Should we pray written prayers?

Question 11048.

Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand.

I understand the instinct and I do not entirely share it. The Bible contains a very large book of written prayers, God’s people have sung them for three thousand years, and Jesus gave his disciples words to say when they asked him how to pray. That is a considerable amount of biblical warrant for a practice we tend to regard as suspect.

The Bible is full of written prayers

The Psalter is the obvious case. One hundred and fifty prayers, composed, edited, set to music and given to the congregation of Israel to use. Many carry musical directions in the headings, which means they were not only preserved but performed, repeatedly, by people who had not written them.

Jesus used them. On the cross he prayed Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” and then “into your hands I commit my spirit” from Psalm 31:5. Those were written prayers, learned in childhood, surfacing at the moment of deepest need. That alone should settle whether the practice is spiritually inferior.

Scripture contains many more: Moses’ song, Hannah’s prayer, Solomon’s dedication prayer, Jonah inside the fish quoting psalms, Mary’s Magnificat, Zechariah’s prophecy. The Bible is not embarrassed about composed prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer settles a good deal

When the disciples asked how to pray, Jesus did not say “just speak from the heart”. He gave them words. Luke’s version begins “When you pray, say,” which is about as direct as an instruction to use a written prayer can get.

Matthew adds “Pray then like this,” which suggests a pattern as well as a text. Both are true. The Lord’s Prayer functions as a prayer to be prayed and as a template for shaping others, and Christians have used it both ways from the beginning.

So a believer who prays those words in the morning is doing exactly what Jesus told his disciples to do, and anyone who suggests that is less spiritual than improvising has an argument with the Lord rather than with the practice.

What written prayers are good for

They carry you when you cannot carry yourself. Grief, depression, exhaustion and shock all reduce a person’s capacity to compose anything, and at those moments having words already prepared is a mercy rather than a crutch. The psalms of lament exist precisely for people who have run out of their own words.

They also widen the range of what we pray. Left to ourselves, most of us pray about roughly the same six things. The Psalter forces us into confession, imprecation, corporate lament and extravagant praise, none of which come naturally, and praying them stretches the soul into shapes it would not otherwise take.

And they teach theology. A well-written prayer is doctrine in the vocative case. Praying the great prayers of Scripture and of church history over years will form your understanding of God more thoroughly than reading about him will, which is part of why doctrine and worship belong together.

The dangers to take seriously

The objection is not baseless. Any repeated form can be performed with the heart absent, and Jesus warned about heaping up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, thinking they will be heard for their many words. That warning is aimed at exactly this failure mode.

Isaiah’s complaint applies as well: this people draw near with their mouth and honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me. Words on a page can become a way of appearing to pray without praying, and anyone who has read a liturgy while planning lunch knows how easily it happens.

But notice that the same danger attends extemporary prayer, which develops its own worn phrases with remarkable speed. Most spontaneous public prayer in evangelical churches uses a fairly small vocabulary, deployed in a predictable order, and it is no less a form for being unwritten.

Written prayers and free prayer together

The healthiest practice uses both, and I would resist making this a party question. Free prayer brings the immediate, the particular and the personal, all of which are indispensable. God wants to hear about today, in your words, including the ones that do not scan.

Written prayers bring the tested, the wide and the deep. They connect you to believers across centuries and continents who prayed the same words in circumstances far harder than yours. There is real comfort in that, and real correction.

In corporate worship a considered prayer, prepared in advance, is often a kindness to a congregation who then have something to follow and to say Amen to honestly. That connects to the wider question of what liturgy is and whether every church has one.

Written prayers across church history

The practice has an unbroken history. The earliest Christians prayed the Psalms as a matter of course, since that was the hymnbook they had inherited. The Didache, from around the end of the first century, instructs believers to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. Collected prayers appear in every century after that.

The Reformers did not abandon the practice; they reformed it. Cranmer’s collects are among the finest written prayers in the English language, and Puritans who resisted imposed liturgy still published prayer manuals for family devotion. The Valley of Vision, which many evangelicals treasure, is a collection of exactly that material.

So a modern evangelical suspicion of prepared prayer is a fairly recent and fairly local instinct. That does not make it wrong by itself, but it is worth knowing that the vast majority of Christians across time and geography would find the objection puzzling. Psalm 102 is headed as a prayer of one afflicted, given to others to use.

How to use written prayers well

Pray them aloud and slowly. Most of the failure of written prayers comes from reading them at the speed of prose, which turns them into information. Read a psalm aloud at half your normal pace and you will find yourself stopping in places you would have skated over.

Personalise as you go. Insert names, circumstances and specifics into the frame the prayer provides. Praying Psalm 25 while naming the people you are anxious about is not tampering with Scripture; it is doing what the psalm was given to enable.

And do not use only one. A single prayer repeated without variety will wear smooth. Rotate through the Psalter, keep a few collects, use the Lord’s Prayer as a skeleton to hang your own petitions on. Matthew 6:7 warns against empty repetition, and variety is one practical guard against it.

Written prayers in the family and the congregation

Family devotion is where written prayers often prove most useful. Parents who feel inadequate at praying aloud can begin with a psalm and grow from there, and children learn far more from praying substantial words together than from listening to a parent improvise nervously.

In corporate worship, a prepared prayer of confession or intercession lets a congregation pray together rather than listen to one person praying near them. It also protects against the leader’s preoccupations dominating, since a prepared prayer can deliberately include the poor, the persecuted and the wider world that extempore prayer routinely forgets.

Both settings work best when free prayer sits alongside. Give people something solid to say and then room to say their own, and you will usually find the written prayers train the spontaneous ones rather than replacing them. That is the relationship I would want in any church, and it fits the wider question of how Christians should pray.

And be generous towards those who use them differently. The believer who has never opened a prayer book and the believer who prays a psalm every morning are doing the same thing in different clothes, and neither has grounds for looking down on the other.

A final encouragement to those who find prayer hard. If you have ever sat down to pray and produced nothing but a fog, written prayers are not a failure of spirituality but a rope thrown to you. Take the words that faithful people have used before you, say them honestly, and let them carry you until your own return.

So, now what?

If written prayers are foreign to you, start with the Psalter. Pray one a day, aloud, in the first person, and do not skip the uncomfortable ones. Within a month you will notice your own praying has changed shape.

If you lead in public, consider preparing. Writing a prayer out beforehand is not a failure of spirituality; it is taking seriously that you are speaking on behalf of a room full of people. Preachers prepare sermons and nobody thinks that quenches the Spirit.

And whichever you use, watch the heart rather than the method. The question is never whether the words were written down. It is whether the person saying them means them. Which of your prayers this week did you actually mean?

“Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

Matthew 6:9 (ESV)