Quakers: An Hour of Silence as a Form of Worship
Quakers meet for an hour of shared silence with no priest, no liturgy and no music, waiting for anyone present to be moved to speak. This guide covers what happens in an unprogrammed meeting for worship, the Inward Light that took the place of creeds, vocal ministry, the testimonies, the sense-of-the-meeting business method, and why most Friends worldwide have pastors and hymns.
What happens during an hour of Quaker silent worship?
During an hour of Quaker silent worship, a group of people sit together in a plain room in silence, waiting; anyone present may stand and speak briefly if they feel moved to, and when the hour is up two Friends shake hands and the meeting is over. Nothing else is scheduled. There is no leader, no order of service, no music, no set reading, no collection and nobody at the front, because in an unprogrammed meeting there is no front. Chairs or benches face inward, often in a square or a rough circle, so that everyone can see everyone else. Worship begins when the first person sits down and settles, not at an announced moment. Some hours pass without a word spoken. Others carry three or four short messages, separated by long gaps of quiet that let each one settle before the next. Latecomers slip in and sit. Children usually stay for the first ten or fifteen minutes and then leave for their own program. At the close, the Friends appointed to hold the meeting shake hands, everybody shakes hands with their neighbors, notices are read, visitors are welcomed by name, and the room turns into a conversation.
Friends call this waiting worship or expectant waiting, and the second word carries the weight. The silence is not a relaxation technique and it is not the point in itself. It is what a room does while it waits for God to speak through somebody sitting in it, which is why Friends distinguish an ordinary quiet hour from what they call a gathered or covered meeting: a stretch where the silence thickens and people afterwards report having been held by the same thing at the same time. Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion, published in 1941, is one of the books most often handed to newcomers who want that experience described from the inside. Early Friends were noisier than the modern hour suggests. Seventeenth-century meetings involved a great deal of preaching, weeping and physical trembling, and the deep silence Friends now treat as characteristic settled in later, during the inward-turning quietist period of the eighteenth century.
How long does a Quaker meeting for worship last?
A Quaker meeting for worship usually lasts one hour, and unprogrammed meetings hold to that closely. Conservative Friends and some retreat settings sit longer, and a handful of meetings run forty-five minutes. Nobody watches a clock openly. The Friends appointed to hold the meeting judge the close and end it with a handshake, which is why worship occasionally runs several minutes over or under the hour.
Is Quaker silence a form of meditation?
Quaker silence resembles meditation from the outside and differs from it in purpose: Friends are not clearing the mind, following the breath or working toward a state, they are listening together for something they expect might be said out loud in the room. No posture, breath count or object is prescribed anywhere. For structured breathing methods, which Quaker practice deliberately does without, see Breathwork: Techniques, Effects and How to Start Safely.
What do people actually do with their minds for an hour?
Most Friends will admit the hour includes distraction, shopping lists and drowsiness, and the standard advice is to notice the wandering and come back without treating it as a failure. Some read a short passage before settling; others hold a person or a decision in mind and then let it go. Meetings publish no technique, and a Friend of forty years may still call the hour difficult.
Who are the Quakers, and what does the Religious Society of Friends believe?
The Quakers, whose formal name is the Religious Society of Friends, are a Christian body that began in northern England around 1652 and teaches that God can be known directly by any person, with no priest, sacrament or creed standing in between. George Fox (1624 to 1691) is the founding figure, a weaver's son who walked the country after concluding that the ordained clergy of his day could tell him nothing his own experience had not already given him. Margaret Fell of Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire turned her house into the movement's administrative center, funded its traveling preachers, and years later married Fox. The ministers who scattered out of the north from 1654 are remembered as the Valiant Sixty. Most of what outsiders notice about Friends follows from that one claim of direct access. If God speaks to anyone, a paid ministry is unnecessary, a church building is only a room, women may preach on the same footing as men, and nobody owes another person deference. Early Friends paid for the position: thousands were jailed under the Quaker Act of 1662 and the Conventicle Acts before the Toleration Act of 1689 eased the pressure on them, and several hundred died in custody, their cases catalogued in the eighteenth century in Joseph Besse's Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers.
