Our bodies respond to the presence of God

“Quaker worship is not exclusively an activity of the rational, disembodied mind (albeit it is easy to receive this impression in some meetings). Our physical presence is not irrelevant to our participation in communal worship. Worship is the response of our whole being to the presence of God – a response which involves our bodies and the physical presence of our fellow worshippers at least as much as our words and thoughts.

It seems unavoidable that the experience of participation in an ‘online Meeting for Worship’ will be significantly different from worshipping together in the same place. Clearly this practice is helpful to the people who take part in it, but it is not clear to me that we should consider it ‘the same thing’ as Quaker worship. The growing use of online communications for Quaker business and worship calls for collective discernment about the role of these practices, rather than taking for granted that what we do online is the same as what happens in person, simply because we are using the same word for it.”