All I did was open the door
Little did I know, when I took this job on in September 2004, that it would turn into such an unruly companion in my life. The job description was modest enough – bring the publication out every week and publish articles of interest to Quakers, but the Friend itself seemed to be making a more urgent request – can you take us further upstream?

Here was a paper that had reached the end of a long and sober gestation and was bursting, like a butterfly out of its chrysalis, to show its talents to the rest of the world. It had stores of wisdom and understanding built up over centuries that it no longer wanted to keep to itself; no sooner had I given it a different set of clothes than it was off, inviting all manner of new thinkers – and old thinkers with new insights – into its pages. The twenty-first century Friend has a momentum all its own. For example, I had planned this little goodbye piece to be an amusing anecdote about the joys and frustrations of editing the Friend, of the pedantic squabbles with readers and contributors, but no – the magazine has other ideas and is insisting on my acknowledging its emergence as a force in British Quakerism and British religious thought.

Your new editor will have his hands full with this feisty 167 year old and I wish Ian and the Friend God speed.

I’d like to thank all of you for recognising – sometimes against your better judgment – that journalism can be a really potent force for good. And particular thanks to those contributors who have amended their prose style in order to let this bird fly and reach new lands.
Reader, all I did was open the door.
Judy Kirby
A broad cast of Quaker values
It is a pleasure to be joining the editorial team at the Friend. The magazine has been at the heart of British Quakerism for more than 165 years and, while it has changed considerably during that time, it has always been true to an original mission: to cherish and reflect the spiritual and practical world, the light and life, of the Religious Society of Friends.

I come to the magazine from early days in magazine and newspaper journalism and then a career in BBC Northern Ireland. I was a radio producer in Belfast and in London with Radio 4, where I worked mainly on magazine and documentary programmes, before moving to television. I was head of Music and Arts in BBC Northern Ireland for five years in the 1990s and for the past thirteen years have been a documentary film-maker.

I walk humbly in to an office where a small team has worked with enormous dedication and skill to produce the Friend every week.

The Friend is both a mirror and a window. It is a mirror that should reflect the diverse world of Quakerism back to itself in an interesting and challenging way, and it is a window through which Friends can see the world from a Quaker perspective. The magazine also offers others a glimpse of the rich diversity of Quaker life. It must continue to fulfil these aims in an engaging way, not ‘narrow-casting’ but ‘broad-casting’ Quaker values and life.

The Friend reflects the practical work of Quakers and the way in which they, and others, ‘comfort the afflicted’ in this world. It also has a responsibility to ‘afflict the comfortable’. It has a responsibility to ‘speak truth to power’.

What else to say? What my father used to tell me: ‘Roll up your sleeves, son, there is work to be done’.
Ian Kirk-Smith