Open Worship, Guided Worship, Fluid Worship: A Talk with John Helding

A Quaker author talk. John Helding’s “How Can I Keep from Singing” appears in the August edition of Friends Journal.

This episode explores how Quaker worship language can feel confusing or intimidating to newcomers, and why more welcoming terms may help. John Helding shares how different Quaker meetings use open worship, guided worship, and worship sharing in ways that blend tradition with innovation. The conversation argues that clearer, more positive terminology can make worship feel more accessible, inclusive, and community-oriented.

Bio

John Helding is a member of Lopez Island (Wash.) Meeting, where he has served as co-clerk for a number of years. John previously served on the board of American Friends Service Committee and was founding board clerk of Quaker Voluntary Service. He currently serves on the Friends Fiduciary Corporation board.

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Transcript

How Quaker Worship Can Be Open, Guided, and Fluid

This episode explores how different Quaker meetings shape worship in practice, from silent open worship to worship sharing and guided formats. Martin Kelley and John Helding compare two West Coast Quaker communities and use that contrast to rethink the language Quakers use to describe their gatherings.John Helding shares how moving from a deeply traditional silent meeting in San Francisco to a more varied, community-rooted meeting on Lopez Island changed his understanding of worship, participation, and spiritual growth. The conversation matters for anyone trying to understand what actually happens in Quaker spaces and why terminology can either welcome newcomers or push them away.

Full transcript

Martin Kelley:

I always feel a little sad for people who are looking up Quakers on the internet, know nothing, and find all these terms about what types of Quakers are and what they might expect in worship. You have all sorts of acronyms for different Quaker bodies, ZFI, FGC, FUM, you have unprogrammed worship, do you have unprogrammed worship? You have liberal friends, conservative friends, evangelical friends, and what are you actually going to find if you walk into your local nearest meeting house or Quaker church? It’s just really confusing. Today I have with us John Helding.

John Helding:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Martin Kelley:

A West Coast US Friend who has a story of two Quaker meetings. So welcome John to the podcast here.

John Helding:

Martin, thank you. It’s good to be here.

Martin Kelley:

Now, your two examples shouldn’t be confusing. They are both part of the same regional Quaker group, Pacific Yearly Meeting. They are both on the liberal—

John Helding:

Well, they’re both on the West Coast, but let’s, you know, diving into acronyms, San Francisco Meeting is in PYM, Pacific Yearly Meeting, and Lopez Island is in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, and they are proudly two different yearly meetings. Yeah, okay.

Martin Kelley:

That’s right. Silly me.

John Helding:

Yeah, well, let me just wipe that then in post production.

Martin Kelley:

So let’s start again here from that spot. So one would think that the two meetings that you are talking about should be pretty much the same. They’re both West Coast liberal meetings. One is Pacific Yearly Meeting, the other North Pacific Yearly Meeting. They should be the same, but as you tell us in the latest edition of Friends Journal, they are not. Tell us a little bit more.

John Helding:

Well, I came to Quakerism in my thirties. That was my Quaker youth. And I was living in San Francisco, only ten blocks or so from the then San Francisco meeting house. Had a relative that was a part of the Quaker community, she introduced me to it, and so that’s where I started to go and it really spoke to me in all the ways that you can find a spiritual home and have that feeling of belonging.

John Helding:

San Francisco Friends, very weighty Friends, another Quaker term, of Friends that have a lot of experience and model in a really powerful way. It’s part of what attracted me, is just like, wow, those are really marvelous people. I’d like to get more of what they’re getting, quite honestly. And San Francisco, with all of those experienced Quakers, was very proud about being a silent meeting or an expectant waiting worship meeting.

John Helding:

We did have, so you enter in silence, and then we had a long period of time with silence, and then there would be vocal ministries. Somebody would rise if they had a message to share. But boy, you were very thoughtful about the messages you shared. You were very thoughtful about the length. And you would get eldering afterwards if somehow your message was sliding off or not quite reaching, or maybe a little too political or even secular in ways, which all was helpful, if not a little intimidating.

John Helding:

And I was a new convert, so to speak, and I was excited about what I was experiencing. And through a lot of trial and error and friendly eldering, I learned how to settle into that deep silence. I left San Francisco after about 10 years of being in that meeting and moved north.

Martin Kelley:

And I just want to—can I just, just a moment? What you described there sounds like your kind of classic sort of liberal Quaker silent meeting. So for a lot of people who are searching any East Coast liberal meeting, it’s going to probably be some variation of that.

John Helding:

Be some variation. Yeah. We were, I mean, we took it a ways. We also had a tradition the last number of years I was in San Francisco of three-hour extended meetings for worship. That became popular. You start with a group at three hours, then another group came in at two hours and then another group came in at one hour.

