Quakers: An Hour of Silence as a Form of Worship

What happens during an hour of Quaker silent worship?

Imagine you have had a loud, draining year. Your phone never stops, and a friend mentions she spends Sunday mornings sitting in silence with Quakers. Part of you aches for that. Part of you fears feeling awkward, not knowing the rules.

The short answer: People sit together in a plain room in silence, waiting. Anyone may stand and speak briefly if they feel moved to. When the hour is up, two Friends shake hands and it is over. There are almost no rules to get wrong.

There is no leader, order of service, music, set reading or collection, and nobody at the front, because an unprogrammed meeting has no front. Seats face inward in a square or rough circle.

Worship begins when the first person settles. Some hours pass without a word; others hold three or four short messages with long gaps between. Latecomers slip in. Children usually stay ten or fifteen minutes, then leave for their own program, often still called First Day school, staffed by an adult rota; a few meetings keep them in throughout, and babies and noise are tolerated far better than newcomers expect.

At the close, the Friends appointed to hold the meeting shake hands, everyone shakes hands with neighbors, notices are read, visitors are welcomed by name, and the room turns into a conversation.

Friends call this waiting worship or expectant waiting. The silence is not a relaxation technique or an end in itself but what a room does while it waits for God to speak through someone in it. Friends tell an ordinary quiet hour from a gathered or covered meeting, when the silence thickens and people later say they were held by the same thing at once. Think of a choir finding one note without anyone conducting. Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion, published in 1941, is one of the books most often handed to newcomers who want that described from the inside.

Early Friends were noisier: seventeenth-century meetings had much preaching, weeping and trembling. The deep silence settled in later, during the inward-turning quietist period of the eighteenth century.

Who are the Quakers, and what does the Religious Society of Friends believe?

If you have ever felt no one should stand between you and God, you share the Quakers' founding idea. The Quakers, formally the Religious Society of Friends, are a Christian body that began in northern England around 1652. They teach that God can be known directly by any person, with no priest, sacrament or creed in between.

George Fox (1624 to 1691) is the founding figure, a weaver's son who walked the country after deciding the clergy could tell him nothing his own experience had not. Margaret Fell of Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire made her house the movement's administrative center, funded its traveling preachers, and years later married Fox. The ministers who spread out from the north from 1654 are remembered as the Valiant Sixty.

Most of what outsiders notice follows. If God speaks to anyone, a paid ministry is unnecessary, a church building is only a room, women may preach equally with men, and nobody owes anyone deference.

Early Friends paid for it. Thousands were jailed under the Quaker Act of 1662 and the Conventicle Acts before the Toleration Act of 1689 eased the pressure, 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 is far less uniform than the founding story suggests, and no statement exists that everyone signs. Evangelical Friends in Kenya, Bolivia and the American Midwest hold a recognizably orthodox Protestant faith, with the Bible as authority and Jesus Christ as savior. Liberal meetings in Britain, Australia and the northeastern United States include Friends who call themselves Christian, Universalist, Buddhist, Jewish or nontheist, and Britain Yearly Meeting has an organized Nontheist Friends Network.

Both wings trace themselves to Fox, who insisted on a living Christ speaking now and cared less about doctrine than obedience. Robert Barclay's Apology, in Latin in 1676 and in English as An Apology for the True Christian Divinity two years later, is the closest thing to a systematic theology. He used the scholastic vocabulary of his day because critics said Quakers had no thought behind them, and he is still read, and disputed, by Friends who think the Society drifted from him.

What is the Inner Light, and why do Quakers have no creed?

Maybe in a quiet moment you have sensed something in you wiser than your moods. Quakers have a name for that. The Inner Light, which many Friends call the Inward Light or simply the Light, is the direct presence of God in every person, available without a go-between and able to guide and convict whoever pays attention to it.

George Fox put it in a phrase Friends still quote, from a 1656 letter written in prison at Launceston: walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.

