On Speaking Out of the Silence: Vocal Ministry in the Unprogrammed Meeting for Worship

Douglas Steere's essay On Speaking Out of the Silence was published in 1972 as a Pendle Hill Pamphlet, the series issued by the Quaker study center near Philadelphia. Steere, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College for decades, wrote it for a particular tradition and a particular problem. In the unprogrammed Meeting for Worship there is no pastor, no sermon and no order of service. The gathered people wait in silence, and anyone may rise to speak if moved to do so. That freedom is the heart of the practice, and it is also its difficulty. Spoken words can deepen a meeting, or they can scatter it. Steere wrote to help Friends think more carefully about when speech belongs in that silence and when it does not.

The essay's central claim is that vocal ministry is a response to something received, not an act of self-expression. Steere treats the silence as the ground from which any true word must arise, and he is wary of speaking that comes from the speaker's own agenda, from the wish to be heard or from the discomfort of quiet. He describes the discipline of waiting to know whether a prompting is genuine and whether it is meant for the gathered group rather than for oneself. He is equally concerned about the opposite failure, in which a person who has been given a word withholds it out of timidity. Throughout, he treats the meeting as a shared body, in which the listening of the whole group makes a spoken message possible and in which the hearers carry real responsibility for the quality of the worship. The argument is practical and pastoral rather than technical, drawing on the long Quaker experience of corporate discernment.

The essay has continued to matter because it names a question that reaches well beyond Quaker meetings: how any speech, in any Christian setting, can stay answerable to prayer and listening. Preachers, teachers, spiritual directors and leaders of small groups will find in it a sober account of what it costs for a word to be given rather than manufactured. It also remains one of the clearer short introductions to the inner workings of unprogrammed worship, written by someone who practiced it throughout his life.

Who should read this: Quakers and those worshiping with them, especially anyone who has felt the pull to speak in meeting and wondered how to test it, along with pastors and group leaders who want a deeper standard for their own speaking. It is not for readers looking for a historical survey of Quakerism or a theology of worship in general, since it assumes the unprogrammed setting and addresses its practitioners directly.