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Comment by 8fGTBjZxBcHq | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I don't know what to do with the assumption that going to meeting in meetinghouses in what quakers do either. I've been to a lot of quaker meetings and the venue has been pretty evenly split between traditional meeting houses, normal white American protestant-style churches, and like random community centers and shit.

I think this might be different in the historical quaker strongholds like parts of the US east and England, but even having a quaker meeting house to go to is probably not part of the experience of being quaker for most of them. Shit iirc the majority don't even practice the silent worship anymore right?

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There are several different branches of Quakers, as a result of various splits over the centuries, with different worship styles and somewhat different theology.

The most evangelical branch (EFCI) often refer to their congregations as 'Friends Churches', and have buildings and service styles that aren't radically different from other protestant churches. At the other end of the scale there are also meetings which hold fast to traditional silent worship, some with a very liberal theological attitude and some (though fewer) with a conservative one. There are a lot fewer Quakers in this 'unprogrammed' tradition in the world, though, partly because the more evangelical and orthodox programmed meetings were quite active in missionary work.

In Britain, FWIW, almost all of us follow the unprogrammed tradition (and would definitely refer to our building as a meeting house, or meet in a community centre or something - the building is not important in our theology). In the US less so, though unprogrammed worship is fairly strong in Pennsylvania and a few other places.

To be clear unprogrammed worship is absolutely still a thing in the US. In my large metro area there are I think five active meetings and two of them of them are unprogrammed.

The reason it was interesting to me is that before I decided to start going to meetings again as an adult, I actually didn't know that ANY quakers anywhere did anything other than silent worship. So to find out that not only does it exist but is probably the majority of quakers today was jarring.

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