There is no greater clarity than in Jesus’ command regarding prayer. For Jesus’ words leave little room for misunderstanding, for when we pray, we are explicitly instructed: “Pray, then, in this way” (Matt. 6:9, NASB 2020). Therefore, what follows is more than highlighted words in red font or a helpful spiritual practice. It is not merely a suggestion or a cultural trend that was once revolutionary and is now fluid and adaptable.
These carefully chosen words of Jesus’ prayer articulate the intentional values of God’s rule and reign, meant to serve as a pathway for confession, a theological framework, and a practical means for realigning the priorities of our lives. This prayer is often prayed, but not well. It is usually not prayed with understanding and intentionality. Arthur Boers remarks, “The Lord’s Prayer is well known, yet little understood. Its overexposure has hardened our hearts to its riches. It is often repeated, yet little contemplated” (Boers 1992, 13). I agree! Yet, ironically, in his book titled Lord, Teach Us to Pray, Arthur Paul Boers presents the Lord’s Prayer both as a powerful illustration of this prayer and as overly fluid, culturally conditioned, and even okay to be uncomfortable with.
Though there were moments when I felt Boer beautifully unpacked the Lord’s Prayer, holistically, Boer’s approach suggests that the prayer must be reworked or reshaped to remain meaningful to the one praying. In doing so, the book risks reversing the posture of the prayer itself. This is what I mean by that: rather than asking God to teach us how to pray, this book unconsciously (or maybe intentionally) establishes a way of praying in which it feels at times that the one praying instructs God on how prayer ought to function and which words should be used to do so.
About Lord, Teach Us To Pray
Released in 1992 on Herald Press (Scottdale, PA), Arthur Paul Boers gives us a look at the Lord’s Prayer in Lord, Teach Us To Pray, which is dubbed as a “New Look at the Lord’s Prayer.” Boers served as the R. J. Bernardo Family Chair of Leadership at Tyndale Seminary (Toronto, Canada) and previously taught Pastoral Theology at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. A Mennonite pastor, he has ministered in rural, urban, and church-planting contexts. Although Boers has published several books with various publishers, this volume reads less like a sustained theological treatment of the Lord’s Prayer and more like a collection of layman’s reflections (equally needing the editing, theological training, unpack statements, and reminder to cite sources one would expect of a layman). The work frequently moves into tangential discussions, often at the expense of theological depth and doctrinal clarity—a tendency readers of this resource should approach with great discernment.
Addressing “Our Father” in Lord, Teach Us To Pray
Boers suggests that “one must address the problem of God’s masculine name,” which is not a problem to be solved, perhaps for some, a tension to be named. He is treating God’s self-identification (as Abba) as a theological problem for modern readers rather than addressing how the concept of God the Father has been distorted by atrocities committed under failed or abusive forms of masculine leadership (1992, 36). The issue is not God’s self-revelation as Father, which is rich and challenging, but the ways human understandings of fatherhood have been corrupted. The biblical language of God as Abba is not something to be avoided or minimized, but something that requires deeper theological recovery, careful formation, and renewed appreciation.
Instead, Boers proposes that because of these historical abuses, we must “ask whether we can call any man a true father” (1992, 37). This move shifts the focus away from calling earthly fathers to reflect the character of the heavenly Father and toward redefining—or potentially undermining—the very category of fatherhood. While Boers rightly notes that “God our Father is better than our fathers,” he immediately qualifies this by citing feminist cautions against idolizing fathers (1992, 37). Few would argue for the idolization of fathers. Yet rejecting idolatry is not the same as abandoning or reconfiguring the theological significance of God’s chosen self-disclosure as Father and the importance of fathers trying to look like God the Father.
The theological question embedded in the Lord’s Prayer is not whether God and earthly fathers are equivalent, but whether our understanding of fatherhood can be reformed by the compassionate, faithful, and life-giving Father whom Jesus reveals. To suggest that the failures of human fathers necessitate the weakening or removal of God as Abba is a category error. As an egalitarian pastoral leader serving an Anabaptist church, I find it difficult to justify the claim that, because earthly fathers are flawed, or because a “worldly movement” critiques paternal authority, the theological weight of God’s fatherhood should be diminished rather than more carefully articulated. No movement of this world (for example, feminism) will define how I choose to see or not see God’s commands.
Boers goes on to commend alternative language, including a “Father-Mother” prayer, and then proposes a revised version of the Lord’s Prayer that removes both “Father” and “kingdom.” God becomes simply “our God,” diminishing the relational intimacy conveyed by Our Father, and “your kingdom come” is replaced with “your new earth come” due to concerns about the gendered implications of kingdom language (1992, 39). This move reflects not theological reconstruction but theological reduction. It substitutes the biblical clash of kingdoms—a theme central to Jesus’ proclamation—for a flattened vision shaped more by contemporary ideological concerns than by Scripture.
