A Prayer for the World's Christian Communities

Let us give thanks to God for the gifts and graces of each branch of the one great family of Christians.

For the Roman Catholic Church: its glorious traditions; its disciplines of holiness; its worship, rich with the religious passion of the centuries; and its noble company of martyrs, teachers and saints: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

For the Eastern Orthodox Church: its secret treasures of mystical experience; its venerable liturgy; its regard for life in community; and its common will as a source of authority: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name.


For the Congregationalist concern for the rightful independence of the soul and of the group: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name.

For the Baptist emphasis on person regeneration and the conscious relation of the mature soul to the Lord: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

For the powerful ability of Methodists to awaken the conscience of Christians to social evils, and for their emphasis upon the witness of experience and the fruits of the disciplined life: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

For the Presbyterian reverence for the sovereignty of God and their confidence in God’s faithfulness to his covenant; for their sense of the moral law, expressing itself in constitutional government: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

For the Quaker witness to the perpetual real presence of the inner light in every human soul, and for their faithful continuance of a free prophetic ministry and Christian nonviolence: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

For the Lutheran devotion to the grace of God and the Word of God, enshrined in the ministry of Word and Sacraments: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

For the Anglican Church: its reverent and temperate ways, through its Catholic heritage and its Protestant conscience; its yearning over the divisions of Christendom, and its longing to e used as a house of reconciliation: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

For the Pentecostal and Evangelical Free Churches, large and small, in slum and suburb and rural isolation, moved by the Spirit to speak the Gospel to those unwelcome or uninspired in other congregations: We thank you, O Lord, and bless your holy name. 

O God, grant to all these families within your one great Church that, as they come from east and west and north and south to sit down in your kingdom, each may lay at your feet that special grace and gift with which you have endowed it; in Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
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This prayer is taken from The Wideness of God’s Mercy: Litanies to Enlarge Our Prayer edited and compiled by Jeffrey W. Rowthorn (2007: Church Publishing), and cited from Prayer Book Guide.