News

ACTS' General Secretary leaves for new post with Quakers

October 18, 2006

Kevin Franz, ACTS' General Secretary for the past eight years, has indicated that he will be moving on to new work in the new year. Kevin has accepted the invitation to serve on the staff of Quaker Peace and Social Witness, part of the centrally-managed work of the Religious Society of Friends. He said:

"The post of General Secretary of QPSW will be an enormous challenge," he said, "but then Friends have always been encouraged to 'live adventurously'!

"In a sense, the work will be a return to my roots. My first ecumenical involvement at national level was through the life and work of the ACTS Commission on Justice, Peace, Social and Moral Issues, and the focus of my research in the late 1980s was on the American Roman Catholic Bishops' ground-breaking Pastoral Letter on 'the challenge of peace'.

"I have learnt so much from colleagues within ACTS over these years and I hope to draw on that in the new post. It will have an inescapably ecumenical dimension, bringing me in touch with projects as varied as the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, the work of the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva, reconciliation programmes in the former Yugoslavia and a raft of projects within Britain, all expressions of the imagination and power of the 'small circles and quiet processes' for which Friends are well known."