How to pray the Lord’s Prayer.

When Jesus’s students wanted to learn to pray, he taught them what we call the Lord’s Prayer. Wanna know how to pray? Here ya go: Practice with that.

Weirdly enough, in most of the Evangelical churches I’ve been to, when new Christians wanna learn to pray, we don’t always point ’em to the Lord’s Prayer. We point them to our prayer groups.

Why’s this? Well, there’s a weird Evangelical stigma about rote prayer. It’s because a lot of Evangelicals grew up in churches which prayed a lot of pre-written, canned material, and it felt like dead religion to them, and they prefer living religion. So, out went the rote prayers. Their only prayers are spontaneous. Sometimes they won’t even pray biblical rote prayers, like the psalms or Lord’s Prayer.

The down side? The only prayer examples they see aren’t from the bible, but from their fellow Christians. Some of whom don’t even read the bible. All their prayer behavior comes from mimicking other Christians, and after enough decades in an echo chamber of babbling pagan hypocrisy… well, you remember Jesus’s wisecrack about tying a millstone round children’s necks and tossing them in the Mediterranean. Mk 9.42 Better they not pray at all, than pray like some of us hypocrites.

What to do? Well, if our bible studies and prayer groups don’t spend any time talking about how to pray more effectively (meaning like God wants), it’s time to fix those groups. Drop the showing off, ditch the mini-sermons in disguise, quit padding and overcomplicating, and get bold. Talk about what really works, and what really doesn’t. Get honest.

And keep pointing back to the Lord’s Prayer.

Jesus taught this rote prayer. He wants us to recite it. Education in Jesus’s day—same as ours—meant memorization. He wanted his students to put this prayer in their brains. (Since the gospels weren’t written down for another three decades after Jesus taught this, obviously his students did as he wanted!) The Lord’s Prayer is the model for how Jesus wants us to pray, and base our own prayers upon. So if we’re gonna learn to pray properly and effectively, we gotta practice with the Lord’s Prayer.

It’s like training wheels. When people first learn to ride a bicycle, and haven’t yet learned to balance the bike upright all the time, a lot of us use training wheels which always hold the bike upright. The Lord’s Prayer isn’t only training wheels. But it definitely does the job of keeping our prayers upright. When in doubt, return to Jesus’s words.