Teens and Prayer

Prayer is important. It therefore follows that Christian youths should pray and be prayed for. Also, they should be taught to pray.

How best to do that? I suppose that varies from teen to teen, depending on their learning style, spiritual development and other factors.


I volunteer with the Christian Youth Conference at Ocean Park and we have tried something in recent years that seems to work. Of course, we have always prayed at CYC. We pray in chapel and classes, at vespers and devotions, as the opening of programs. We also have always offered prayer support, both praying individually with teens and praying for them as staff.

Two years ago, though, we began to think about how to best teach teens to pray themselves, so that it would become a habit. We also realized that a new class schedule had opened up a 15 minute slot between chapel and lunch. We decided to make use of that quarter hour. We decided to try prayer groups. These would give us structured opportunities to pray with campers, to encourage them to pray and to model prayer. The Chaplain would provide "blueprints" but each group would work as they found best. Different types of prayer were to be explored.

The teens and staff were divided into small groups. Each group had a faculty member, cabin staff and campers. The faculty member was responsible for some aspects of the group, but the leadership of the prayer time was to be shared by all participants who were wanted to and were able. Campers were to be encouraged to step up.


It worked. Campers rated the prayer groups very highly on their yearly evaluations and staff spoke highly of them as well. It was very exciting to find something so effective.



Have you found good ways to teach teens to pray? I'd be very interested to hear. Always looking for new information.

Have a wonderful day!!







Christian Youth Conference at Ocean Park (CYC) is a two week ecumenical conference for high school students held in August on the beautiful southern coast of Maine. The theme for the 2011 conference is "Face to Face" and will look at restoring relationships between God and individuals, and amongst people. Click here for more information.