Prayer has always been a central part of the Christian life. Unfortunately, it has also been the most difficult part to practice in my own faith. At least until recently.
See, I’d been trying to years to pray in the way low-church evangelicalism taught me to pray, and it wasn’t working. Not because that method of prayer is inherently bad, it gets twisted and misunderstood like any religious practice but is a powerful way of approaching God for a whole host of people.
But for me that way of praying has always been a bit of a losing battle.
Knowing how important prayer is, I would determine to get my act together and pray on a regular basis for more than a few minutes at a time. This would last for a few awkwardly forced days, with a spiritual high or two scattered in there somewhere, and then eventually my questions and struggles and inability to play by the language game I’d been handed would catch up with me and I’d quit trying for a while.
Until I came across liturgical prayer.
It started out of frustration really. Years of trying to “improve my prayer life” with different techniques and books had gotten me nowhere, so I resorted to the only thing I was really resonating with, the Lord’s Prayer. Every morning I’d pray through the Lord’s Prayer, sometimes verbatim, sometimes expanding on each section.
There was a reverence in it that I didn’t often feel in prayer, and it wasn’t all about me and my requests, however it was also a bit short and a little too repetitive.
I had been hearing many of like-minded believers talking about The Book of Common Prayer, and I had recently begun my initial ventures into the Church calendar and was starting to be sympathetic towards a more structured form of worship, so I decided to try using that to shape my praying.
It was a better idea in principle than in practice.
Don’t get me wrong, the Book of Common Prayer is beautiful and my use of it was one of the best things to ever happen to my praying. That said, for someone from a low-church background it’s more difficult to use than I expected. It is not a day by day liturgy, but various collections of prayers for different times and events.
I loved the prayers, but it was hard to keep it as part of my routine when I essentially just looked for a new section each morning.
So when I heard of a new prayerbook, one structured by both the Church calendar and a daily routine of prayer, written by new monastics and with an eye to the Global church, I was intrigued.
When this prayerbook, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, was released it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I didn’t realize this at first of course. For quite a while I used commonprayer.net as part of my morning routine without any real commitment. Then, in February, I realized I’d been praying those prayers almost every morning for the last four months and decided it was about time I got a copy of the book for myself.
A couple months later, Common Prayer has become an important and rooted part of how my faith is expressed. It grounds my faith in something deeper than my immediate surroundings, in the life of the Church and the Story of Jesus, while also shaping me to engage in exactly the place I find myself. It gives an order, and reverence, and Christo-centric shape to my prayers. And it gives me words to offer before God when often my own words come less than easily.
Common Prayer is certainly not for everyone, and neither is liturgical prayer in general. That’s not the point of this post. I’m not saying my way of prayer is better than yours, I’m celebrating that after far too long I’ve found a sort of prayer that brings joy and life instead of discouragement and frustration.
And, perhaps, if you’ve experienced the same struggles with prayer that I have, liturgically shaped prayer might help you as well.
Grace and peace.
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How about you? Do these struggles sound like your own?
Have you used Common Prayer or The Book of Common Prayer? What did you like/dislike?
What do you think is behind the rediscovery of liturgy among many low-church evangelicals?
* This is part three in a series, you can find the first two posts here and here.![]()
and started to flip through it. And by “flip through it” I mean I read about a third of it during my break and spent the rest of the evening contemplating its challenging words.
, and contributor to 
), and brings the ancient words of Benedict crashing into our own day and age, while offering commentary that sheds light on the Rule and the practices of Benedictine communities.