Two claims sit inside it. The Light is in everyone, including people outside the church, outside Christianity and outside any behavior you approve of. It belongs to God, not to you. Friends separate it from conscience, taste or opinion, since a Light that only told you what you wanted would be worthless. Barclay described it as a real spiritual substance, not a faculty of the natural mind.

The creedless position follows. 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 swap a document for the encounter. Like framing a photo of a friend and no longer calling them.

Friends disagree sharply, along branch lines, about how far this goes. The Richmond Declaration of Faith was drawn up at a conference of Orthodox yearly meetings in Richmond, Indiana, in 1887, with British and Irish Friends alongside Americans. It set out orthodox belief and argued Quakers had let doctrine go slack. London Yearly Meeting declined to adopt it, the Hicksite meetings were not party to it, and it remains a reference point for evangelical Friends, not the whole Society.

Britain Yearly Meeting uses Quaker Faith and Practice, revised roughly once a generation, which collects individual Friends' writings instead of defining belief, plus a short booklet of Advices and Queries that asks questions rather than making statements.

The cost: a body with no doctrinal floor struggles to say what it is, and newcomers to liberal meetings expect Christianity and meet something harder to name. A second argument runs alongside. Rufus Jones, teaching at Haverford in the early twentieth century, presented Quakerism as a branch of Western mysticism. Lewis Benson spent a career answering him, insisting Fox spoke as a prophet announcing Christ's present government, not as a mystic describing an inner state.

What is vocal ministry, and how does a Friend know when to stand and speak?

Worried you will feel pressure to speak? Relax. Many people never do. Vocal ministry is a short spoken message offered during worship by anyone who believes they have been given something to say for the meeting, not for themselves. Friends judge the moment by inner and physical signs, not by a rule.

The usual description is a rising pressure attached to one specific thought that will not go away when you set it aside, often with a hammering heart, shaking hands or a dry mouth. Friends say a message that disappears once you release it was probably not for speaking. The advice to newcomers is blunt: if in doubt, do not.

The message is spoken standing, audibly, to the whole room, and kept short, often under two minutes. It is not addressed to anyone and does not answer or argue with an earlier message.

Silence returns for several minutes so the words can settle, and someone who has spoken usually does not speak again that day. Nobody thanks, applauds or reviews the speaker.

Meetings guide vocal ministry gently, 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 by an elder, a practice called eldering. At its best it is a private, kind conversation; at its worst it has silenced unwelcome voices.

Friends have slang for an hour that fills with quick messages before any can settle: a popcorn meeting. The other named failure is prepared ministry, arriving with something you meant to say.

This differs from channeling. 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 are the Quaker testimonies, and how do Friends live by them?

If you want a faith that shows in how you live, this is where Quakers put their weight. The testimonies are shared commitments Friends understand to follow from the Light, lived positions rather than rules: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship, taught across North America as SPICES. That acronym is a twentieth-century teaching device, not a historic list, and plenty of older Friends object to it. Testimony here means witness, something a life shows without announcing it.

Peace is the best known and has a date. In January 1661 Friends gave Charles II a declaration that they utterly denied all outward wars and strife with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretense whatever. You will notice it in a Friend who will not hit back.

Integrity produced the refusal of oaths. Friends read Matthew 5:34, swear not at all, as binding, and argued that swearing implies a lower standard of truth for ordinary speech. Since an oath of allegiance was the standard trap used to jail them, refusing cost them their liberty again and again. They eventually won the right to affirm, in England through the Affirmation Act of 1695, and affirmation now exists in most common-law countries.

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.

The testimonies have a public record. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting moved against slave trading among members in 1758, largely under pressure from John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, and Quakers were nine of the twelve founders of the London committee formed in 1787 to abolish the slave trade. Elizabeth Fry carried 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 Friends themselves document. Quakers owned slaves for a century before stopping, and the internal campaign was slow and bitterly resisted by wealthy members. Quaker-run firms Friends still cite with pride, among them Cadbury, Rowntree, Barclays and Lloyds, grew rich inside an economy Friends were also criticizing. Ideals and lives rarely line up perfectly, for a community or for you.

