RAPT Prompts: Teaching Children to Pray
At the bottom of it, prayer is a loving conversation with God.
Helping children have such a conversation can be tricky. The combination of short attention spans, an new thing, and a parent’s own unfamiliarity with prayer can make it easy to simply avoid the whole thing altogether. I mean, isn’t saying an “Our Father” or “Grace before Meals” every once-in-a-while good enough anyway?
Well, those are good prayers, even if we say them less frequently than we might wish. However, sometimes when we say rote prayers, words are coming out of our mouths, but our minds are somewhere else. We go through the motions only to ask afterwards, “did we pray?” We can hide behind memorized prayers and not really get the heart involved.
It is possible to be more vulnerable in prayer — to get the mind and heart more involved — and it’s possible to give children a structure for this as well. With a few simple prompts, you can teach your kids to pray in a personal kind of way. I refer to this series of conversation starters as RAPT. This acronym stands for Repentance, Adoration, Petition, and Thanksgiving.
RAPT Prompts
You can use the RAPT prompts yourself for quiet prayer. You can also use them with your children (saying the prompt out loud and giving time for the children to fill in the blanks in the quiet of their hearts):
Repentance — “Father/God/Jesus, I am sorry for _____. It was wrong. Please forgive me.”
Adoration — “Father/God/Jesus, you are ________.” (Examples: merciful, loving, forgiving, present to me, etc.)
Petition (and Intercession) — “Father/God/Jesus, I need _____. Please help me _____. Please help (name of person) with ______.”
Thanksgiving — “Father/God/Jesus, thank you for ______.”
To explain further:
Repentance is obviously about apologizing. With this step, we are challenged to face up to our sins, to those thoughts, words, and actions that hurt our relationships with God and others — those deficiencies in our love.
Adoration comes from a posture of humility and lauds and praises God.
Petition is begging. When we petition God, we ask for what we need. Intercession is begging on behalf of another.
When someone gives you a gift, it is right and just to thank that person. We usually thank the giver of the gift through words spoken or written. Either way, we don’t just think about saying thanks. We actually have to do it. Prayer of thanksgiving is kind of like that — it is actually saying thanks to God for particular blessings received.
Listening
Listening is perhaps the most critical element of any good conversation. If there’s no listening, a dialogue devolves into a monologue. In prayer, we talk and listen to the Lord. And, the listening is critical:
In a conversation, if you are the wisest, it makes sense for you to do most of the talking. If the other person is wiser, it makes sense for you to do most of the listening…Well, prayer is conversation with God, and it makes no sense for us to do most of the talking. We ought to be listening most of the time. — Peter Kreeft
Therefore, it’s important to remember that RAPT is a series of conversation starters. The series of prompts implies a time of listening as well. When guiding a child through the RAPT steps, it’s worth taking your time and intentionally leaving extra silence after each prompt — to be quiet and listen. Maybe God has something to say in response. After all, he did invite the little children to come to him (cf. Mk. 10:14). Presumably, he has something to say to them.