Prayers for Christian unity

Prayers for the unity of the Church, and the creeds held in common across traditions.

Prayer for Christian unity rests on a request Christ made himself. In the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel, on the night before his crucifixion, he prays for those who will believe in him, that they may all be one. Christians divided by seventeen centuries of schism have kept praying that prayer, which is one of the few things every tradition agrees ought to be prayed. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is observed each year from January 18 to 25, ending on the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. It began in 1908 and is now kept jointly by Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant churches, with a shared set of texts prepared each year by an ecumenical committee. The eight days are among the few fixed points in the calendar when churches that do not share a communion table nonetheless pray the same words on the same days. The prayers gathered here are ones that already belong to more than one tradition. The Lord's Prayer is the obvious case: it is prayed by every Christian tradition without exception, and the differences between versions are small enough that Christians of different churches can say it together. The Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed are the shared statements of faith, the second of them formulated at the councils of 325 and 381 AD, before the divisions that later separated East from West. The Filioque clause added to the Nicene Creed in the Latin West remains one of the substantive points at issue between the traditions, and the creed page documents it. The Book of Common Prayer's Prayer for the Whole State of Christ's Church and the Prayer of Saint John Chrysostom are ecumenical in a different sense: Anglican in their present form, but drawing on prayers that predate the Reformation and, in Chrysostom's case, on the Eastern liturgy directly.