lunchtime fruit counter at Sibford School in future.
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Whether you are new to Quakerism or have been going to Meeting for years, you’ll find something here to inspire, inform and challenge you.
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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