Petition
Asking for oneself.
Prayer that asks for one's own needs: bread, forgiveness, protection, guidance. Most of the Lord's Prayer is petition, which teachers across traditions read as permission to ask plainly and briefly. Wording divides the branches, set texts in some and one's own words in others, but the asking itself is universal.
Petition is asking on one's own behalf. It is the form most people arrive at prayer through, and the form most often apologised for by people who think prayer ought to be about something higher.
Christian teaching is generally unembarrassed about it. The prayer Jesus taught asks for bread, and traditions across the spectrum cite that when reassuring people who feel their requests are too small.
What it does not come with is a guarantee about outcomes, and the pastoral literature spends far more time on that than on how to ask.
Does it have a text?
A mode rather than a text. The Lord's Prayer is the tradition's model of it and is held here in three languages, from the Douay-Rheims, Reina-Valera and Segond editions.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Christian
- Praise and adoration — Prayer that addresses God for who God is rather than asking for anything.
- Confession — Naming what has gone wrong, privately or in a congregation.
- Thanksgiving — Prayer that names what has been received.
- Intercession — Asking on behalf of someone else.
- Set and free prayer — The long argument between prayer that is written down and prayer that is not.
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.