Can a Written Prayer Be a Real Prayer?

Imagine next Sabbath a worship leader announcing, “Today we’re going to pray a prayer I wrote earlier this week.” Some Adventists may express concern. “Isn’t prayer supposed to come from the heart?” Some may feel comfortable writing a sermon, others songs. We encourage memorizing Scripture. We even read prayers from the Bible. Yet a written prayer can feel suspiciously “Catholic.”

Is a Written Prayer a “Lesser” Prayer?

How we feel about written prayer carries with it cultural differences. In some European Adventist contexts a responsive prayer or responsive reading of Scripture can carry an association with Roman Catholicism. In many North American contexts, however, the same practice can appear with little concern. These differences raise important questions. Does prayer have to be spontaneous to be genuine? Does someone else’s authorship make the prayer less “ours”? Is reading a prayer fundamentally different from praying extemporaneously?

American Adventist worship has been wrestling with these issues for more than 100 years. Frank Belden was the first Adventist to publish a hymnal with readings and prayers in his 1900 songbook, Christ in Song. Remarkably, the first responsive reading is a reading of the Ten Commandments. The congregation is given a responsive prayer to sing following each commandment: “Lord, have mercy, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” Belden was not original with this structure. In fact, Thomas Cranmer introduced this setting in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer.

This mode of prayer within Adventism expanded over the twentieth century. The 1941 Church Hymnal possessed 30 pages of responsive readings, while the 1985 Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal has 225 readings. Many of these readings are designed to serve not only as Scripture reading but as different kinds of prayer: words of assurance, offertory sentences, and benedictions.

Although some Adventist hymnals contain responsive readings and written prayers, they all provide something more valuable for us to help address our questions: congregational song. What happens when a congregation sings? We sing words written by someone else, or words written prior to the singing. Someone else wrote the theology. Someone determined what we were going to say to God. But we usually don’t think, These aren’t my words, so I can’t sincerely worship with them. Quite the opposite is true. We choose songs, sometimes our favorite songs, because we want those words to become our own.

We don’t need more written prayers or more spontaneity. We need more prayer.

Congregational song is prayer, or at least it should be. “As a part of religious service, singing is as much an act of worship as is prayer. Indeed, many a song is prayer.”¹Some songs are about prayer, such as “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” Others address God directly: “Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty”; “Take My Life and Let It Be”; and “Come, Thou Fount.” When we sing congregationally, we do precisely what some object to in written prayer. We receive words composed by someone else and speak those words collectively to God.

Is Repetition Wrong?

This does not negate the very valid concerns raised by many in the church. What if we applied some of the objections to written prayer to congregational song? For example, some note that written prayers can be repetitious. Congregational song is, however, deliberately repetitive. We sing the same songs over and over, sometimes every Sabbath. Sometimes we repeat a chorus multiple times. But we do not conclude that this type of repetition is vain. Additionally, we understand that congregational songs do not emerge spontaneously, but were composed beforehand. We value when musicians have rehearsed the music. We publish the lyrics in hymnals or project them on screens.

Our Adventist identity is precious and deserves safekeeping. Nonetheless, our faith tradition does stand on the shoulders of centuries of other Christians’ experiences. Our hymnody includes songs by Baptists, Methodists, Reformed, Pentecostals, and yes, Catholics. Every December many Adventists sing the ninth-century Catholic Gregorian chant, “O Come, O Come, Immanuel.” My Adventist faith is strengthened by this hopeful Advent hymn. We owe much to our Christian brothers and sisters through their contributions to the corpus of congregational song.

The objections to written prayer are important. There can be dangers. Repetition can become vain. A song can be sung by rote. A written prayer can become formalistic. Inherited language can become irrelevant to our modern realities. While these concerns are valid, if we are going to make them, then we ought to apply them to the congregational songs we have grown to love and worship by. A form of worship does not guarantee that worship within that form is authentic. 

