Grace at meals and household devotion
Prayer at the table, and the habit of family prayer at home.
Brief thanksgiving before eating remains a common mark of Protestant households, in forms from memorized children's rhymes and the common table prayer of Lutheran and Moravian homes to spontaneous thanks. Family devotions and the personal quiet time of Bible reading and prayer carry the practice through the ordinary week.
Grace before a meal is the most widely kept Protestant prayer habit, and often the last one to survive in households that have stopped going to church. It may be a fixed rhyme learned in childhood, or a sentence in the speaker's own words, or a moment of silence.
Family devotions, a longer practice of reading scripture and praying together at home, were once nearly universal in Protestant households and are now much less common, though they persist strongly in some communities.
Both are domestic and unsupervised, which makes them hard to describe accurately: what happens at kitchen tables varies more than any published account suggests.
Does it have a text?
Some graces are fixed and memorised, but they are folk texts with many variants and no authoritative edition, and most are of uncertain and recent authorship. None is published here.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Protestant
- Extemporaneous prayer — Prayer composed in the moment, in the speaker's own words.
- Liturgical prayer and the Daily Office — Set prayers and set hours, kept by the traditions that retained them.
- The pastoral prayer — The long prayer offered on behalf of a whole congregation during worship.
- The prayer meeting — A gathering whose only business is praying together, usually mid-week.
- Charismatic and Pentecostal prayer — Prayer expecting the immediate activity of the Spirit, including prayer in tongues.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.