Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends) characteristically affirm the rejection of outward sacraments, dispensing with water baptism and the physical bread and cup of communion. They hold that the realities these signs point to, inward cleansing, and communion with Christ, are received directly and spiritually, and that to insist on the outward rite is to mistake the sign for the substance. All of life, rightly lived, is held to be sacramental, so no ceremony is singled out; worship classically proceeds in expectant silence rather than through prescribed rites.
Not all modern Quakers hold this position uniformly. Classical, unprogrammed worship, silent and without pastor or planned liturgy, remains the practice of Liberal and Conservative Friends, chiefly in Britain and parts of the United States, and continues the original seventeenth-century rejection of outward rites. Programmed or Evangelical Friends, however, a majority of Quakers worldwide today, especially in Kenya, which has the largest Yearly Meeting of any country, worship with hymns, sermons, and a pastor in a service closer to other Protestant churches, and some Evangelical Friends churches have reintroduced water baptism or a form of communion, a development that unprogrammed Friends generally regard as a departure from the tradition's founding testimony.