Quaker Business

Hearts and Minds Prepared for the National Gathering

Do Quaker business meetings make your eyes roll up? Mine too. Or have you ever had the pleasure of being present at a gathered Meeting for Worship for Business? Yeah, me too.

My experience of Quaker business depends on how it’s held, a bit like Meeting for Worship. If the vocal ministry on Sunday is a commentary on something they heard on the radio, my eyes roll up. If instead vocal ministry arises from a place of spirit, from deep silence, I am touched, inspired, healed, strengthened.

So what makes Quaker business meetings inspiring, healing, strengthening? Well, it’s the same thing as a regular Meeting for Worship: the quality of worship that underpins the words.

I find consensus irritating, like hearing about the radio program. Consensus is ‘an agreement that emerges through discussion, compromise, and mutual understanding’. It is a humanly negotiated agreement and not particularly worshipful, so it is not particularly inspiring, sometimes positively eye rolling.

There is something so much more, the ‘sense of the Meeting’, which is just as difficult to articulate as a ‘gathered meeting for worship’. In a properly worshipful Quaker business meeting, where we listen for Spirit rather than lobbying or negotiating, we can arrive at the ‘sense of the Meeting’. Its quality is quiet, calm, gathering, soft. It is not hard won, but rather a thing to celebrate together that we have been given such a gift.

How do we listen for the ‘sense of the Meeting’? We wait expectantly, like in Meeting for Worship. We offer our words from the Spirit of the Meeting, like in Meeting for Worship. We listen to what is arising, like Meeting for Worship.

We find the sense of the meeting when the name “Meeting for Worship for Business” is an accurate description.

Written by Sheila Keane, June 2026