Belief among Friends is far less uniform than the founding story suggests, and the Society has never settled the question by writing a statement that everyone signs. Evangelical Friends in Kenya, Bolivia and the American Midwest hold a recognizably orthodox Protestant Christianity, with the Bible as authority and Jesus Christ as savior. Liberal meetings in Britain, Australia and the northeastern United States contain Friends who describe themselves as Christian, Universalist, Buddhist, Jewish or nontheist, and Britain Yearly Meeting has an organized Nontheist Friends Network. Both wings can trace their position back to Fox, who insisted on a living Christ speaking now and who cared less about doctrinal formulation than about obedience. Robert Barclay's Apology, which appeared in Latin in 1676 and in English as An Apology for the True Christian Divinity two years later, remains the closest thing the Society has to a systematic theology, and it argued the case in the scholastic vocabulary of its day precisely because critics claimed Quakers had no thought behind them. Barclay is still read, and still disputed, by Friends who think the Society drifted away from him.
Where does the name Religious Society of Friends come from?
The name comes from the Gospel of John, where Jesus tells his disciples that he has called them friends. Early Quakers used several self-descriptions first, including Children of the Light and Friends in the Truth, before Friends won out. The full formal title hardened during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Members address one another as Friend, and a member is written with a capital F throughout Quaker publications.
How many Quakers are there, and where do they live?
Counts are uncertain because branches define membership differently, but estimates put the worldwide total somewhere between three and four hundred thousand. The largest national population by a wide margin is in Kenya, whose Friends are mostly evangelical and worship with pastors and hymns. The United States comes next, then Burundi and Bolivia, with Britain smaller than any of the three, and Guatemala, Tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all holding memberships counted in the thousands. Silent unprogrammed worship, the form outsiders picture, is a minority practice globally.
Do Quakers have churches and clergy?
Quakers have no clergy in unprogrammed meetings, and no branch consecrates a building. Unprogrammed Friends call the place a meeting house rather than a church and have historically refused to call it holy, since it is a room with chairs in it, while pastoral congregations often do carry the word church in their own names. Pastoral branches employ released ministers, a nineteenth-century development. Unprogrammed meetings appoint clerks, elders and overseers, unpaid and normally serving fixed terms, though the exact titles and the way the roles are divided differ from one yearly meeting to another.
What is the Inner Light, and why do Quakers have no creed?
The Inner Light, which many Friends prefer to call the Inward Light or simply the Light, is the Quaker term for the direct presence of God in every person, available without an intermediary and capable of guiding and convicting whoever attends to it. George Fox put it in a phrase Friends still quote, written in a 1656 letter from prison at Launceston: walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one. Two claims sit inside it. The first is that this Light is in everyone without exception, including people outside the church, outside Christianity and outside any behavior you would approve of. The second is that it belongs to God and not to you. Friends have always separated the Light from conscience, taste or private opinion, since a Light that only told you what you already wanted would be worth nothing. Barclay described it as a real spiritual substance rather than a faculty of the natural mind. The creedless position follows from there. A creed fixes in permanent words what the Light is understood to say continuously and freshly, and early Friends held that writing one would quietly substitute a document for the encounter.
