The image many modern Christians carry of "real" Christian prayer is the fixed prayer, read from a book, said in the same form by everyone in the room. The Mass. The Anglican collect. The Rosary. The Eucharistic liturgy. These prayers are real and old and central. They are not, however, the whole story.
For at least the last four centuries, large parts of the Christian tradition have made personal, extempore prayer in the petitioner's own language the central form of their devotion. The history is worth knowing because most people who hesitate about whether they can pray in their own words are working from an incomplete picture of where the Christian tradition actually stands on this question.
It stands further toward "yes, please do" than they realize.
The Puritan moment
In 17th-century England, the Puritan branch of Protestantism made extempore prayer one of its defining commitments. The Puritans had two complaints against the Book of Common Prayer: that its language was insufficiently scriptural, and that fixed liturgical prayer had become rote rather than heartfelt. Their solution was to develop a practice of prayer in which the minister, and increasingly any layperson moved to do so, prayed aloud in their own words, drawing language from scripture but composing the actual prayer on the spot.
This was a deliberate theological choice. The Westminster Directory for Public Worship, adopted by the Westminster Assembly in 1645, replaced the Prayer Book during the Commonwealth period in England and was the official liturgy of the Church of Scotland for the rest of the 17th century. It gave detailed guidance on what an extempore prayer should contain (confession, thanksgiving, intercession, supplication) but left the wording to the minister.
The result, paradoxically, was some of the best prayer writing in any language. Matthew Henry's A Method for Prayer, published in 1710, is essentially a structured manual for extempore prayer drawn from the Puritan tradition. It is a remarkable document: page after page of scripturally-grounded language, organized by category, designed not to be read aloud but to give the petitioner a vocabulary for praying in their own words.
The Puritans understood that praying well in your own words is a skill, and that skill can be taught.
Wesley and the Methodist tradition
A century later, the founder of Methodism made extempore prayer the centerpiece of a vast new movement. John Wesley preached an estimated 40,000 sermons across the British Isles between 1739 and his death in 1791, almost all of them followed by extempore prayer that he or his preachers would lead. The early Methodist class meeting, where small groups gathered weekly for spiritual conversation, made extempore personal prayer one of its standard features.
Wesley believed that fixed liturgical prayer and extempore personal prayer were both gifts of God to the Church. He continued to attend Anglican services his entire life, using the Book of Common Prayer in worship. But he also led Methodist meetings where everyone present might pray aloud in their own words. This is still essentially Methodist practice today.
Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of 19th-century London, brought the same approach to Baptist worship. His sermons are still in print, but it was his prayers, prayed extempore from the pulpit before congregations of six thousand at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, that the historian Lord Macaulay called among the finest examples of religious eloquence in the English language. Recordings of them survive only in transcripts taken during the services. They were never written in advance.
The Quaker silence
The most radical Protestant move in this direction came earlier, with the Quakers. George Fox, who founded the Society of Friends in mid-17th-century England, abandoned fixed liturgy almost entirely. The Quaker meeting for worship consists of an hour or so of silence, broken only when someone present is moved to speak. When someone speaks, what they say is extempore, in their own words, on whatever the Spirit has prompted.
The Quaker meeting has been the standard form of Friends worship for nearly four hundred years. It is one of the longest-running experiments in pure extempore prayer in Christian history, and the Quakers have generally been articulate about why it works.
The point of Quaker silence is not that words do not matter. The point is that words spoken from the deep silence of attentive waiting tend to be the right words, where words rehearsed in advance often are not.
What Catholics and Orthodox have done with it
The Catholic and Orthodox traditions kept their liturgical prayer largely intact through the Reformation, but they also developed parallel traditions of personal prayer in one's own language. The Catholic practice of mental prayer, systematized by Teresa of Avila in 16th-century Spain and Ignatius of Loyola at roughly the same time, gives the Christian a method for sitting with scripture or a theological theme and letting their own response form in their own words. It is not extempore in the Puritan sense. It is closer to what a modern reader would call meditative journaling.
The Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer, which uses a fixed phrase repeated continuously, sits alongside a long Orthodox tradition of personal prayer in one's own language. The hours of the Office are fixed; personal prayer in between is not.
What it all adds up to
The Christian tradition, taken as a whole and across all its branches, is overwhelmingly in favor of personal prayer in the petitioner's own language. The fixed prayers exist as anchors, as common ground, as inheritance. They do not exist to substitute for personal prayer. They exist alongside it.
If you have been holding back from praying in your own words because you thought it might not count, you have been holding back from one of the central practices of Christianity. The tradition wants you doing it.
You can start now.