Martin Kelley:

Right. That became popular in the East Coast too.

John Helding:

And by the end you had the gathered body. So again we took it all quite seriously. We worked hard on how to enhance the quality around that aspect of very traditional original conception of how Quakers will meet in worship. I moved to be with a partner, my now wife, who I got reintroduced to at a college choir reunion.

John Helding:

One of those situations and hadn’t seen her for twenty-six years and or she me and we started dating and I moved up to Lopez Island for a tryout. And what was fabulous is that I came to this island that had a Quaker meeting. Actually, what’s referred to as a Quaker worship group, not a formal meeting yet, but a smaller group.

John Helding:

We met in houses for a month at a time. One of the folks, a member of that group, would host the meeting. We went around from house to house. And right off the bat, while there was silent worship or what I refer to as open worship, there was also what my San Francisco Friends would say, my God, that’s programmed worship. So we had Worship Sharing Sunday, which had queries that would guide your worship, very kind of planned in advance. And then we had Singing Sunday, which I talk about in the article I wrote, where we would sing songs pretty much through most of the worship time. And obviously the songs had been written ahead and somebody had thought about them ahead of time.

Martin Kelley:

Happy happening.

Martin Kelley:

Well, there’s that old joke. You know the one like why can’t Quakers sing? Or why are they so bad? Why are we so bad? And it’s because we’re always scanning the next line before we sing it to make sure we’re in agreement with it. And there’s a certain truth.

John Helding:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Helding:

Yeah. So it was a bit of a shock. And because I was very, very attached to in part because I had learned how to worship in silence, how to sit in the silence, how to connect with spirit and not have any pre-planned activities around it. And so moving into this was quite a bit different. And of course it was very different to move from San Francisco, which I joke as a city with 3,000 restaurants and I moved to an island with 3,000 inhabitants. And so it was a big cultural change that way, sense of place changed that way.

John Helding:

But over time, it grew on me. And I share about that. It just grew on me that there was power in different forms, even if they weren’t sort of the traditional or original form of Quaker worship, and broke me out of making the process the goal.

John Helding:

But thinking more about when we worship, what are we trying to accomplish? Where are we trying to travel? What’s the fruits of that harvest? And that has had a profound impact on me and how I engage with Quaker worship. It’s really also just thinking about how we can innovate versus just stick with something that, in the case of pure silent worship, goes back over, you know, three hundred years in the Quaker tradition.

Martin Kelley:

And some of these other techniques, you know, you mentioned worship sharing, which I think in its kind of current forms is more of a nineteen seventies kind of thing, nineteen eighties, it’s fairly frequent and fairly new. And I think was often started because meetings would be kind of dry, there’d be the silence, but you know, no one would speak and you know, you go week after week and people weren’t getting much and—

John Helding:

Yeah.

Martin Kelley:

So for those who don’t know, worship sharing is more of an idea that people will speak. Like you don’t have to be prompted by, you know, the Holy Spirit, the inward Christ to speak, like you can just share afterthoughts. Another technique that some meetings have brought in where at the end of worship, the clerk might rise and say, now anything that didn’t come up in worship, maybe is not quite the weight of the worship, but it’s still something you want to share. Share. So we have these techniques that we’ve been developing.

John Helding:

Right.

Martin Kelley:

Partly because sometimes, you know, we do know that silent worship is—it can be dry, it can be boring, it can also be wonderful and gathered, but sometimes—

John Helding:

And it can be quite intimidating.

Martin Kelley:

I and—

John Helding:

To stand and provide vocal ministry as we term it, with, as you said, that technically that condition, that spirit talked to you, shared an important message with you, and then asked you to share it with everybody else. So if you think through that a little bit, you go, hmm, I want to be really sure that’s what’s going on here, if I want to do it quote unquote right. And I think sometimes we can put that pressure.

Martin Kelley:

Yeah.

John Helding:

And then sometimes the body itself can kind of put that pressure. I think what we’ve learned with our worship sharing, we do it once a month, and we’ve been doing it now for at least three or four years.

John Helding:

Is that it helps with the really the lower bar to being able to speak. And it’s really to speak from your own experience, your own personal experience, in your own spiritual sense. It doesn’t have to be a message from God, per se. And there is an expectation that most everybody will speak. And so it’s a lower bar. It’s easier to step into that.

John Helding:

Our experiences than in our traditional open worship or the silent worship, we hear new voices giving vocal ministry because they’ve developed their skill and they practice those muscles in worship sharing. And so now worship sharing is our most popular—

Martin Kelley:

They practice those muscles, yeah.