Friends disagree, sharply and along branch lines, about how far that reasoning holds. The Richmond Declaration of Faith was drawn up at a conference of Orthodox yearly meetings held at Richmond, Indiana, in 1887, with British and Irish Friends represented alongside American ones. It set out an orthodox statement of belief and argued that Quakers had let doctrine go slack. London Yearly Meeting declined to adopt it, the Hicksite meetings were not party to it at all, and it has remained a reference point for evangelical Friends rather than for the Society as a whole. Britain Yearly Meeting uses a book called Quaker Faith and Practice, revised roughly once a generation, which collects the writings of individual Friends rather than defining what Friends must hold, alongside a short booklet of Advices and Queries that asks questions instead of issuing statements. Friends name the cost themselves. A body with no doctrinal floor has trouble saying what it is, and liberal meetings in particular find that newcomers arrive expecting Christianity and meet something much harder to name. A second argument runs alongside that one. Rufus Jones, teaching at Haverford in the early twentieth century, presented Quakerism as a branch of Western mysticism, and Lewis Benson spent a career answering him, insisting that Fox spoke as a prophet announcing Christ's present government rather than as a mystic describing an inner state.
Is the Inner Light the same as conscience or intuition?
No, and Friends draw the distinction deliberately. Conscience is formed by upbringing and culture and can be badly wrong, while the Light is understood to come from outside the self and frequently contradicts what the self would prefer. The test Friends apply is corporate rather than private, on the reasoning that a genuine leading survives being taken to other Friends and examined by them at length.
Is a Quaker leading the same as hearing a voice?
A leading is usually described as a pressure, a weight, or a persistent refusal of some thought to be dropped, rather than as an audible voice or a psychic reception. A few Friends do report words. The Society treats the experience as God's initiative and not as a faculty to be trained, which is where it parts company with Clairaudience: Signs of Clear hearing, How to Develop It and Common Confusions.
What did early Friends mean by the Seed and the Truth?
Early Quaker writing uses several near-synonyms for one reality: the Seed, the Truth, the Light within, the Christ within, and the Word. The Seed carries the sense of something planted that can grow or be crushed. Truth was capitalized and used as a proper noun, so early Friends spoke of convincement to Truth rather than conversion, a word they generally avoided.
What is vocal ministry, and how does a Friend know when to stand and speak?
Vocal ministry is a short spoken message offered during silent worship by any person present who believes they have been given something to say for the meeting rather than for themselves, and Friends judge the moment by inward and physical signs rather than by any rule. The commonest description is a rising pressure attached to one specific thought, a thought that will not go away when you set it aside, often arriving with a hammering heart, shaking hands or a dry mouth. Friends say that a message which disappears once you release it was probably not for speaking. The advice repeated to newcomers is blunt: if in doubt, do not. The message is offered standing, audibly, to the whole room, and it is kept short, frequently under two minutes. It is not addressed to any individual and it does not answer or argue with an earlier message. After somebody speaks, the meeting returns to silence for several minutes so that the words can settle, and a Friend who has spoken once customarily does not speak again that day. Nobody thanks the speaker, nobody applauds, and nobody discusses the message afterwards as a performance.
Meetings police vocal ministry gently and mostly after the fact. A Friend who speaks too often, too long, or about a topic rather than out of the silence may be visited afterwards by an elder, a practice called eldering, which at its best is a private and kind conversation and at its worst has been used to silence unwelcome voices. Friends have a slang term, a popcorn meeting, for an hour that fills with quick messages before any of them can settle. The other named failure is prepared ministry, meaning that you arrived with something you intended to say. The difference between vocal ministry and channeling matters here and gets missed constantly. A Friend speaking in meeting remains themselves, uses their own words, is answerable for them, and can simply be wrong. Nothing is understood to speak through them as a vessel, and no altered state is sought or claimed. For the practice that does make that claim, see Channeling: How It Works, Famous Cases and How to Assess Claims.
What happens if a message is wrong or unwelcome?
Nothing is said at the time. Friends do not respond to a message during worship, correct it or debate it, and the silence after a poor message is held exactly like any other. If a pattern develops, an elder speaks to the Friend privately afterwards. Meetings vary enormously in how firmly they do this, and complaints about elders who never intervene are as common as complaints about elders who intervene too readily.
Can a visitor or newcomer speak in meeting?
