The Prayer and Sacred Place Project is jointly led by the Revd Dr Tania ap Siôn and the Revd Canon Dr Randolph Ellis.

The Project is concerned with approaching ‘place’ and ‘prayer’ in new ways through exploratory and speculative research studies, which draw on the disciplines of philosophy, theology, phenomenology, speculative realism, social sciences, and education.

About the project

Central to the ethos of the Project is:

• the advancement of a praxis that does not assume the critical stance to be the default pathway to rigour and understanding;
• the emphasis on exploration, speculation, adventure within the uncertainty of human-decentralised worlds.

Some examples of areas being studied within the Prayer and Sacred Place Project include:

• developing a phenomenology of prayer and sacred place through immersement and direct engagement;
• developing a discourse that unfolds the complexity of place;
• approaching place as existing in its own right;
• repositioning and de-amplifying human centrality in relation to place and things;
• undermining the position of ‘if things exist, they do so only for us’;
• discovering relationships between place and prayer;
• exploring who occupies sacred place and in what ways they inhabit and define it;
• investigating ‘invisible communities’ engaging with sacred place and prayer, and what may be learnt from them;
• questioning what ‘sacred space’ is and how it is recognised;
• exploring whether sacred space is a public or private affair.

Project history

The seeds of the Prayer and Sacred Place Project were sown in 2007, when Randolph and Tania first met to share their common interest in the prayer requests left in the Lady Chapel of Bangor Cathedral. Tania was in the early stages of exploring the characteristics of prayer requests left in church-related contexts, while Randolph was exploring the distinctiveness of the cathedral as “a broad place” and the significance of this for ministry.

Some years later, in 2014, the Prayer and Sacred Place Project formally came into being in partnership with the St Mary’s Centre. Rather fittingly, the first commissioned activity of the Project was to develop a proposal for a ‘shrinal-focus’ in the Lady Chapel of Bangor Cathedral (a commission given by the former Dean of the Cathedral, the Very Revd Dr Sue Jones, now Dean of Liverpool Cathedral). Although the final report and proposal for this commission was not taken forward at the time because of a change in Cathedral leadership at Bangor, the resulting document, The Report: Developing a shrinal-focus in the Lady Chapel of Bangor Cathedral (2015, revised 2016) is seminal to the shaping and development of the wider Prayer and Sacred Place Project.

Research into practice

As immersement and direct engagement with place are significant positions taken in the Prayer and Sacred Place Project, there is a close relationship between research and practice. Research from the Prayer and Sacred Place Project informs and shapes practice in a number of contexts.

Examples of this include developing:

• new liturgies for specific sacred places (including three new liturgies devised for sacred places on Anglesey: Pilgrim Service for Healing and Wholeness; Blessing and Thanksgiving for Dogs; and the St Tysilio Festival Service 2019 The Tree of Life: A service of blessing);
• the original storybook series for schools, Randalph’s Spiritual Quest and Search for Meaning.

Project website and publications

Spring-Source is the official website for the Prayer and Sacred Place Project.

You can access project publications, videos and audio recordings on the Spring-Source website.