How do Quakers make decisions without voting?

If you have sat through meetings where the loudest voice won, this may sound too good to be true. It is slow, and real. Decisions are made 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, instead of a majority. Nobody votes and nothing is decided by counting heads.

A clerk introduces each item, calls on speakers, and listens for the point of unity, then drafts a minute and reads it aloud for the meeting to approve or correct on the spot, so the decision exists in agreed words before anyone leaves.

Speaking follows worship discipline: one at a time, addressing the clerk and meeting rather than each other, no direct replies to the previous speaker, a pause between contributions. Silence is called on purpose when discussion overheats.

A Friend who disagrees may ask to stand aside, recording dissent while letting the decision go ahead, or 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 assumes the meeting seeks something beyond its own preferences, and degrades fast without that. Friends name the failures. A determined individual can hold a meeting hostage under cover of principle. Exhaustion can pass for unity when people just 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 allowed, and by teaching the difference between a leading and an opinion.

The refusal to force a judgment before it is ripe, like waiting for fruit instead of pulling it green, has parallels elsewhere. For the divinatory version of the same instinct, 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 are the branches of Quakerism, and why do some meetings have pastors and hymns?

Found a Quaker service near you with a pastor and hymns? That is not the wrong place; it is the most common kind. Quakerism split repeatedly in the nineteenth century. The main branches today are liberal unprogrammed Friends, pastoral or programmed Friends, evangelical Friends and Conservative Friends, and most Quakers worldwide worship 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 split 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 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 carried it abroad, most consequentially to western Kenya, where American Friends founded a mission at Kaimosi in 1902 and where the world's largest Quaker population now lives.

A programmed Sunday meeting in Kenya, Indiana or Bolivia looks like a Protestant service: pastor, singing, Bible reading, sermon, prayer and often an offering. Most keep a period of open silent worship somewhere in the hour, what survives of the older form. These Friends usually say Christ leads the worship and the pastor helps the meeting rather than mediating for it.

Relations between branches run from warm to nonexistent, like cousins at a big reunion. Friends World Committee for Consultation exists to keep them in touch, while Friends United Meeting, Friends General Conference and Evangelical Friends Church International each gather different yearly meetings. Disagreements over sexuality and scriptural authority have caused further separations in the twenty-first century, including inside North American yearly meetings, so the fault lines are still live.

How do you attend a Quaker meeting for the first time?

Thinking of actually going? Here is all you need, and it is less than you fear. Look up a local meeting's listed time, arrive about ten minutes early, tell whoever greets you 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 needed, and unprogrammed meetings are open to anyone who walks in off the street.

A greeter will often hand you a short leaflet. Seats carry no hierarchy, though the bench facing the room is usually for the Friends holding that day's meeting. No announcement marks the start.

You are not expected to speak, close your eyes, adopt a posture or pray. If someone stands and speaks, listen, and let silence follow. If nothing at all happens for sixty minutes, that is an ordinary meeting, not a failed one.

At the close, shake hands with whoever is nearest, expect to be asked your name, and expect notices, tea and some friendly curiosity.

Three things surprise most first-timers.

First, the hour is longer than it sounds. 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 of several decades still meet them. It is like the first minutes in cold water before your body adjusts.

Second, messages are often very ordinary, about a hospital visit, or a hedge. That plainness is deliberate; a polished message draws mild suspicion.

Third, nothing is asked of you afterward: no follow-up call, money request or membership pitch. Some find that restful; others, too hands-off to return.

A regular who does not join is an attender, and many stay one for years or for good. Membership is requested by letter to the local meeting, which appoints a small committee to visit and then records a minute.

Questions people ask