How, then, shall we pray?
Few questions have the power to make a church gathering awkward more quickly than asking people about their prayer life. Yet it is a deeply important part of life for the follower of Jesus. A new year is a fair time to ask an ever-important question: how, then, shall we pray? There are two approaches to prayer that you should utilize which can yield benefits in your prayer life (and life in general): off the cuff prayer and scripted prayer.
“Off the cuff” prayer
Off the cuff prayer, or more fancily, extemporaneous prayer, is what we call a prayer that is made up on the spot. In my experience, people in the Baptist and Baptist-like circles of Christian practice consider extemporaneous prayer to be the gold standard. Off the cuff prayer has a unique power to unleash passion, but without proper attention it also can easily end in dull routine and limited prayers.
raw and passionate prayer
Probably the best feature of extemporaneous prayer is that it connects to the actual thoughts and feelings of the moment. Since it is much like talking, it allows us to freely bring our thoughts and concerns to the throne of God, with all the angst and joy we feel right now. This conversational aspect of off the cuff prayer often results in it feeling more real, more authentic, and more connected to our lives. All good things.
the problem of routine and blinders
But for all its strengths, extemporaneous prayer has some weakness to guard against. Two important weaknesses are dull routine and prayer-blinders.
dull routine
A prayer routine is when you end up saying the same old things about the same old things. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Nothing saps the savor from prayer quite like a dull routine. Off the cuff prayer can easily degrade from connected conversation to stale patterns and cliches. Let’s face it, the depth and breadth of extemporaneous prayer is largely limited by your creativity. While we have periodic flashes of creative brilliance, most of life is spent in the humdrum murk of the mundane. Stagnant prayers tend to result in a stagnant prayer life.
Alongside the danger of the dreaded dull routine, off-the-cuff prayer can also be crippled by prayer-blinders.
prayer-blinders
Envision the Mackinaw Island horses. They all wear the same, stylish headgear: blinders. Blinders serve to narrow the horses’ immense range of vision, so they can only focus on what is ahead. For horses pulling wagons in busy streets, blinders are useful. But for the follower of God in prayer, blinders hinder spiritual depth and breadth.
Prayer driven only by the needs and thoughts of the moment tends toward spiritual narrowness. It is relatively easy to pray for my needs; after all, I am always acutely aware of them. But what about the needs of others in your church? The one struggling with the recent death of a loved one or the couple at a loss in parenting their child, and so many others. They are on the periphery of your life. Without some sort of guidance you probably won’t get around to praying for them. Not to mention even further removed issues like church unity, gospel effectiveness, the spiritual health of denominational leaders, the effectiveness of community leaders, or even the perseverance of the church around the world.
All these topics, and more, deserve prayer. But when our prayers are blown about by our daily concerns, they tend to never arrive anywhere but where the wind blows.
Scripted or rote prayer.
Opposite to off the cuff prayer, the other main model involves praying from a script. Scripted prayer, aka rote prayer, is praying via reading or reciting from memory. Think reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Scripted prayers can be either self-written or composed by others. Periodically using prayers written by others can sharpen the way you pray and broaden your awareness of what is worth praying for. This makes scripted prayers useful for learning how to pray. Scripted prayer, though, also suffers from the pitfall of a different sort of dull routine.
deep and wide prayer
Scripted prayer is like marinated meat. The longer it soaks, the more flavorful the result. Off the cuff prayer is limited by the creative spark of the moment. Scripted prayer soaks in the flavors of reflective thought. As such, scripted prayers—at least those done well—tend to have greater breadth and depth of concern, rigor, and beauty. A prayer that has time to soak gains the strength to move beyond immediate, personal needs and embrace God’s words and intentions to us.
lasting prayer
Since it is written down or memorized, scripted prayer gains a further strength: repeatability. While many from non-liturgical church backgrounds fear repetition, the fact is that those things which we repeat shape us. Skill and expertise emerge through practice over time. Scripted prayers can shape our lives and shape our prayer sensibilities in powerful ways over the years.
the pitfall of dull routine
Dull routine is the chief drawback of scripted prayers. While repetition shapes our lives, it can also become background noise. How often do we go through the routine of taking a step without giving any conscious attention to what we are doing? A prayer life that is reduced to sub-conscious prayer is a tragedy.
Aside from monotonous repetition, scripted prayers can also become stale when they fail to excite the emotions. Prayers that feel foreign in your mouth don’t taste good, thus they are never savored. Remember your favorite B movie. One quality of B movies, aside from poorly written scripts and deeply underfunded effects, is that the actors sound like they are saying lines. The words don’t quite fit in their mouths. Praying foreign prayers is not helpful.
The best of both worlds
How then shall we pray? I hope it is clear that both off the cuff and scripted prayers are valuable. Scripted prayer tends to be strong in all the ways that off the cuff prayer is weak, and weak in all the ways that off the cuff prayer is strong. As such, there is great wisdom in incorporating both into a life of prayer. The two approaches can feed into one another in lovely ways as you build a more robust prayer life.
In the next post, I’ll give a few patterns that are worthwhile guides for praying.
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash