Community and Worship

Douglas V. Steere was a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College, and Community and Worship comes from the period when he was giving his first sustained attention to the inner life of the Society of Friends. Written in 1940, with Europe already at war and the old moral certainties of the West visibly failing, it asks what holds a religious community together when the common life around it is coming apart. The essay is addressed to Friends, but its question is broader than any one denomination: what happens to a people when they gather to worship, and what does that gathering do to the way they live with one another afterward?

Steere's central claim is that worship is not an activity added to community life but the thing that makes a deeper community possible in the first place. People who wait together in silence are drawn out of their private concerns and into a shared attentiveness to God, and in that attentiveness they come to know one another differently than they could through conversation, common projects, or shared opinion alone. He draws on the Quaker practice of the gathered meeting, in which no one leads and no one performs, to show that corporate worship can be both profoundly personal and genuinely shared. The solitary seeker and the worshipping body are not rivals; each needs the other. Worship that stays purely individual becomes thin and self-regarding, and community that has no center in worship becomes merely social or merely organizational.

The essay also presses an ethical point. If worship truly binds people together, its fruit should show in how they bear one another's burdens and in how the community faces the world beyond itself. Steere resists any retreat into a worship that is satisfied with its own warmth. The listening that takes place in the meeting is meant to issue in obedience, and he treats the credibility of a worshipping people as something tested in their ordinary common life.

The essay has continued to matter because it states, briefly and without technical apparatus, a conviction that much of Steere's later writing on prayer, listening, and contemplative community would develop. It offers a corrective to two familiar temptations: treating spiritual formation as a private project, and treating church as a social club with a religious veneer. Its Quaker grounding gives it a distinctive texture, since it assumes silence rather than liturgy as the shared form, yet its argument carries over to any tradition that takes gathered worship seriously.

Who should read this: pastors, small-group leaders, and members of worshipping communities who suspect that their gatherings are missing something they cannot quite name, and anyone curious about the Quaker understanding of corporate silence. It is not for readers looking for a practical manual on structuring a worship service or building a program, since it is an essay about the meaning of gathered worship rather than a guide to its mechanics.