A Compact Substitute for a Longer List

The Prayer for All Conditions of People, added to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and traditionally attributed to Bishop Peter Gunning, was designed for a specific practical purpose within Anglican daily office liturgy: on occasions when the fuller set of intercessory prayers, called the Litany, could not conveniently be used, this single prayer offered a compact substitute that still touched most of the same categories of need. It opens with intercession for the whole human family in the broadest sense before narrowing to the state of the church, comfort for those in trouble of any kind, mind, body or estate, and finally those who have not yet received knowledge of the gospel, a three-stage narrowing that liturgists have compared to similar general-to-particular movements found elsewhere in Anglican prayer of the period. Its final clause concerning those without knowledge of the gospel situates the prayer within the missionary assumptions common to seventeenth-century English Christianity, an emphasis that has made some of its exact wording a subject of more recent liturgical reconsideration in provinces of the Anglican Communion revising their prayer books with different assumptions about religious pluralism. Despite that, its core structure of intercession moving from universal human concern to specific communities in need has remained a template many later Anglican intercessory prayers have followed.