s of attending and most of those who subsequently do minister, find it can be upwards of three years before they do speak.
There is no music or sound used in the meetings. Silent worship is thus key to achieving ministry – in effect the Friends adopt similar techniques to those who meditate.
Quaker Faith and Practice
In our meetings for worship we seek though the stillness to know God's will for ourselves and for the gathered group. Our meetings for church affairs, in which we conduct our business, are also meetings for worship based on silence, and they carry the same expectation that God's guidance can be discerned if we are truly listening together and to each other … It is this belief that God's will can be recognised through the discipline of silent waiting which distinguishes our decision making process from the secular idea of consensus. We have a common purpose in seeking God's will through waiting and listening, believing that every activity of life should be subject to divine guidance.
There is a real danger with voice hearing, which is explained in the section on this form of experience. There is, however, no doubting the sincerity of the people who belonged and belong to this movement - they wished for direct and not indirect experience of the spiritual world.
The approach used today to achieve ministries is quiet contemplation, but at one time, the direct experience achieved by Quakers could be ecstasy.
It is almost as if we are dealing with two mystic groups here, one which aimed at ecstatic experience and one which aims far 'lower' [with no intention here to be derogatory].
Spiritual experience was induced by the practise of ‘Quaking’ – a form of physical movement which involves shaking, shouting, shuddering, shivering – all of it deliberately - Extreme physical exercise. Groups of ‘Friends’ gathered together in silence and stood and shook and quaked until they achieved breakthrough.
Why Did the Quakers Stop Quaking?
The quaking movements were highly effective, so it begs the question – why did the Quakers stop quaking? These days all meetings are executed in quiet contemplation, no quaking takes place.
David Yount, a Quaker, wrote an article in 2002 entitled, “Why Did the Quakers Stop Quaking?” The essay was prompted by an incident following a public lecture where Yount was challenged by a Pentecostal minister who suggested that Friends had lost touch with the fervour of their forbears when they ceased to quake. “I'm not good at thinking on my feet,” Yount wrote, “but I believe the response that popped into my head that day was pretty good. I suggested to him that Quakers stopped quaking when we stopped being persecuted.”
Bradford Kenney, a non-Quaker however believed that the opposite was true: “Quakers stopped quaking because they were persecuted, even imprisoned, for their wild ecstatic experiences.” And from what I can see, he is right. Quakers didn’t stop quaking when the persecution ended; they stopped quaking to end the persecution. The turnaround in the treatment of Quakers began with the Toleration Act of 1688, however the quaking had stopped many years before.
Richard Baxter was no friend of Quakerism and he wrote in 1664 that the persecution had all but stopped the quaking by then………….
At first they did use to fall into violent Tremblings and sometimes Vomitings in their meetings, and pretended to be violently acted by the Spirit; but now that is ceased, they only meet, and he that pretendeth to be moved by the Spirit speaketh; and sometimes they say nothing, but sit an hour or more in silence, and then depart.
But it was not just persecution that may have caused the cessation of quaking. There are indications that there was an intentional effort on the part of the second generation Quaker leadership to prohibit ecstatic behaviour and then to censure all reference to it from surviving manuscripts. As the movement grew and became more organized in the latter half of the 17th century, ecstatic experiences were increasingly seen by the leadership as an embarrassment.
These people were theologians 