Unprogrammed silent worship

Unprogrammed silent worship is the distinctive practice of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, in which a congregation gathers and worships together in silence, without any prearranged order of service, sermon, liturgy, hymns or presiding minister. Friends sit together in stillness, waiting expectantly upon God, in the conviction that Christ or the divine Light is present to teach the gathered meeting directly and inwardly, without the mediation of clergy or set forms. Out of the silence, any worshipper, woman or man, without distinction of office, who feels moved by the Spirit may rise to speak, offering a brief "vocal ministry" of words, prayer or song, after which the silence resumes; a meeting may pass with much such ministry or with none at all, in unbroken quiet.

The practice grew from the radical conviction of the movement's seventeenth-century founders that God speaks directly to every person through the "inner light," so that the outward apparatus of priest, sacrament and prescribed worship is unnecessary and may even hinder the immediate encounter with the divine. The silent meeting embodies this belief in its purest form, treating the gathered stillness itself as the ground of worship and the whole company as a "priesthood of all believers" among whom any may be led to minister. Not all Quakers today worship in this way, a large portion, especially in Africa and the Americas, hold programmed services with pastors and singing, but unprogrammed silent worship remains the historic and defining Quaker form, and one of the most radical simplifications of Christian worship, dispensing with nearly everything external in favour of the shared, expectant silence.

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.