Traditional Quaker worship follows directly from the Inner Light: a meeting gathers in expectant silence, with no minister, order of service or set liturgy, and anyone present, regardless of ordination, office or sex, may speak if moved to do so by the light within. Business decisions follow the same logic, reached not by majority vote but by the meeting seeking a shared sense that unity has been found, on the conviction that Christ present in the gathered group can make his will known directly rather than through the arithmetic of ballots.
Early Friends drew from the same conviction a set of testimonies that have remained central to Quaker identity: refusal of oaths, since a truthful person needs no special promise beyond plain speech, opposition to war and violence, the Peace Testimony, and an insistence on simplicity and equality that led Quakers into early and sustained work against slavery, for prison reform, and for the equal treatment of women within the meeting itself, well ahead of most of the surrounding society.
Later branches of the movement, particularly in the nineteenth-century United States, adopted pastors and a more programmed, hymn-and-sermon style of worship under evangelical influence, a real division within modern Quakerism, but even programmed Friends meetings typically retain some period of open or silent worship, and the underlying conviction that the divine light is directly available to the ordinary worshipper remains the theological center both branches trace back to Fox.