Yes. Vocal ministry is open to everyone present, including a first-time visitor and a person who is not a member, because the Society has never restricted it to a trained or appointed group. Newcomers are gently discouraged from speaking on a first visit, by convention rather than by rule, since the customs around length, timing and tone take some months of sitting to absorb.
Are there recorded ministers among Friends?
Some yearly meetings record ministers. Recording is a formal acknowledgment that a Friend has a settled gift in vocal ministry, and it is granted by the meeting rather than sought. Recording confers no authority, no pay and no exclusive right to speak, and many liberal meetings dropped the practice during the twentieth century as inconsistent with equality. In the pastoral branches, recording sits much closer to ordination and is the ordinary route to employment as a pastor.
What are the Quaker testimonies, and how do Friends live by them?
The Quaker testimonies are the shared commitments Friends understand to follow from the Light, and they are lived positions rather than rules: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship, taught across North America under the acronym SPICES. That acronym is a twentieth-century teaching device rather than a historic list, and plenty of older Friends object to it. Testimony in Quaker usage means witness, something a life demonstrates without needing to announce. The peace testimony is the best known and carries a date. In January 1661 Friends presented a declaration to Charles II stating that they utterly denied all outward wars and strife with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretense whatever. Integrity produced the refusal of oaths, on the argument that swearing implies a second and lower standard of truth for ordinary speech, and Quakers eventually won the legal right to affirm, secured in England by the Affirmation Act of 1695. Equality produced the refusal of hat honor and the use of thee and thou to social superiors, which read as calculated insolence in the seventeenth century and got Friends beaten for it.
The testimonies have a documented public record. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting moved against slave trading among its members in 1758, largely under pressure from John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, and Quakers made up nine of the twelve founders of the London committee formed in 1787 to abolish the slave trade. Elizabeth Fry took the same instinct into Newgate prison. The Friends Ambulance Unit and the American Friends Service Committee found work for conscientious objectors through both world wars, and in 1947 the Nobel Peace Prize went jointly to the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Service Council in Britain. The record has holes in it that Friends themselves document. Quakers owned slaves for a century before they stopped, and the campaign inside the Society was slow and bitterly resisted by wealthy members. Quaker-run firms that Friends still cite with pride, among them Cadbury, Rowntree, Barclays and Lloyds, grew rich inside an economy that Friends were simultaneously criticizing.
Do all Quakers refuse military service?
No. The peace testimony binds no individual, since Friends have no mechanism for compelling belief, and members have served in armed forces in every major war. What the testimony does is set the Society's corporate position and give a member who refuses service a documented body to point at, which mattered enormously to conscientious objectors facing tribunals. Evangelical Friends are on average less absolute about it than liberal meetings.
What does Quaker simplicity look like now?
Plain dress and plain speech mostly disappeared during the nineteenth century, and a modern liberal meeting will not look distinctive on the street. Simplicity now shows up in meeting houses with no images, no altar and no devotional objects, in unadorned burial grounds with identical stones, and in a general suspicion of possessions that clutter attention. Friends use no crystals, incense, candles, beads or counted prayers in worship.
Why do Quakers refuse to swear oaths?
Friends read the instruction in Matthew 5:34 to swear not at all as plain and binding, and they added a practical argument: an oath implies that a person tells the truth to a higher standard when sworn than when speaking normally. Refusing cost early Friends their liberty repeatedly, since an oath of allegiance was the standard trap used to jail them. Affirmation now exists in most common-law countries.
How do Quakers make decisions without voting?
