Welcome to Your First Time at a Quaker Meeting 

You will be welcome at the Reno Friends Meeting House and to our Meeting for Worship. If you have never been to a Quaker Meeting before, this page may be helpful. On entering the Meeting Room, feel free to sit anywhere, but it is helpful to leave seats near the doors for latecomers.

In Quaker Meeting, we practice Silent Worship, and it lasts about an hour.  We begin in silence at the scheduled time, and after about an hour our Clerk will begin to join hands with the circle to signal the end of worship. Otherwise there is no fixed structure to the Meeting. There are no creeds, hymns or set prayers. There is no minister in charge and no formal service.  Children who are too young for an hour of Silent Worship are invited to our First Day School.  About ten minutes prior to the end of our worship, the children will enter the Meeting to join their parents in silence.

A Quaker Meeting is a way of worship based on silence, a silence of expectancy in which we seek to come nearer to God and each other as we share the stillness of the Meeting. Participants are not expected to say or do anything other than join in this seeking. Do not be concerned if the silence seems strange at first. We rarely experience silence in everyday life so it is not unusual to be distracted by outside noise or roving thoughts.

If someone feels compelled by the Spirit to speak, pray or read, the silence will be broken. Such ministry, which has not been planned before worship begins, seeks to enrich the gathered worship. If something is said that does not seem to make sense, try to reach behind the words to the Spirit which inspired them or allow them to be absorbed into the silence. Meeting for Worship is not a debate, so it is inappropriate to respond directly to spoken ministry -- although it is not unusual for other ministry to build on what has been said before. Often a Meeting will pass with no words spoken.  Other times many will be called to share their ministry.

(Thomas R. Kelly, 1938; from Quaker Faith and Practice, para 2.36, published by Britain Yearly Meeting)

No two Quaker Meetings are the same. A Meeting can embrace a wide range of experience. Some people may experience a profound sense of awe or an awareness of the presence of God. Others may have a less certain sense of an indefinable spiritual dimension.