Martin Kelley:

Nice.

John Helding:

I think Quakers are allowed to say that. It’s our most popular Sunday, first Sunday of the month. That’s where we have the largest attendance, close to 30 people on an island of 3,000 inhabitants. And so it’s great in that regard, but then it also enhances our other meetings where we have just the traditional open worship, no queries, nothing planned ahead of time.

Martin Kelley:

Well it sounds like you really like are kind of as much a community center as this, you know, Quaker worship because you do let in, you know, or you get all the people from the neighborhood. I mean, I would love if one percent of my town would show up a meeting one day. I don’t know where we put them all. New Jersey school kind of. But you know, I would love the problem of that. But it seems maybe the sort of insularity of being on an island there lets people feel free to think of that as a kind of community shared space.

John Helding:

Well, that’s certainly the truth. And our facility, we built ourselves a thirty-foot hard-sided, hard roofed yurt building, rain building, for our worship and the idea there was to create obviously a space for us to use and such but also for the community to come in and there’s now concerts there and classes and it’s located on the goat farm that we used to worship in the farmhouse of the goat farm and when we outgrew that we thought well maybe we’ll move somewhere else on the island maybe to the school or rent the Episcopal church or something. But we loved our goat farms. We figured out a way that we could build the yurt on the goat farm and really share it with them.

John Helding:

And then they use it for farm education and their events and so forth. So we feel well integrated into the community.

John Helding:

We have presence in the community. We bring other Quaker organizations onto the community, bring FCNL onto the community, Quaker Voice, which is Washington State Quaker lobbying organization, and open that to the community. And for sure we’ve had some impact and we had a lot of wars not the answer bumper stickers going around the island.

Martin Kelley:

Sure. Yeah. I just think it must be great just, you know, someone who’s a little nervous, intimidated by walking into a Quaker meeting house. Well, they’re walking in for other events. And so they’re gonna kind of know what to expect. They’ve seen the building. They’re gonna feel more comfortable.

John Helding:

Well yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think we really worked at making our meeting house, it’s called the Sunnyfield Meeting House. We really worked to make it as welcoming as we could because one of the things we learned meeting in houses, private houses, is that there was a barrier there to coming if you were a newcomer. Because not only were you coming to this new religious gathering, but you’re also coming to somebody’s private house down typically a long gravel driveway.

John Helding:

It might be hard to find. And so we realized that we weren’t getting outreach and we weren’t as welcoming as we could have been, not through any sort of intention, but just the way in which we were meeting. Yeah, so it informed us when we got the meeting house and we’ve been really blessed by a lot of newcomers and a larger meeting. We’ve almost doubled in size since we moved into the meeting house that we built.

Martin Kelley:

That’s great. So John, you’re also, to switch into the Quaker side here, we’ve been talking Quaker, but you also proposed a change of terminology Quakers might use. So I’m fascinated by this. I’m a little worried, I’m gonna have to admit, it’s like, no, we have more terms now to confuse everyone and who knows who’s gonna be able to walk in the meeting house.

John Helding:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Kelley:

I will say my meeting website, which I put together, there’s a page, What to Expect, where it’s like, this is what’s going to happen. This is the door you walk into. And you know, someone’s gonna say this in worship about 20 minutes in, and you know, because we’re a bit routine, so I can say that, but you know, we do want to make it as welcoming as possible. But you want a new terminology, so let’s just go through. I’m gonna give the old terminology and you can say what you think we should be using and give a little for it.

John Helding:

Okay. Okay, great. Hopefully it’s one I’ve got a different term for, but yeah.

Martin Kelley:

So the first is unprogrammed. Now unprogrammed Friends are generally this sit down in silence, you’re there for an hour, someone speaks every so often. See what arises. So what do you think we should be using instead of unprogrammed? Which is a terrible term.

John Helding:

And see what arises. Yeah. The term I use and that we tend to use at our meeting is open worship meeting. So open to the silence, open to messages, open to all people, open to diversity. And at the heart of it is the realization that unprogrammed is a negative definition of who we are.

Martin Kelley:

Yeah.

John Helding:

We’re not what we are, it’s what we’re not. We’re not programmed. We’re unprogrammed. So—

Martin Kelley:

Right. And it sounds so, you know, computery or something, so technical.

John Helding:

Well, darn well sounds computer-y or, you know, as I’ve mentioned, like an intervention that your family and friends take you on for some reason. But open, it’s a positive term. And yet you still have to explain it to friends. It doesn’t, you know, well we’re in open worship. Most newcomers aren’t gonna instantly understand what that is.

Martin Kelley:

Yeah.