Quakers make decisions in a meeting for worship for business, which uses the same expectant silence as worship and seeks the sense of the meeting, a shared discernment of the right way forward, in place of a majority. Nobody votes and nothing is settled by counting heads. A clerk holds the meeting, introduces each item, calls on people who wish to speak, and listens for the point at which the meeting has come to unity. The clerk then drafts a minute, reads it aloud, and the meeting either approves it or corrects it on the spot, so that the decision exists in agreed wording before anyone leaves the room. Speaking follows worship discipline: people rise one at a time, address the clerk and the meeting rather than each other, do not reply directly to the previous speaker, and leave a pause between contributions. Silence is called deliberately when the discussion overheats. A Friend who disagrees may ask to stand aside, which records the dissent while letting the decision proceed, or may stand in the way, which stops it. One person standing in the way is enough. Unripe items are laid over to another month, sometimes for years.
The method rests on a shared assumption that the meeting is seeking something outside its own preferences, and it degrades fast when that assumption goes. Friends know the failure modes and name them. A determined individual can hold a meeting hostage under cover of principle. Exhaustion can pass for unity when people simply want to go home. A clerk with a settled view can steer by choosing whose hand to see. Meetings guard against this by rotating the clerkship, by holding threshing meetings where a hard subject is aired with no decision permitted, and by teaching the difference between a leading and an opinion. The refusal to force a judgment before it is ripe has parallels elsewhere, and readers who want the divinatory version of the same instinct can compare I Ching Hexagram 61: Inner Truth - Meaning, Changing Lines and Guidance, whose Image, in the Wilhelm translation, has the superior man discuss criminal cases so as to delay executions.
What is a clearness committee?
A clearness committee is a small group of Friends appointed to help one person or a couple reach clarity about a decision, most often marriage or an application for membership, and its governing rule is that members may ask questions but may not give advice. Three or four Friends meet the person over one or more sessions. The educator Parker Palmer carried the format outside Quakerism, where it now circulates in secular settings.
How long can a Quaker decision take?
Longer than most organizations would tolerate. Britain Yearly Meeting considered same-sex marriage over several years before agreeing in 2009 to seek legal recognition for such marriages celebrated in meetings, and local meetings routinely lay an item over for months. The method has no deadline mechanism, which is its main practical weakness and the reason Quaker bodies respond slowly to anything urgent.
Is the sense of the meeting the same as consensus?
No, and Friends correct that confusion often. Consensus seeks an agreement everybody can live with, negotiated between competing preferences. The sense of the meeting assumes there is a right course to be discovered and that the group's task is to find it, which means a meeting can reach unity on something nobody arrived wanting. In practice the two overlap, and secular consensus process borrowed heavily from Quaker method.
What are the branches of Quakerism, and why do some meetings have pastors and hymns?
Quakerism split repeatedly during the nineteenth century, and the main branches today are liberal unprogrammed Friends, pastoral or programmed Friends, evangelical Friends and Conservative Friends, with most Quakers worldwide worshiping with a pastor, hymns and a prepared sermon. The first break came in 1827 and 1828 in America, when meetings divided into Hicksite and Orthodox parties over the authority of scripture and of elders; Elias Hicks, a Long Island farmer and preacher, gave the first party its name. The Orthodox side divided again in the 1840s between followers of the English evangelical Joseph John Gurney and those of the Rhode Island Friend John Wilbur, who held that Gurney had traded direct revelation for a Bible-centered Protestantism. Wilbur's heirs are today's Conservative Friends, who kept silent worship and plain ways. Gurney's heirs met the American revival movement of the 1860s and 1870s head on, and pastoral Quakerism came out of that collision. Missionaries then carried the programmed form abroad, most consequentially to western Kenya, where American Friends founded a mission at Kaimosi in 1902 and where the largest Quaker population in the world now lives.
A programmed meeting on a Sunday morning in Kenya, Indiana or Bolivia looks like a Protestant service. There is a pastor, singing, Bible reading, a sermon, prayer and often an offering, and in most cases a period of open worship in silence is kept somewhere inside the hour, which is what survives of the older form. Friends in these branches are usually explicit that Christ leads the worship and that the pastor's job is to help the meeting rather than to mediate for it. Relations between the branches run from warm to nonexistent. Friends World Committee for Consultation exists to keep them in contact, while Friends United Meeting, Friends General Conference and Evangelical Friends Church International each gather a different set of yearly meetings. Disagreements over sexuality and scriptural authority have produced further separations in the twenty-first century, including inside North American yearly meetings, so the fracture lines are still live.
