Prayer for All Conditions of People

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.

Within the structure of Anglican Morning and Evening Prayer, this prayer typically appears among a small cluster of intercessory prayers said after the creed and the Lord's Prayer, positioned so that the daily office moves from praise and confession of faith into concrete concern for the needs of others before closing with thanksgiving, a sequence that liturgical scholars describe as moving worshippers outward from their own devotion toward the wider world before the service ends. Its use has remained largely confined to the daily office rather than the communion service, distinguishing its liturgical role from prayers such as the Collect for Purity that belong specifically to the eucharistic rite.

Clergy reciting the daily office privately, a practice historically expected of Anglican priests whether or not a congregation was present, would have said this prayer as a matter of routine discipline, which partly explains why prayers of this kind, general in application and moderate in length, proliferated within the daily office tradition even as much longer or more elaborate prayers remained reserved for major services. Its continued inclusion in many contemporary Anglican prayer books, sometimes in updated language, testifies to the ongoing value provinces have placed on having a short, comprehensive intercessory option available for daily use.