From a thoughtful piece, by Tish Harrison Warren, in favor of praying prewritten prayers:
Evangelicals can pin ‘extemporaneous’ prayer against ‘other people's prayers’ and deem the latter inauthentic. We can see prayer as a means of self-expression — a way of voicing our most raw fears, needs, and joys before God. Formulas and imitation seem like enemies of self-expression. If prayer is primarily self-expression before God, then we figure it should come naturally; it should be our words. But what if prayer is more than simply self-expression? What if prayer is a kind of craft or exercise that shapes us? What if God uses prayer to ‘act back on us,’ to form us? What if set liturgical prayers are an ancient tool that reframe our perspectives and desires so that we might learn to pray in ways that are beyond us? For most of church history, Christians understood prayer not primarily as a means of authentic self-expression, but as a learned way of approaching God ...
When his disciples found Jesus praying alone in a ‘solitary place’ (Mark 1:35 KJV), they asked him to teach them to pray. He did not tell them, ‘it's easy; just say whatever comes to mind’; he taught them the Lord's Prayer, a pattern of prayer to shape their own prayer habits. Christians over the centuries have honed practices of prayer. Beyond the Lord's Prayer and the Psalms, other Christian leaders have written prayers both for gathered worship and for private devotion. My own tradition's prayer book, the Book of Common Prayer, pulls from and simplifies a number of different sources of prayers and liturgies from the Christian tradition — for instance, the Collect for Purity is drawn from an eleventh-century eucharistic liturgy, and the Great Thanksgiving is based on a third-century prayer in Hippolytus's prayer book, The Apostolic Tradition. In our current moment, as we drown in a torrent of words with our near-constant self-expression on social media, inhabiting the ancient, enduring prayers of the church is perhaps more needed than ever.
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