This weekend we were visiting my family in my ancestral homeland of Western Pennsylvania. As is our habit, we attended the early service at the ELCA congregation in my hometown. This is a gem of a church and we always receive a warm welcome when we worship there, even though we don’t have a particular connection to the parish.

Anyway, the pastor was on vacation but in his stead the ELCA bishop of the Northwestern Pennsylvania Synod, Ralph E. Jones, presided and preached. The Gospel lession was the story from Luke 11 where the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray and he responds by giving them the Lord’s Prayer as well as by telling them that their Heavenly Father is always ready to give them the gift of the Spirit.

Bishop Jones’ sermon began with recounting a message he’d heard on a Christian radio station against the practice of “rote” pre-written prayers. God, the speaker suggested, wants prayers that come spontaneously “from our hearts.”

However, Bp. Jones, good Lutheran that he apparently is, suggested, the problem with prayer “from the heart” is that our heart’s desires are often self-centered and misaligned with God’s will. What prayers like the Lord’s Prayer do through repeated use, he said, is form us in such a way that our thoughts and desires gradually come to be aligned with God’s will.

As he put it, if I pray from my heart, I’ll spend a lot more time asking for things than praying for others or offering praise or thanksgiving. But the prayers of the Bible (and the tradition of the church) help us to readjust our vision and our priorities in line with God’s kingdom. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that pre-written prayers keep us in touch with “sound doctrine” and prevent our religion from becoming wholly privatized. I’m also reminded of Bonhoeffer’s dictum that our prayer should be rooted in God’s word, not in the poverty of our hearts.

He also pointed out that, according to the Gospel text, the gift that God is always ready to give us when we ask in prayer is the Holy Spirit. Some Christians have been misled into the view that God will literally give us whatever we ask for if we have sufficient faith (this seems to be the root of some “prosperity gospel” preaching). But in this story at least, the gift of the Spirit seems to be chiefly what is promised. And the role of the Spirit is to form us into new people who love God and our neighbor.

I don’t think this should be taken as an argument against “spontaneous” prayer or to say that we should only use pre-writter prayer forms. Personally most, though not the entirety, of my prayer life (pitiful as it is) consists of traditional prayers. I tend to think of prayers as tools for helping me to focus on God, and the great prayers of our tradition seem to me to do this best. This isn’t to say that Christians shouldn’t have recourse to spontaneous prayer, but I do think that Bp. Jones is right that those prayers need to be formed and directed by God as we believe he has revealed himself to us.