No Friends Meeting is ever the same – whether with the same body of people, in the same location, or while visiting around the world. This awareness casts a new light on the concept of expectant worship, in that you never know exactly what to predict, other than the possibility of being blessed by something wondrous and remarkable.
Traveling among different strands of Friends expands that concept.
In one pastoral Meeting, for instance, I encountered “silent singing” – no, they did sing from a hymnal, but the room was awfully quiet. Maybe all of their best voices were away in Philadelphia that weekend.
In one Evangelical Friends Meeting, as the pastor told me the following week, the Holy Spirit had been so powerful he had to put his sermon aside; I’m sure he wasn’t expecting that!
Or I was introduced to karaoke, of a contemporary Christian vein, in a midweek Meeting in central Pennsylvania. Who’d a’thunk.
So what do you say, greeting the stranger at our meetinghouse door, ready to sample Quaker worship for the first time? This is what not to expect?
“Maybe we’ll have a rare, totally silent worship,” seems to be as good as any. You never know.
Jnana's Red Barn 
Enjoyed that. “Strangers are simply friends who have not yet been introduced.”
It is always fun to learn something new from a “stranger”.