What does the language in a person's prayers say about their relationship with God, their denomination and their world? Surprisingly quite a bit, says Macquarie University PhD graduate Dr Juliet Mar.

Dr Juliet Mar

Mar, who completed her PhD titled The Power of Prayer: Construing Religious Meaning Through Language in Macquarie's Linguistics Department, collected and studied around 100 prayers, taken from church and prayer group meetings from eight denominations in Sydney.

She wanted to find out how different Christian groups pray, looking at a range of prayers, including those contained in books and informal prayers.

She visited groups from eight denominations, namely: Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Churches of Christ, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, the Salvation Army and the Uniting Church. She attended meetings and church gatherings mostly from the eastern suburbs of Sydney, to keep variables to a minimum.

She chose to exclude individual prayers from her study because of the difficulty in obtaining data.

“What interested me was to see how people talked to God in the presence of other people. From a linguistic point of view I wondered how people speak to an addressee who is [according to Christian faith] everywhere, knows everything and can do anything,” Mar says.
“I focused on the grammatical structures people would use for that kind of context. And I also explored how the language people choose for their prayers constructs the person they are talking to.”

She found that while there were similarities in the way Christians in the eight denominations prayed, there were also noticeable differences. Praying in the Uniting Church was done with the speaker calling for general, rather than specific benefits, with the person praying assuming a counselling role, sympathising with the person/people in need.

In the Baptist church, the speaker gave more of a “pep talk”, using phrases such as ‘do a work, Lord' and ‘Draw forth worship', and encouraging enthusiasm in the congregation.

“To make requests of the addressee, some groups used imperatives such as ‘send us rain' whereas others would say ‘we pray you will send us rain' or ‘grant that we may have rain',” Mar says.

“Different grammatical structures show a different kind of relationship. One of them construes God as acting directly, another suggests that results will take a little more time.”

There were certain grammatical structures that construed a sense of “mystery” and “transcendence”, for example archaic phrases like “grant that” - were mostly used in set prayers like those used in the Catholic Church.

Mar also noticed that prayers had varying functions according to the denomination and setting.
“Sometimes they are about offering things to God, but they could also function as a way of teaching the community, instructing, and informing,” she says.

“Some were rebuking. There was one example of a leader praying for an HSC student, who had confessed he hadn't studied. The speaker asked God to rebuke the student for not studying, but also to help him.

“That was interesting. There were people in the congregation laughing, which suggests that another minor function of prayer is one of entertainment or performance.”

Some of the characteristic features she found were:

Pentecostal - Leaders brought entertainment to the gatherings. In prayers, God was asked to do something directly. People were chosen to pray on behalf of a group, and when they prayed they spoke to God using the word “I”, not “we”.

Uniting - Surprisingly similar to the Catholic Church prayers in terms of meanings construed. The prayers presented God as a transcendent God, who acts in a global way. The prayers featured quite lofty language, despite the fact that many were not set.

Anglican - Presented God as a somewhat passive spectator, whose response is deferred and not necessarily perceivable. Framing phrases such as “we pray for...” were used. Prayer in the Anglican Church was also used as a means of telling the congregation what was going on in the world, instructing right and wrong values. People were defined collectively, as members of groups.

Catholic - Prayer presented God as mysterious and transcendent. People offered things to God, and praised God more than asked for things. The roles of priest and congregation were clearly defined. Prayers contained decorative, stereotypically “religious” language.

Baptist - Prayers indicated God had more of an immediate presence, through the use of imperatives such as “be with us”. The prayers contained more of an emotional tone, rather than instruction about right and wrong behaviour.

Presbyterian - The speaker often took an informing role, announcing relevant church events. Prayers tended to focus on human actions, placing God in the role of initiator or helper, so phrases such as “help us to do” were often used.

Salvation Army - Similar on the one hand to the Uniting Church, but also to the Presbyterian Church.

Churches of Christ - Similar to the Presbyterian Church. Prayer contained declaratives that construed a less direct way of asking for action, such as “we pray for your blessing”.

Mar notes that while there were differences, there were also many similarities.

“Often exaggerated boundaries are placed between the groups but visiting these different groups highlighted a great deal of unity in terms of meaning, values and ideas,” she says.
“It's like the same melody is being played on different instruments. While there may be different keys, and trills and chords are used in different ways, there is nevertheless a recognisable tune across all of them.”

Mar chose the research topic because of her interest in the phenomenon of prayer.
“It is said that prayer is universal. It may not necessarily be institutionalised, but everyone in some way reaches up to something unseeable,” she says.

“There seems to be a common urge in human beings, despite what they might say in public, to reach out verbally to some unseen force that knows about them, understands them and can even interact with them.”

Story by Charmaine Newton
Photo by Mario Bianchino

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