Unprogrammed Quaker worship, the form historically associated with the meeting house architecture described here, consists of sitting together in silence for a set period, typically about an hour, with any member free to rise and speak, pray or read aloud if they feel genuinely moved to do so, an arrangement that requires no minister to organize the service and gives the meeting house's inward facing bench arrangement its practical as well as symbolic function. The same building also hosts Quaker business meetings, in which decisions are reached not by vote but by seeking what Quakers call the sense of the meeting, a form of collective discernment aimed at unity rather than majority rule, a process that can take considerably longer than a simple vote but is understood as more faithful to the community's theological commitments about how truth is reached together.
Meeting houses played a documented and significant role in nineteenth century abolitionist organizing in Britain and North America, reflecting Quakers' early and comparatively consistent opposition to slavery, and the same buildings have often served as venues for other forms of social and political organizing consistent with the tradition's long standing peace testimony and emphasis on social equality. Not all Quakers today worship in this unprogrammed form; some branches of the movement, particularly in parts of the United States, adopted programmed worship closer to conventional Protestant services, complete with a pastor and prepared sermon, a divergence reflected in correspondingly different meeting house or church architecture within the wider Quaker movement.