Novena, rosary, free prayer, liturgy: how Christians pray

Christians who would give the same answer about who they pray to often pray in visibly different ways. The differences are not random: each tradition has worked out how much of a prayer should be decided in advance, how much the body should be involved, and how prayer relates to the church's worship. This article describes what each one actually does, without ranking them.

What everyone shares

Before the differences, the overlap is larger than it looks. Every tradition described here prays the Lord's Prayer, uses the psalms, prays before meals, prays for the sick, and treats Scripture as something to pray with rather than only read. Two New Testament lines sit behind all of them: "In praying, don’t use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their much speaking" (Matthew 6:7) and "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Every tradition holds both, and each interprets the tension differently.

The comparison at a glance

Catholic practice

Catholic prayer runs on a calendar and on repetition. The Mass is the central act of public prayer; the Liturgy of the Hours divides the day into fixed offices of psalms, readings and prayers, prayed by clergy and religious and by a growing number of lay Catholics.

Outside the liturgy, the best-known form is the rosary: a sequence of decades, each one an Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be, prayed while meditating on a set of events from the Gospels called mysteries. John Paul II's 2002 letter on the rosary added a fourth set, the Luminous Mysteries, covering Christ's public ministry, and described the whole practice as a "compendium of the Gospel" — the beads keep the mouth occupied so the mind can dwell on a scene.

A novena is simpler: the same prayer or set of prayers repeated on nine consecutive days, usually for a particular intention or in preparation for a feast. The nine days are traditionally connected to the interval between the Ascension and Pentecost.

The Catechism sorts all of this into three kinds of prayer — vocal prayer, meditation and contemplative prayer — and states plainly that vocal prayer, prayer with words, is an essential element of Christian life rather than a lower form.

On praying to saints, the Catholic position is that the faithful ask saints to pray for them, in the same way one might ask a friend, rather than praying to them as to God. That distinction is central to how Catholics describe the practice, and it is also the point most disputed by others.

Orthodox practice

Orthodox prayer is built around a prayer rule: a fixed set of morning and evening prayers, agreed with a priest or spiritual father and adjusted to a person's circumstances rather than applied uniformly. The published collections of Orthodox daily prayers include morning and evening prayers, the Trisagion, prayers before and after meals, prayers for the sick and the departed, and the Lenten Prayer of St Ephrem.

The most distinctive form is the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", repeated slowly, often with a knotted prayer rope, sometimes coordinated with breathing. Its wording descends from the tax collector's prayer in Luke 18. The aim described in Orthodox writing is not a mental state but continual prayer — the "pray without ceasing" line taken literally.

Icons are used, and the language matters: Orthodox teaching describes veneration directed through the icon to the person depicted, not worship of the object. Prayer is physical — standing for long services, bowing, prostrations in Lent, the sign of the cross.

Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian practice

These churches kept written prayer while removing much of the medieval devotional apparatus. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer shapes the pattern: Morning and Evening Prayer built from opening sentences, confession, psalms, two readings, canticles, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, suffrages and collects. Lutheran and Methodist service books follow a similar architecture; Presbyterian and Reformed churches historically leaned more on extempore prayer led by the minister, framed by psalm singing.

The collect is worth naming because it is a genuine literary form: a single sentence that addresses God, names something about God, makes one request, states the purpose, and closes through Christ. Many Christians who have never used a prayer book pray in that shape without knowing it.

Alongside the written material, pastoral prayer in these traditions is normally free — a minister praying aloud for the congregation in their own words, and members praying spontaneously in small groups.

Evangelical and Pentecostal practice

Here prayer is mostly unscripted and mostly out loud. The typical individual practice is a daily "quiet time": Bible reading followed by prayer in one's own words. Corporate prayer happens in home groups and prayer meetings, where several people pray aloud in sequence and others agree audibly.

Distinctive features include the prayer of agreement, in which two or more people pray the same request out loud together, often citing Matthew 18:19; prayer ministry after a service, where people come forward to be prayed for with laying on of hands; and, in Pentecostal and charismatic churches, praying in tongues, understood as a form of prayer given by the Spirit, based mainly on 1 Corinthians 14. Churches differ sharply on whether tongues is for all believers, for some, or not for the present age at all — cessationist evangelicals hold the last position while remaining otherwise close to their charismatic neighbours.

Fixed texts are rare but not absent: many evangelical churches say the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed together, and written prayers have been quietly returning to some of them.

Where the disagreements actually are

Three questions divide practice, and it is more useful to state each side than to resolve them.

• Asking saints to pray. Catholic and Orthodox Christians ask Mary and the saints to intercede, holding that the dead in Christ are alive and can pray. Most Protestants decline, holding that Scripture directs prayer to God through Christ alone and gives no instruction to address anyone else.
• Repetition. Catholic and Orthodox practice uses repeated formulas deliberately, arguing that Matthew 6:7 condemns empty babbling rather than repetition itself and pointing to Jesus praying the same words three times in Gethsemane. Some Protestants read the same verse as a caution against exactly the kind of counted prayer a rosary involves.
• Set texts versus free prayer. Liturgical traditions argue that written prayer carries a community through the days when nobody feels like praying. Free-prayer traditions argue that scripted prayer drifts into recitation. Both describe a real risk.

If you visit another tradition's service

Stand and sit with everyone else, and stay seated for anything you do not want to join. Nobody expects a visitor to cross themselves, venerate an icon or come forward for prayer, and in Catholic and Orthodox churches communion is not open to all visitors, so it is safest to stay in your seat unless you have been told otherwise. Asking someone afterwards what a particular moment meant is almost always welcomed.

For fixed texts you can use whatever your background, this site has a morning prayer, a night prayer and Psalm 23. The article on prayers in the Bible shows where most of these forms came from.