Which branches keep the silent hour?
Unprogrammed silent worship is kept by liberal Friends, who predominate in Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, most of Europe and the northeastern and western United States, and by Conservative Friends, a much smaller group concentrated in Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina. The two look similar for an hour and differ considerably in theology, since Conservative Friends are plainly Christian and many liberal meetings are not.
Do the branches recognize each other as Quakers?
Mostly yes, and sometimes reluctantly. An evangelical Friend in Kenya and a nontheist Friend in London share a name, a business method and a lineage, and fairly little else in the way of belief. Friends World Committee for Consultation holds a world gathering periodically to keep the conversation alive. Individual yearly meetings have on occasion broken affiliation with one another over doctrine.
What happened to plain dress and the plain language?
Plain dress and the plain language faded through the nineteenth century, faster among Gurneyite and Hicksite Friends than among Conservative Friends, a few of whom kept plain dress into living memory. London Yearly Meeting, as Britain Yearly Meeting was then called, dropped the requirement in 1860. Friends also numbered the days and months, writing First Day rather than Sunday, to avoid names drawn from Norse and Roman gods.
How do you attend a Quaker meeting for the first time?
To attend a Quaker meeting for the first time, look up a local meeting's listed time, arrive about ten minutes early, tell whoever greets you at the door that it is your first visit, then sit anywhere and stay quiet until the handshake at the end. No membership, invitation, belief or prior contact is required, and unprogrammed meetings are open to anyone who walks in off the street. A greeter will usually hand you a short leaflet explaining what is about to happen. Sit wherever there is space, since the seats carry no hierarchy, though the bench facing the room is normally taken by the Friends holding the meeting that day. When the hour begins, people simply settle, and no announcement marks the start. You are not expected to speak, close your eyes, adopt a posture or pray. If somebody stands and speaks, listen, and let a silence follow. If nothing whatever happens for sixty minutes, that is an ordinary meeting rather than a failed one. At the close, shake hands with whoever is nearest, expect to be asked your name, and expect notices, tea and a certain amount of friendly curiosity.
Three things surprise most first-time visitors. The hour is longer than it sounds, and the first twenty minutes can be uncomfortable in a way nobody warns you about; boredom, restlessness and a strong urge to leave are normal, and Friends who have attended for decades still meet them. Second, the messages when they come are often very ordinary. Someone describes a hospital visit, or a hedge. The plainness is deliberate, and a polished message is regarded with mild suspicion. Third, nothing at all is asked of you afterwards. There is no follow-up call, no request for money and no membership pitch, which some visitors find restful and others find so hands-off that they never return. A person who attends regularly without joining is called an attender, and many people stay attenders for years or permanently. Membership is applied for by letter to the local meeting, which appoints a small committee to visit and then records a minute.
What should you do if you find the silence unbearable?
Leave quietly if you need to. Walking out partway through is accepted and nobody will comment on it afterwards. A shorter first visit is fine, and some meetings run a brief introductory session beforehand for newcomers. If sitting still for an hour is physically hard, say so at the door, because cushions, an upright chair and a seat near the exit can all be arranged. Meetings would far rather you moved than suffered. A smaller number of people find that a long unstructured silence brings up distressing memory or anxiety rather than calm. Nobody at a meeting is trained to handle that, and it belongs with a doctor or a therapist rather than with the Friends sitting next to you.
Can children attend a Quaker meeting?
Children are welcome and most meetings expect them. The usual pattern is that children join worship for the first ten or fifteen minutes and then leave for a children's meeting, still called First Day school in many places, staffed by an adult rota. A few meetings keep children present throughout. Babies and noise are tolerated far better than newcomers anticipate, since perfect silence is not the goal.
