A Continuous Prayer Ministry Answers Requests Sent from Anywhere

Unity's best known institution is Silent Unity, a prayer ministry that receives requests by letter, telephone and, since the internet era, online, and holds them in continuous prayer around the clock rather than at scheduled services. Catherine Albanese's history of American metaphysical religion situates the practice as flowing directly from Unity's founding conviction, traced to Myrtle Fillmore's own recovery from tuberculosis in the 1880s after she began affirming statements of health rather than accepting her diagnosis as final, that sustained, disciplined prayer and affirmation can act on a condition regardless of the physical distance between the one praying and the one asking. The Encyclopedia of American Religions records that Silent Unity has operated continuously from Unity's headquarters near Kansas City since the 1890s, among the longest-running ministries of its kind anywhere in American religious life, answering requests from callers and correspondents who are frequently not Unity members and sometimes not self-identified as religious at all, extending the practice well beyond the movement's own formal membership. The ministry's continuous, always-available character is itself treated within Unity as a demonstration of its founding claim, that prayer directed at a request works independently of where or when it reaches the one offering it.

Unity was founded at Kansas City in 1889 by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, a married couple who built the movement's teaching directly out of Myrtle's own experience of the practice that became Silent Unity's method. The Encyclopedia of American Religions records that Unity reads much of the Bible as metaphysical allegory rather than as literal history, and that it holds neither original sin nor a substitutionary atonement, teaching instead that God is a principle of good already present in every person rather than a distant judge to be reconciled with. Albanese's history situates Unity within a wider late nineteenth century American current of mind cure and metaphysical religion that also produced Christian Science and, later, Religious Science and Divine Science, movements that shared vocabulary and a confidence in prayer's practical effect while developing distinct institutions and distinct relationships to organised medicine. Unlike Christian Science, which the Encyclopedia of American Religions notes discouraged conventional medical treatment, Unity has not asked its members to forgo medical care, treating prayer and affirmation as a complement to it rather than a substitute, a distinction that has shaped how broadly Silent Unity's ministry has been able to reach beyond Unity's own formal congregations.