These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
Meetings for Worship: Queries
For the Individual:
In what ways do I prepare my heart and mind to receive
the power of God's presence and love?
How does worship deepen my relationship with God? Is
this inspiration carried over into my daily life?
For the Meeting:
Are meetings for worship held in expectant waiting for
Divine guidance?
Do activities of our Meeting find their inspiration in worship?
In what ways does worship uphold meeting activities?
Meetings for Worship: Advices
The heart of the Religious Society of Friends is the
Meeting for Worship. In worship we are called to seek God's will with
our entire being: body, mind, and soul.
Worship is the adoring response of the heart and mind to
the influences of the Spirit of God. It stands neither in forms nor
in the formal disuse of forms. God is a spirit, and they that
worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in
Truth. (John 4:24, RSV) We treasure silence as a path towards inspiration and guidance
that leads to communion with God.
In our Meetings for Worship, we are called to listen
with prayerful obedience to God, with a willingness to give as well
as to receive. In speech or in silence, each person contributes
to the Meeting. Worshipping God together, we can strengthen
one another, and our bodies and minds can be refreshed in the life of
the Spirit. Our daily lives are linked with the Meeting,
the Meeting for Worship with our daily lives. "Let meeting for
worship nourish your whole life." (Britain Yearly Meeting,
Quaker Faith and Practice, 1.02.10)
Give adequate time for study, meditation and prayer, and
other ways of preparing for worship. Be mindful that worship is
the fusion of individual and collective waiting to experience the
love of God. Come regularly to meeting for worship even when
you are angry, depressed, tired or spiritually cold. In the silence
ask for and accept the prayerful support of others joined with you
in worship.
During the Meeting for Worship, Friends may be led by
the Spirit to testify, to share an insight, to pray, to praise.
When speaking, we should do so clearly and simply, using as many
words as necessary and as few as possible. When another speaks,
listen with an open spirit, holding the speaker in love. Rest with
the message, recognizing that even if it is not God's word for you,
it may be so for others.
Meetings for Worship: Voices
Friends, meet together and know one another in that
which is eternal, which was before the world was.
George Fox, 1657
Our worship is a deep exercise of our spirits before the
Lord, which doth not consist in an exercising the natural part or
natural mind, either to hear or speak words, or in praying according
to what we, of ourselves, can apprehend or comprehend
concerning our needs; but we wait, in silence of the fleshly part, to hear
with the new ear what God shall please to speak inwardly in our
own hearts, or outwardly through others.
Isaac Penington, 1681
In worship we have our neighbours to right and left,
before and behind, yet the Eternal Presence is over all and beneath all.
Worship does not consist in achieving a mental state
of concentrated isolation from one's fellows. But in the depth
of common worship it is as if we found our separate lives were
all one life, within whom we live and move and have our being.
Thomas R Kelly, 1938
A Friends' meeting, however silent, is at the very lowest
a witness that worship is something other and deeper than
words, and that it is to the unseen and eternal things that we desire
to give the first place in our lives. And when the meeting,
whether silent or not, is awake, and looking upwards, there is much
more in it than this. In the united stillness of a truly `gathered'
meeting there is a power known only by experience, and mysterious
even when most familiar. There are perhaps few things which
more readily flow `from vessel to vessel' than quietness.
Caroline E Stephen, 1908
Group, like individual worship, is an offering; and let
none think that because he comes to meeting dry and empty or
in great perplexity or need of help, he has "nothing to offer." He
has not only his "outward testimony" to bear, but he has his
weakness itself to lay before God in trust and love; and if the meeting
is truly "gathered," that offering may bring it to a deeper
place than any surface happiness and praise could do.
Beatrice Saxon Snell, 1965
What is the ground and foundation of the gathered
meeting? In the last analysis, it is, I am convinced, the Real Presence
of God.
Thomas R Kelly, 1940
The presence of fellow-worshippers in some gently
penetrating manner reveals to the spirit something of the nearness of
the Divine Presence. `Where two or three are gathered together
in His name' have we not again and again felt that the promise
was fulfilled and that the Master Himself was indeed `in the midst
of us'? And it is out of the depths of this stillness that there do
arise at times spoken words which, springing from the very source
of prayer, have something of the power of prayer - something of its
quickening and melting and purifying effect. Such words as
these have at least as much power as silence to gather into stillness.
Caroline E Stephen, 1908
Our way of worship is not just an historical accident; it is
a corollary from our conviction concerning the universal Light
of Christ. Believing that in every worshiper, regardless of
age, learning, sex, or any other human label, the promptness of
God's spirit are at work, Friends meet together in entirely
unprogrammed meetings, worship in silent prayer, opening themselves [to
the Spirit]. … In such corporate worship…we are led into a depth
of communion with God and with one another that is
deeply meaningful and spiritually refreshing.
L. Hugh Doncaster
Yea, though there be not a word spoken, yet is the true
spiritual worship performed, and the body of Christ edified; yea, it
may, and hath often fallen out among us, that divers meetings
have passed without one word; and yet our souls have been
greatly edified and refreshed, and our hearts wonderfully overcome
with the secret sense of God's power and Spirit, which without
words hath been ministered from one vessel to another.
Robert Barclay, 1677
For, when I came into the silent assemblies of God's people
I felt a secret power among them which touched my heart; and
as I gave way unto it I found the evil weakening in me and
the good raised up; and so I became thus knit and united unto
them, hungering more and more after the increase of this power
and life, whereby I might feel myself perfectly redeemed.…
Robert Barclay, 1678
And as many candles lighted, and put in one place, do
greatly augment the light and make it more to shine forth; so
when many are gathered together into the same life, there is more
of the glory of God, and his power appears, to the refreshment
of each individual, for that he partakes not only of the light and
life raised in himself, but in all the rest.
