About

Shared Prayers was inspired by an encounter at Forma 2020 where a congregation that regularly meets outdoors hosted Morning Prayers. They handed out pages, but I thought it made sense to let people pray from their phones. My favorite part is that every liturgy has a QR code at top, so anyone who has already loaded the prayers can share with others, e.g., with those who arrive after the service has started. When using Shared Prayers, everyone’s an usher!

So Shared Prayers is a paperless worship bulletin. This was handy during the early days of COVID-tide when we weren’t sure what was dangerous and what wasn’t, and touching things someone else had touched (e.g., a book or a piece of paper) was highly suspect. After the worst of COVID had passed, my parish continued to use Shared Prayers because it saved on printing costs and paper waste. We still printed some bulletins, most Sundays just in outline form, and made Shared Prayers available via a qr code for those who wanted a more complete guide to the liturgy.

That’s the other useful thing about Shared Prayers: they make all the choices for you. For a visitor to an Episcopal Liturgy, the most daunting thing is often the profusion of choices and possibilities (the word “may” appearing throughout the rubrics) in the prayer book. Shared Prayers is more like the Sunday bulletin that was printed just for a specific liturgy on a specific day at a specific parish: all the choices are made and everyone can follow the same liturgy together without second-guessing themselves.

Source for this site can be found on github.

Misc pages for development:

• indices
• tests