I have sometimes had conversations with Christians from ‘free’ churches who dismissed my involvement in liturgy that involves set prayers. Informally, they often say something like, “We should pray from the heart. You can’t really mean a prayer that someone else has written”. If there is a scriptural backing for that stance it is usually Jesus’ teaching against “vain repetition” in prayer. I guess that I would note in passing that the vain repetitions thing seems to be about accumulating formulaic prayers with a view to earning a deity’s attention, presumably by dint of impressing them or wearing them down. This is not, of course, really the same as Christian liturgy prayed with sincerity of heart. The real problem is that such a person doesn’t really get how someone can make the words of others their own.

Anyway, the occasion of writing this post was to draw attention to this posting by John Frye which puts the another point about the way that so-called spontaneous praying can often be far less spontaneous and more liturgy-like than many notice. He writes:

I noticed that my own prayers and many of the prayers of the church were, in fact, notoriously vain repetitions. By that, I mean, the prayers were basically the same. After a while, I knew what was going to be prayed as the person stood to pray. Not real names here, Bill always prayed for separation from the world: “‘Come out from among them and be ye separate,’saith the LORD.”Maggie always covered the globe and the missionaries and their needs. Jake prayed for the lost, lonely and forlorn that needed Jesus. Hank prayed for the old, the ill and the “shut in’s.”Prayers at the church potlucks were always re-runs, too. Prayers before Communion might as well have been written because they were the same.How ironic: the thing we were so earnestly warned about—vain repetitions—was the very nature of the church’s prayers. This seemed to go totally unnoticed. I was shaped by this “ritual”of prayer.via What are “Vain Repetitions”? (John Frye).

In fact, it seems to me that this routinization of prayers is probably how many ‘liturgical’ prayers began. And in fact it is likely that particularly helpful and resonant turns of phrase would be picked up by others in a way similar to the way that many of us recycle turns of phrase in everyday conversation.