Liturgical prayer and the Daily Office
Set prayers and set hours, kept by the traditions that retained them.
Fixed prayers read or sung from authorized service books, above all the Book of Common Prayer in the Anglican tradition, whose Morning and Evening Prayer condensed the old monastic hours into two daily services of psalms and scripture. Lutheran and Methodist churches keep comparable worship books, and clergy in most Anglican provinces are expected to pray the daily office throughout their ministry.
Not all Protestant prayer is extemporaneous. Anglican, Lutheran and some Reformed traditions kept a liturgy, and the Book of Common Prayer condensed the monastic hours into Morning and Evening Prayer, which were designed to be sayable by ordinary people rather than by religious communities.
The texts are fixed and old, and the argument for them is the mirror of the argument for extemporaneous prayer: on a day when a person has nothing to say, the words are already there and do not depend on them.
Morning and Evening Prayer are still said daily in cathedrals, and increasingly by lay people using apps that serve the day's office.
Does it have a text?
Fixed text, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is out of copyright, which is why this is one of the better-represented traditions here. This site holds the Collect for Aid against All Perils, the General Thanksgiving, a Prayer of St Chrysostom, and three psalms in the Coverdale translation the prayer book uses.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Protestant
- Extemporaneous prayer — Prayer composed in the moment, in the speaker's own words.
- 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.
- Grace at meals and household devotion — Prayer at the table, and the habit of family prayer at home.
- 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.