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.
The Opening Session of Yearly Meeting can be a bit like Marmite. Some dislike the slow trek through lists of nominations and notices. But others see Quaker practice at its best: the upholding of the functions of a DIY church. Mary Aiston, second assistant clerk, said as much when she quoted Elizabeth Allen, assistant clerk to Meeting for Sufferings (MfS): ‘It seems like dry business but, take the lid off the box, it’s what we’re about… We need people to give faithful service, joyfully. Each of these names is a picture of the people who do that.’
More than 800 Friends joined on Saturday morning For Session 2: Radical peacemakers. During opening worship one Friend said: ‘I hope we can feel uncomfortable… We need to be led to change and change may have a cost.’
At the end of January 2019, Emily Provance left her Harlem apartment, picked up her backpack and caught a bus to Ohio. With no keys in her backpack, ‘this was the act of giving up a home to go home to’, Emily told the 600 or so Quakers assembled in Friends House (with a further 470 online).
On Sunday morning Friends gathered for All-together worship. This included individual Friends and forty Meetings online, together with those at Friends House, who included a group of the youngest Friends on the floor in front of the clerking table.
The selection of Jeremy Corbyn as 2024 Salter lecturer was, according to Yearly Meeting Agenda Committee, the wrong person in the wrong place. It could have no complaints this year: Abimbola Johnson is an award-winning human rights barrister with experience of criminal law, police scrutiny, and inquiry work. Two months on from the raid on Westminster Meeting House, she was the perfect choice.
Session Six picked up where Session 5 ended, with some nominations business shunted into the later session to make space for deep (and protracted) discernment.
‘Dear Friends everywhere, we send you our love and greetings.
Gyfeillion annwyl ym mhobman, anfonwn atoch ein cariad a’n cyfarchion.
What is your message of peace for the world?
What brings you a sense of inner peace?
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Written by and for Friends on the bench
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