Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.
We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.
—excerpt from a prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake (?!) and thus thoroughly in the public domain
I’m sure I’ve heard this “disturb us, O Lord” prayer before, but it walked (back) into my life Tuesday at a church staff meeting (thanks, John!). This excerpt leapt out at me, I suspect because it sums up how I’ve felt in the course of launching Creative Commons Prayer and, today, asking for your support.
I started this site because it’s the spirituality resource I wished existed.
I wanted to create a place where digital culture could joyously inform the forms of our prayers. I wanted to create a place where the process of creating and sharing faith resources was transparent and encouraged reuse and remixing without copyright anxiety.
I wanted to pray online the way I pray out loud and in my head: by borrowing little bits of inspiration from the art and letters I encounter in my daily life.
I’m thrilled that so many of you have signed up to receive these prayers and resources via email. I’m also OK with the fact that many others interact with the prayers via social media and might not even know this site exists.
The mission is to invite people to pray, whatever that might mean for them. I believe in that mission, and I think many of you believe this site accomplishes it in a quirky but principled way.
So today I’m asking you to help keep the mission going. I spent almost 150 hours on Creative Commons Prayer in 2017—and it only launched in September. To continue hosting and producing the site, I need your support.
I’m launching a Patreon page where you can give $1/month or more in support of Creative Commons Prayer and also my Learning, Faith, & Media newsletter. If you’re reading this post by email, you may already have received issue #9, in which I explain the Patreon process in a bit more detail. If you haven’t yet, you will soon. I apologize for sending two emails on the same day.
There are some fun rewards for those who give. Perhaps my favorite is the chance to commission a prayer for this site (that one kicks in at the $3/month level). I can’t wait to hear what some of you want to pray about.
I know a lot of people are asking you for money in exchange for content on the Internet. I’m proud of the site and am not ashamed to do the same.
But I hope you’ll consider your gift an investment in a ministry experiment, one intended to make faith practice accessible, habitual (in a good way), and fun.
Thank you so much for checking out or subscribing to Creative Commons Prayer. I appreciate your enthusiasm for the site more than I can say.
And thanks for giving what you can to make the site better in 2018. I look forward to “losing sight of land, so we can find the stars” together.
Yours, truly, with tremendous gratitude,
Kyle