Illinois Yearly Meeting, founded in 1875, is a spiritual community of Quakers, also known as the Religious Society of Friends. Individuals in this community attend some 22 affiliated local meetings across five states. Each summer the yearly meeting gathers in a retreat on its campus near McNabb, Illinois to worship together and to conduct the business of the community.

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Early Quakers had a vivid sense of the Holy Spirit as an active presence, transforming themselves, their dealings with each other, and the entire world. They honored each person’s direct access to the Light, yet were aware of the frailty of human judgment. Their response was to develop practices of communal listening, seeking, and discerning. Meeting for worship, meeting for business, and some more specialized practices were all developed to allow the group to clarify and support individual guidance and revelation. Today, Quakers continue to revise, refine, and hand on their characteristic practices of corporate listening and waiting, because these practices work.

As the name “Faith and Practice” suggests, this book is both a spiritual and a practical document. It articulates the historical and continuing faith of Friends; it also outlines recommended procedures regarding a wide variety of matters that local Quaker meetings are likely, and in many cases certain, to face.

Friends in Illinois Yearly Meeting engage in “waiting worship,” in which we gather silently to enter into communion with God and with one another and to seek God’s help and guidance in ministering to our own spiritual needs, those of the meeting community, and those of the wider world. Meeting for worship begins when the first worshipper enters the room. As Friends enter the meeting room, they seek to still their minds, leaving behind the concerns and activities of their daily life, and to focus inward and enter a period of expectant waiting. After a substantial period of silence anyone present who feels led to speak by the Divine Spirit may rise and do so. Friends speak spontaneously as led rather than composing a message in advance of coming to meeting for worship. This vocal ministry is typically followed by a period of silence to deepen the worship and allow those present to take in what has been said. When enough time has passed another Friend may feel led to speak. Sometimes the entire meeting may pass in outward silence. The meeting ends with the shaking of hands.