Martin Kelley

Quaker writer, workshop leader, and editor, with a focus on outreach, nonviolence, and the Christian roots of Friends. Sharing stories of Quakers as senior editor of Friends Journal and blogger at QuakerRanter.org. He/him. Let your life preach.

About Martin Kelley

At age 20, Martin first walked into a Friends’ meetinghouse. He had a building concern for nonviolence and felt that the Friends he met had something to teach him. He found that and slowly became more involved with Quakers.

Martin Kelley entered publishing in college when he launched a weekly campus zine (X-acto knives, glue sticks, and sharpies). AHis professional career began a few years later as a book designer and acquisitions editor at the collectively-run New Society Publishers. He later started a pioneering online website called Nonviolence.org, which provided web hosting, design, and content management for dozens of U.S. and international peace organizations.

Martin served with Friends General Conference for eight years, working as its outreach coordinator, website developer, and bookstore associate. During that time Atlantic City Area Friends Meeting minuted support for his ongoing outreach ministry and the Clarence and Lilly Pickett Endowment awarded him a fellowship and grant to launch a social media network named QuakerQuaker, which incubated what came to be called the “Convergent Friends” movement (the fourth design of QuakerQuaker is planning to launch in late 2023). Martin has been blogging as the Quaker Ranter since 1997. In recent years it’s become organized as a weekly email newsletter, with long-form writing and curatorial links going out every Friday.

Since 2011, Martin has served as senior editor of Friends Journal, the award-winning Quaker magazine with roots dating back to the early 1800s. He’s worked alongside a talented team of colleagues to expand it from a monthly print magazine to include a twenty-first century multimedia suite of membership-driven websites. The Friends Journal website is constantly updated with breaking news, timely opinion pieces, and weekly features exploring Quaker life today. It is joined by a popular YouTube channel (QuakerSpeak), a growing monthly podcast (Quakers Today), and an encyclopedic outreach site built to attract seekers (Quaker.org). These are all powered by the latest techniques in digital marketing and reach increasingly wider audiences with the Quaker message. It’s been quite a remarkable transformation, one that is very much continuing.

Martin lives in a small town in the South Jersey pine barrens with his wife, four children, two dogs and four cats. He is a member of Cropwell Meeting in Marlton, N.J.