The Christian Service With No Sermon and No Schedule

Doors open. People walk in, take their seats on benches arranged facing each other in a square, and stop talking. The room stays quiet for about an hour. Sometimes a member stands and offers a short message — a verse, a memory, a moral observation — and sits down again. Several minutes are expected to pass before anyone else speaks. At the end someone shakes a neighbor's hand, and the meeting is over. That is the entire liturgy.

George Fox, a 28-year-old shoemaker's apprentice, started preaching this way in northern England in 1652. He had concluded after a long spiritual crisis that ordained priests, prepared sermons, sacraments, and church buildings were unnecessary intermediaries: every person had access to what he called the Inner Light, and worship was simply waiting together for it to speak. The early Friends were jailed, fined, and whipped for refusing oaths and tithes. Free Quaker assembly only became legal in England with the Act of Toleration in 1689.

Most Quakers today, especially in Kenya, Bolivia, and parts of the United States, hold pastoral services with hymns and a paid minister; the silent style now accounts for roughly 11 percent of Friends worldwide. Where it survives, the meetinghouse is usually a square room with no altar, no pulpit, no cross. Newcomers often misread the silence as awkward at first, then as patient, then as something they cannot quite name.

The form is so plain it is almost impossible to commercialize, which is probably why it is still around.