About Make A Prayer

Make A Prayer is a reference for prayers and spiritual-care guidance across religious traditions, organised by what is happening in someone's life rather than by which faith they belong to.

It is built for two people. The first is someone facing a hard morning who wants the words their own tradition uses. The second is harder to serve and is the reason the site is shaped the way it is: a person who needs appropriate words for someone whose beliefs are not their own.

The gap this fills

Almost every good prayer resource belongs to one tradition. That is not a failure; a tradition’s own people are the right custodians of its words. But it means the material sits in silos, and anyone standing between them has to bridge the gap themselves.

A hospice chaplain with a Catholic patient in one room, a Muslim patient in another and a family in a third who want something said without any religious language at all is doing that bridging several times a day. So is a funeral director, a ward nurse, a prison or military chaplain, and a member of an interfaith family. The tools available to them are mostly pocket-sized printed booklets, and a booklet has a fixed page count, so its coverage of smaller traditions is thin by arithmetic rather than by choice.

A website has no page count. That is the whole opportunity.

What we are careful about

Religious text is easy to get wrong and the errors are not cosmetic. A mangled transliteration, a prayer attributed to the wrong tradition, or a rite offered by someone not qualified to perform it are the kinds of mistake that make a resource worse than useless to the person holding it.

So the site is built around a few rules it cannot break:

• Nothing is invented. A prayer is never written by us and presented as traditional. Anything we did write is labelled as ours.
• Every text names its source. Which collection, which translator, which century, and what its rights status is.
• Nothing publishes without qualified review. Not editorial review. Review by someone credentialed in the tradition the material comes from. How that works.
• A tradition appears only when its coverage is adequate. Listing a tradition we have barely covered would repeat the exact failure we set out to fix.
• No political alignment, stated or implied, in any tradition.

Where the name comes from

This domain is not new. From 2003 until 2015 makeaprayer.com ran as a multi-faith prayer site with a Buddhist figure in its tradition picker, a composer that let visitors write their own prayer, and a taxonomy organised by intention rather than by religion: blessings, faith, fertility, health, love, peace, prosperity, spirit.

It went offline in 2015 and the domain eventually lapsed. When we picked it up and went looking through the archives, that structure turned out to be close to what we had independently sketched. The occasion vocabulary here still carries those eight original intentions, recorded as evidence of what people came to this address looking for twenty years ago rather than as categories we consider settled.

The 2003 homepage described itself as a place for spiritual aid in the form of prayer, and an opportunity to pray with those in need. That is still a fair description.

What is here right now

Very little, deliberately. Resources are written and sourced, but no credentialed reviewer has signed any of them, so nothing is published. The site refuses to show you material that has not been checked, which at this stage means it refuses to show you almost everything.

That is the correct state for a site whose entire proposition is that its words have been checked. If you are qualified to do that checking, we would like to hear from you. Our review model explains what it involves.