How do you find a meeting near you?
Yearly meeting websites keep directories of local meetings with times and addresses, and most meeting houses are also listed on general mapping services. Times cluster around ten or eleven on Sunday morning, with some midweek and evening meetings in cities. Check whether the meeting is programmed or unprogrammed if the silent hour is what you came for, because a listing will not always say which it is.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Quakers believe in God?
Most Quakers believe in God, and the Society's whole practice assumes a God who communicates directly with people rather than through an appointed office. Belief is not uniform. Evangelical and pastoral Friends hold an orthodox Christian theism. Liberal meetings, particularly in Britain, include Friends who prefer words like the Light, the Spirit or the ground of being, and a smaller number who describe themselves as nontheist and attend for the practice and the testimonies. Unprogrammed meetings do not test belief at the door, and a visitor is never asked what they hold. Membership is a separate question, and the evangelical and pastoral yearly meetings do expect a Christian profession from the people who join them.
Are Quakers Christians?
Quakerism began as a Christian movement and most Quakers worldwide are unambiguously Christian, since the evangelical and pastoral branches that hold the majority of members are explicitly so. Liberal unprogrammed meetings are more mixed and contain Friends who would not use the word of themselves. Historically the answer is simple: George Fox preached Christ, Robert Barclay wrote Christian theology, and the early Society understood itself as primitive Christianity revived. Whether a given modern meeting is Christian depends on which meeting you walk into.
Why are they called Quakers instead of Friends?
Quaker began as an insult. The traditional account, which Fox gives in his own journal, is that Justice Gervase Bennet at Derby in 1650 called them Quakers because Fox had told him to tremble at the word of the Lord. Early Friends did physically shake and weep in worship, which helped the nickname stick. The Society absorbed it rather than fighting it, so both names are correct today: Quaker in everyday speech, Religious Society of Friends in formal and legal use.
Do Quakers have a Bible, a minister, or communion?
Quakers read the Bible and do not treat it as the final authority. The Spirit that gave scripture, Friends hold, is the Spirit speaking now. Unprogrammed meetings have no minister at all; pastoral meetings employ one. Friends rejected outward communion and water baptism from the beginning, on the argument that the inward reality is the thing the outward sign was pointing at, and Barclay argued that case at length in his Apology. Unprogrammed meetings still hold to it. Some evangelical Friends churches have since adopted one or both of the outward rites, which other Friends read as a departure from the historic position.
What should you wear to a Quaker meeting?
Wear whatever you would wear to a friend's house. Quakers have no dress code, no head covering requirement and no expectation of formality, and a modern meeting will contain suits, jeans, walking boots and everything in between. Plain dress ended in the nineteenth century for almost all Friends. The only practical advice is to dress for comfort, since you will sit still for an hour, and to wear quiet shoes, because the room will already be silent when you arrive.
Can you attend a Quaker meeting if you are not religious?
Yes, and a great many people do. Unprogrammed meetings ask nothing about belief, take no register and require no statement of faith, so an atheist, an agnostic or a person from another religion can attend for years without any awkwardness arising. Some liberal meetings contain long-standing attenders and even members who do not believe in God. What a meeting asks of you is an hour of silence and respect for what other people say inside it.
Are Quakers the same as the Amish, the Shakers or the Mennonites?
No. The Amish and Mennonites are Anabaptists out of the continental Radical Reformation, tracing to Menno Simons and, for the Amish, to Jakob Ammann, and they practice adult baptism, which Quakers reject altogether. The Shakers were gathered around Ann Lee, who came out of a Quaker-influenced group in Manchester, and they were celibate, which is why almost none remain. The Quaker Oats company has no connection to the Society of Friends. Its trademark dates from the 1870s, and the company's own account is that the name was picked for associations of purity and honest dealing. Friends have objected to the borrowing on and off ever since without managing to stop it.
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