Unprogrammed worship goes back to the movement's founder rather than to a later simplification of something more elaborate. George Fox, preaching in England in the 1650s, taught that every person could know the Inward Light directly and needed no ordained minister, no set liturgy and no church building to reach it, a claim that put Quakers at odds with both the established church and the Puritan establishment of the Commonwealth and led to repeated imprisonment of early Friends under laws against unlicensed religious meetings. Meetings for worship in that first generation were often held in members' homes or in the open, partly from conviction and partly from necessity, since Quakers were barred from many public spaces and their own meeting houses were sometimes pulled down by hostile authorities.
The 1689 Act of Toleration finally allowed Quakers to worship without prosecution, by which point the unprogrammed form, silence, expectant waiting, and ministry given only when a Friend felt moved to rise and speak, was already settled practice rather than an improvisation. A programmed form, with a paid pastor, a sermon and hymns, developed in the nineteenth-century United States under the influence of the wider evangelical revival and is now the more numerous form worldwide, particularly in Africa and Latin America, which makes unprogrammed worship the older but no longer the majority Quaker practice, kept most consistently in Britain and the north-eastern United States.