A Collection of Prayers

October is clergy appreciation month!

Enhance your pastor’s personal prayer life, and possibly help in your pastor’s worship planning by giving these resources as gifts:

Christian Prayer

This book strives to bring together the best classic prayers and rites from many sources and arranges them for personal devotion. Most of the prayers are gathered from Christians of the past as a source of prayer for Christians today. Thus, the title Christian Prayer.

This prayer book can also be used for group or congregational worship. The topical prayers can be used as intercessions in corporate worship. The confessions and absolutions and the litanies can be read alone, but they are printed so they can be used with a leader and group.

The topical prayers drew from many sources, all updated in language and edited for consistency.

Seasonal Devotions and Home Liturgies are short rites can be used by families or small groups to observe days and seasons that may not always be celebrated in corporate worship, and some that may establish new traditions in the home. Lighting of an Advent Wreath, Blessing of a Nativity Scene, Chalking the Door for Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Days of Holy Week, Easter Eve and All Saints Day. As this book is being prepared, (April and May of 2020) we are being made painfully aware of the need for worship materials in the home.

Available now in paperback and for Kindle through Amazon.com. 

“God Be in My Head…” Prayers from Old Sarum

“God Be in My Head…” Prayers from Old Sarum – The Sarum Rite, also called the Use of Salisbury, was a variation of the Roman Rite developed in the 1100s that was known to be high in ceremony. It also had a wealth of richly worded prayers that have influenced Christian worship ever since. Many prayers from the Sarum Rite were used in the Book of Common Prayer. This book gathers prayers from the original Sarum Missals, Breviaries and Psalters and presents them in a single collection in contemporary liturgical English, and may be useful in public or private devotions. Click here to order through Amazon.com.

The New Ancient Collects

The New Ancient Collects – For over 150 years, Bright’s Ancient Collects has been a standard resource for classic Christian prayers. The New Ancient Collects is a complete revision and refreshing of all the prayers in Bright’s Ancient Collects with updated language. Click here to order through Amazon.com.

Prayers from the Ancient Celtic Church

Prayers from the Ancient Celtic Church –  A collection of prayers from the time of Patrick (d. ca. 460-493) to the Synod of Whitby (664), and also from the Celtic Christian tradition that remained after Whitby. A few of the prayers in this book may be familiar from their appearance in other prayer books. Some may be appearing in English for the first time. All prayers (with one exception) are rendered or revised into contemporary English with the hopes that they will be useful in private and corporate worship. Includes prayers from The Antiphonary of Bangor, The Lorrha-Stowe Missal, The Book of Cerne, The Book of Dimma, St. Patrick, St. Columba and many other sources. Click here to order through Amazon.com.

Prayers from the Evangelical-Lutheran Heritage

Prayers from the Evangelical-Lutheran Heritage –A collection of prayers from the history of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church from Luther to Loehe. The collection includes prayers by Johannes Bugenhagen, Georg C. Dieffenbach, Veit Dietrich, Matthias Flacius, Wilhelm Loehe, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Joachim Mynsinger, Johann G. Olearius, Johann Jacob Rambach, and the early agendas and prayer books of the Austrian, Brunswick, Hamburg, Lueneberg, Norwegian, Nuremberg, Pomeranian, Riga, Russian, Saxon, Schleswig-Holstein, and Swedish Evangelical-Lutheran churches. Click here to order through Amazon.com.

Also available for scholars of Celtic Christianity:

The Antiphonary of Bangor and the Divine Offices of Bangor

Prayers from the Evangelical-Lutheran Heritage – A collection of prayers from the history of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church from Luther to Loehe. The collection includes prayers by Johannes Bugenhagen, Georg C. Dieffenbach, Veit Dietrich, Matthias Flacius, Wilhelm Loehe, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Joachim Mynsinger, Johann G. Olearius, Johann Jacob Rambach, and the early agendas and prayer books of the Austrian, Brunswick, Hamburg, Lueneberg, Norwegian, Nuremberg, Pomeranian, Riga, Russian, Saxon, Schleswig-Holstein, and Swedish Evangelical-Lutheran churches. Click here to order through Amazon.com.

To preview, download this free pdf of a sampling of the Christmas prayers:

Prayers from the Ev. Lutheran Heritage – Christmas Sampler

This prayer website began on June 18, 2016 as a collection of classic prayers. Usage (unique visitors and visits to pages in the site) has almost doubled each year. I am humbled and pleased to see my work used or linked by many church and Christian spirituality websites. The prayer database now has about 1,450 entries. In the past year I began posting pages of seasonal “Featured Prayers” as aids to those planning worship.

Something strange happened this year. Previous years showed heightened usage in March because of worship planners looking for resources for Lent and Easter, and then dropped in April after the rush. This year, April usage was greater than March, and May greater than April. With COVID-19, the whole world is in a time of crisis and Christians are looking for prayers and prayer resources for worship. The most visited entries in early 2020 have been “Kyrie Eleison / Lord, Have Mercy,” “In the Midst of Life We Are in Death,” “Litany of the Holy Spirit” and “Litany of the Most Holy Trinity.” The common theme in all of these entries is Christians crying out, “Lord, have mercy.”

I pray that God would continue to make this website a blessing to many who visit it, and as classic prayers are shared, make it a blessing to even more as hearts and minds are directed to our Lord, who has mercy.

Paul C. Stratman
Editor/curator of A Collection of Prayers