John Helding:

But it conveys this sense versus, say, a computery sense. It’s open. And so part of it is to be a clear definition, because I do actually think it’s a clearer and more accurate sense of what we’re doing and the state we’re in in that worship. But it’s positive and in a direct definition. So and it’s welcoming. I really, if I’m trying to think back, back to starting off on this, you know, somebody says, Would you like to come to an unprogrammed meeting with me? And I think I’d be a little bit hesitant versus would you like to come to an open worship meeting? And I instantly feel like I’m leaning forward. So that’s my hope is that open just feels more positive and explains things pretty well.

Martin Kelley:

Yeah. No, I like it. I’m, I could go for that. So what about the other side of the equation? Programmed, which in normal Quaker parlance is a meeting that might even have a pastor and there’s kind of a set sequence of events that will happen. You might have like a sort of other small church, hymn singing and old reading from the Old Testament, New Testament, a sermon prepared. So for this what—

John Helding:

Program.

Martin Kelley:

Still using computery language, still like what does it mean to program?

John Helding:

We’re still in the computery language with program. And I’ve never heard church Friends describe themselves as program meetings for one thing. I think it’s something that they don’t then use. But the word I have, and it’s really around what the activities we do at Lopez Friends Meeting is guided worship. There are guides. It’s like a tour guide that you go with on a trip or a guide through a museum or something, where you do get some frameworks and some guides. In our case, it’s queries for worship sharing, where they’re pre-prepared queries that guide you, or singing Sunday, you have songs that guide you along.

John Helding:

And I think that’s a really effective terminology. One, it again it’s positive. A guide is a positive thing. Program is—

Martin Kelley:

Yeah, someone help bring you in, happen to be lost.

John Helding:

And spontaneous, powerful, unplanned sort of messages and reactions and experiences come out of that even though it’s guided with some sort of predetermined sort of guide framework and so forth that’s gonna be used. So it’s not as though it is programmed in that nothing other than what’s in the program is gonna happen. Which I think is the fear for Quakers of my ilk is that, geez, if you start programming it, introducing that, it’s all just gonna be predetermined what happens. And pretty soon we’re just gonna be reciting the same scripture and prayers every week, like some other denominations do or do more so.

John Helding:

But that’s not my experience from introducing some guides into Quaker worship. It in many ways can at times engender more powerful, profound, spontaneous sort of information, knowledge, sharing than you may get out of the strictly open worship or silent worship of our ancient Quaker tradition.

Martin Kelley:

Thanks. And the third term that you wanted to recast here is the in-between, semi-programmed, which typically might be yes, you have these kind of pieces of the puzzle that’s predetermined, but you might have twenty minutes, half an hour of the silence in between. So what do you think we should be saying instead of semi-programmed?

John Helding:

Semi program.

John Helding:

Well, the term that’s speaking to me in particularly of late in the wisdom of the times is worship fluid meeting. And in that it breaks down a worship duality between traditional phrasing programmed and unprogrammed, but is a blend. And very seriously keeping with the wisdom of our knowledge now and exploration and deeper understanding of we’re having of gender in particular and gender fluidity, there’s more than two genders.

John Helding:

And there’s this magical, wonderful spectrum. I think the same thing applies to Quaker meetings, you know. We can be fluid in how we move between these different techniques we use, quite honestly. They’re techniques to help us connect with spirit, to help us to be inspired, to be comforted, to be informed.

John Helding:

But it’s not about the technique. So there’s yeah, worship fluid is how I’m thinking of around what traditionally has been called semi-programmed, which sounds like you didn’t get the program done if you’re in the computer world. You almost, you were working on it and then, you know, you took a coffee break and your boss says, is it done? You go, well it’s semi-programmed.

Martin Kelley:

Right. You get distracted and—

Martin Kelley:

It’s halfway done, yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much, John, for coming here and throwing out these new terms for us to all consider.

Martin Kelley:

And I hope that anyone who’s stumbling on this, you know, thinking about Quakers, will have a little bit of a sense of the range perhaps that we can have. And that all of us buddy duddy Quakers might actually try and step out a little bit and get a bit more playful, get a little bit more worship fluid.

John Helding:

My hope too. Yeah. More playful, more fluid, and more inventive. I think it can serve us well. We talk of ourselves as an experimental faith. So great, let’s do some experimenting.

Martin Kelley:

Let’s experiment. Well thanks. Well thanks so much for coming here. Your article’s in the August 2026 copy of Friends Journal and How Can I Keep From Singing is the title. And anyone can read that and we’ll have little show notes and things and links to everything. So thanks again, John, for joining me today.

John Helding:

Great, Martin. Just a delight talking with you.

Martin Kelley:

Thanks. Take care.