Many rightly point out that Jesus said, “When you pray, do not use vain repetitions” (Matt. 6:7). It is important to note, however, that Jesus prohibited, not repetition, but meaningless repetition, or babble. Our Protestant and Adventist identity has rightly questioned the validity of modes of worship in the Christian tradition. The issue at stake is forced allegiance versus genuine worship. The Puritans criticized the Anglican tradition because they viewed the written prayers as leading to dead formalism. Puritan free worship valued extemporaneous prayer as an expression of spiritual vitality. Horton Davies noted, however, that this protestation led to a great irony. Condemnation of a formulary of prayer led to the prohibition of a “corporate vocal expression of prayer that responses [provided]” and that would have actually fit their “congregational conception of worship more easily than the apparent sacerdotalism of a passive congregation merely murmuring a concluding assent [an “Amen”] to a pastoral prayer of their ministers.”² By avoiding responsive prayer forms, which we view as Catholic, we may actually be embracing a more Catholic form of prayer: the vicarious forms we often offer through our pastors and elders.

It’s Not Either-Or

Let us not miss the point. Preparation and spontaneity aren’t opposites. Extemporaneous does not necessarily mean unprepared. A pastor may spend an hour thinking about a prayer and deliver it without reading it. Another may write the prayer and read it word-for-word. Both may have prayed deeply before leading the congregation. The inverse is also true. A spontaneous prayer may be both beautifully eloquent and spiritually profound. It may also be a “sermon” of theological wandering.

Contemporary forms of prayer have ironically become formulaic, bordering on vain repetition. Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong note how contemporary, extemporaneous prayer uses standard formulas and repetition:³

“Lord, we just want to . . .”

“God, we pray that You would . . .”

“Father, we ask that You would . . .”

“And right now, Lord . . .”

These liturgical habits become a liturgical form. Free worship becomes a highly predictable liturgy.

Jesus didn’t prohibit repetition. He warned of vain repetition. If repetition is the problem, we must take issue with the Psalms, biblical prayers, liturgical responses in Scripture, the repeated heavenly worship of Revelation, and congregational song. Repetition does not equal vain repetition. Being prepared for worship does not mean offering inauthentic worship. Spontaneity does not equal authenticity.

The Bible does not give us one type of prayer. It gives us many. The question is: What different modes of prayer does the church need to become a praying people? There is a spectrum of possibilities: spontaneous, prepared, responsive, Scripture-based, sung, silent, individual, corporate, repeated, and improvised. Immediately after Jesus warned of the dangers of heartless worship, He taught His followers words for prayer. Could it be that our role as church leaders is not merely to give people the opportunity to express whatever is in their hearts, but to teach the people what to desire, what to confess, what to ask for, and what to imagine God’s kingdom to be?

Worship is not merely expression; worship is formative. How do we learn to pray for things we do not yet know how to pray for? Through the discipleship offered in public worship. A congregation may not spontaneously think to pray:

for enemies,

for justice,

for the stranger,

for forgiveness,

for God’s kingdom rather than its own prosperity,

for the church’s mission,

for those who suffer,

for humility, and

for the transformation of society.

Public Prayer as Discipleship

We have the profound opportunity to invite our congregation to consider putting these words into their mouths. By crafting words for worship and praying them repeatedly, my prayer is that we will learn to desire them. This is exactly what happens with congregational song. We sing before we fully understand it. After gaining understanding, we begin to live it. This is discipleship through public worship.

A false binary exists between liturgical and spontaneous prayer. We don’t need more written prayers or more spontaneity. We need more prayer. Your congregation should not replace heartfelt spontaneous prayer with written prayers. But you should not assume that spontaneous prayer is somehow more spiritual. The goal is not to choose the correct form of prayer, but to be formed by many different kinds of prayer, that we might learn how to pray.

I propose that we need Adventists of all cultures to explore more ways to pray, and to pray intentionally, uncomfortably, that God may form us into a people who will live and be in the world, that by His grace our communities will experience peace, healing, and transformation.

It takes courage to worship in ways we are not familiar with. But those experiences jolt us out of our complacency, awakening in us an earnest desire for the things of God. We risk this every time we sing a new song at church. Perhaps we can explore new and meaningful ways to pray as a congregation that will prepare us to live and share the gospel. Whatever mode your congregation prays, I ask you, “Are you really worshipping? Or are you just going through the motions?”