A recent Hampstead Meeting I attended finished with a musical performance by a group of children and adults that elicited a ripple of applause, which was publicly reproved after the Meeting by the clerk who read out the week’s announcements. When I asked her why she had done so she referred me to a minute of the Hampstead Meeting, headed ‘A concern about equality’, that said in part: ‘We agree that applause is completely inappropriate in Meeting for Worship, since our practice is – or should be – to be open and responsive and to value the contributions of all equally. We ask our elders and clerks to explain this to individual Friends or to the Meeting as a whole.’

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