Robert Barclay, 1678
On one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday morning, I found
myself one of a small company of silent worshippers, who were
content to sit down together without words, that each one might
feel after and draw near to the Divine Presence, unhindered at
least, if not helped, by any human utterance. Utterance I knew
was free, should the words be given; and, before the meeting
was over a sentence or two were uttered in great simplicity by an
old and apparently untaught man, rising in his place amongst
the rest of us. I did not pay much attention to the words he
spoke, and I have no recollection of their purport. My whole soul
was filled with the unutterable peace of the undisturbed
opportunity for communion with God, with the sense that at last I had
found a place where I might, without the faintest suspicion of
insincerity, join with others in simply seeking His presence. To sit down
in silence could at least pledge me to nothing; it might open to
me (as it did that morning) the very gate of heaven.
Caroline Stephen, 1872
Silence is often a stern discipline, a laying bare of the
soul before God, a listening to the "reproof of life." But the
discipline has to be gone through, the reproof has to be submitted to,
before we can find our right place in the temple. Words may help
and silence may help, but the one thing needful is that the
heart should turn to its Maker as the needle turns to the pole. For
this we must be still.
Caroline Stephen, 1908
I returned to Quaker meeting of my childhood. It was
the silence that drew me, that deep, healing silence of the
meeting at its best, when the search of each is intensified by the search
of all, when the `gentle motions,' the `breathings and stirrings'
of the Spirit which is within each and beyond all, are
expectantly awaited and often experienced.
Elizabeth Gray Vining
The practice of Quaker worship has a strength which goes
far beyond the simple act of sitting in an unprogrammed meeting.
It defines a community of believers and the way they
understand the bond that exists between them. It gives expression to their
sense of the indescribable holiness of God. This has probably
never been better put than by Paul in his first letter to the
Corinthians: "we teach what scripture calls: `the things that no eye has seen and
no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God
has prepared for those that love him.' These are the very things that
God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit reaches the
depths of everything, even the depths of God."
John Punshon, 1987
As Catholic worship is centered in the altar and
Protestant worship in the sermon, worship for the Society of Friends
attempts to realize as its center the divine Presence revealed within. In
a Catholic church the altar is placed so as to become the focus
of adoration; in a typical Protestant church the pulpit
localizes attention; while in a Friends Meeting House there is no
visible point of concentration, worship being here directed
neither toward the actions nor the words of others, but toward the
inward experience of the gathered group.
Howard Brinton, 1952
Only in its method is the Society of Friends unique.
The Quaker meeting for worship and the Quaker meeting for
business are unique institutions. It is their purpose to expose the soul
to the Light from God so that peace is removed if it ought to
be removed, or attained if it can be attained. If the soul
becomes sensitive, if its vision is widened and deepened so that new
areas of life come within its ken, then a new requirement may be
laid upon it and peace removed until that requirement is met. If
the soul is able to find in the silence union with the peace of God
at the heart of existence, then inward peace is secured and
new knowledge and power received. The soul, no longer
exhausting its energy in conflict with itself, becomes integrated and
unified. Hence arises new power and vision for tasks ahead.
Howard H. Brinton, 1948
There are times of dryness in our individual lives,
when meeting may seem difficult or even worthless. At such times
one may be tempted not to go to meeting, but it may be better to
go, prepared to offer as our contribution to the worship simply a sense
of need. In such a meeting one may not at the time realise
what one has gained, but one will nevertheless come away helped.
Berks & Oxon QM Ministry &
Extension Comittee, 1948
The meeting for worship on a basis of silent waiting in
which each member present is open to receive and to express the
word which comes to him is a direct consequence of the drive
towards perfectionism which insisted on the priesthood of all
believers and the absence of a professional clergy. It is a direct
consequence also of the experimentalism which denies the efficacy of
rites and ceremonies.
Kenneth E. Boulding, 1964
When a local meeting is engaged in building this kind
of religious community, the meeting for worship becomes
its culminating experience. Here in the corporate silence
people who live in the world and face all of its problems gather
each week both to work and to let God work. Let there be no
mistake about either of these aspects of worship, for both are present.
The meeting for worship when it gathers in the silence is
no longer merely a respectable outward association. It is soil
that has been ploughed and harrowed and disked by these
common experiences. It has been made open for the planting of the seed.
Douglas V. Steere, 1940
The Meeting for Worship is at the very heart of our
Quaker faith and the life-blood of the Society. Again and again it
has proved to be the right discipline by which the individual
may free himself from the usual cares that beset the mind, and
allow the light to break in upon his consciousness. Whether it be
the first time or the thousandth, it is equally wonderful,
equally rewarding and refreshing.
John H. Hobart, 1954
Do you come to meeting for worship with heart and
mind prepared? What is the preparation that readies us ... for the life
and power of the seed? It is not simply a matter of arriving
for meeting on time, though with our hectic lives even that is
not always easy. Preparation for worship is a life that integrates
prayer, meditation, edifying reading, and deep conversation into the
busy routines that most of us pursue. We cannot expect to dive
casually out of the heat of the world into the coolness of
divine communication for an hour per week. That only brings the
heat of the world in and disturbs the waters, leaving no place for peace.
Douglas Gwyn, 1997
If meeting for worship becomes persistently and
repeatedly jarring and meaningless, that may be God's challenge to you
to rethink your Christianity and come, with his help, to a
conclusion as to what you really believe. Feelings always mean
something, and by taking counsel with God in prayer we may come to
find whether they are the result of spiritual neglect or spiritual growth.
Beatrice Saxon Snell, 1965
These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
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