The prayer's enormous reach owes less to its author than to its adopters. In 1941 a member of the young Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship noticed the prayer in a New York newspaper obituary, and the group's New York office was struck by how exactly it fitted their programme. Cards were printed, the prayer entered the fellowship's meetings and literature, and it has opened or closed twelve step gatherings ever since, recited by millions of people who could not name its author.
The fellowship's common wording, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference, is a first person singular petition, while Niebuhr's own later printed version asks God to give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, a congregational form with grace at its head, and the differences mark the text's passage from sermon to folk prayer.
During the Second World War the prayer circulated among service members and chaplains, and the United Service Organizations distributed it in printed form. Its afterlife has been boundless, on cards, plaques, medallions and needlework, in pastoral counselling and popular culture alike, because its three petitions compress a whole practical theology, the limits of control, the duty of action, and the difficulty of telling the two apart.