Undermining “Your Kingdom Come” in Lord, Teach Us To Pray
To name and pray for God’s kingdom to come, Boers suggests, might feel chauvinistic. Rather, for me, this prayer is choosing a side in the midst of competing powers and not chauvinism. To pray for the kingdom’s manifestation in the here-and-now is an act of God’s holy resistance, justice, and heavenly revolution. For an Anabaptist tradition profoundly shaped by the tension between rival kingdoms, this language is not optional but essential. That a trained theologian and pastoral leader would choose deletion over disciplined theological rediscovery is not only disappointing but deeply problematic for a prayer meant to form a follower of Jesus’ (and the Church’s) allegiance, identity, and imagination. It is not wrong to name the tensions our society has caused in praying these prayers, but it is counterproductive to erase them because our cultural tensions deem them inappropriate.
Thoughts That Don’t Connect
Throughout this book, I found that Boers favored one-liners that may connect with a more progressive readership, but he consistently fails to provide actual theological context or academic unpacking for many of them. These shallow statements become distractions rather than catalysts for greater understanding. For example, at one point, seemingly out of the blue, he states, “As a pacifist I have difficulty addressing God with the military title, ‘Lord of hosts’” (1992, 41), yet he offers little explanation for why this language presents such difficulty for him. To understand God as the Lord of hosts—as a king over a just kingdom, a divine presence that is over all seen and unseen and invades a broken world in ways that may resemble insurrection is not a hard statement to make. The Lord of hosts, a holy army that fights with weapons unlike we do, brings about the slow coming and steady permeation of God’s kingdom, and unlike Boers, I find no difficulty at all referring to God as the Lord of Hosts. I have no problem seeing God as this kind of Father of fathers, God of fathers, or King of kingdoms. After making this statement, Boers does not sufficiently engage this theological vision, nor does he wrestle with the biblical imagination that frames God’s reign in precisely these terms.
Throughout this book, Boers also overlooks many of the most respected voices and scholarly findings on the Lord’s Prayer from the past century. Many church fathers, theologians, and spiritual formation leaders offer deep and enriched insight into each line and petition in the Lord’s Prayer. Rather than utilizing these sources to help us reframe our understanding of Jesus’ intent in this model prayer, Boers draws on figures such as Elizabeth McAlister, who struggles to speak of God in kingdom language and instead describes God’s reign as family. While kinship and family are certainly meaningful biblical metaphors, and an inaugurated kingdom expresses itself in family-like ways, we cannot ignore that God consistently defines the rule of God (and heaven) as a kingdom throughout both the First and New Testaments. Family imagery helps us understand how the kingdom gathers and forms a people, but it must be related to, unpacked, explained, and understood—not erased.
I found Boers employing distractions to his own thoughts at times, tangents that are not particularly helpful to his intended points. In the chapter Hallowed Be Thy Name, Boers remarks, “Driving to church one Sunday, I was shocked to hear that Bush had declared the day a national day of prayer for coalition troops in the Middle East. (He overlooked the fact that Jesus commanded us to love and pray for our enemies). Who made George Bush a spiritual leader?” (1992, 61). This is a strange comparison and offhanded mark to introduce in a discussion about what it means for God’s name to be kept holy. Despite my disagreement with Bush and his policies, few are arguing for him to be a spiritual leader (which is a non-point) and this time-contextualized point doesn’t help us understand reverence any better. As a side note, I would disagree even more with Boers’ implication that praying for one’s enemies cannot include praying for one’s own troops (1992, 61). We are called to intercede for all people at all times.
Our Daily Bread
In his discussion of Daily Bread, Boers tells a story about a farmer who learns to be content with what the land provides. The story is good. It felt like an Anabaptist telling of How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Leo Tolstoy (one of my favorites). The double standard here for me was ironic. We cannot refer to God as a Father, or objectively use “Kingdom,” however, Boers can paint farmers as a holy parable illustration. This shows how far a worldly justice view often fails to go. Indeed, daily bread involves learning how to be content with what God provides (as the farmer in the story did). However, if we are going to use this as an example, we must then apply his justice lens here. This parable must be used as a reminder to large farmers who have failed to steward the land well, change fields for land preservation, undermine waterway protections, and more. If this is a parable of what daily bread loks like, than it is important to own that forgiveness is needed (the line that follows daily bread in the Lord’s Prayer), because far too often we are going after more land for more food, water, and productivity – which I cannot help but mention has significantly led to the destruction of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Our daily bread isn’t about being content with what the land provides; it is about being dependent on God.
Most concerning is Boers’ attempt to unpack the petition for daily bread itself. Boers largely ignores church history, established scholarship, and more recent findings from the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the word translated as “daily” does appear. He states, “Scholars debate the meaning of the word…daily” (1992, 96). While this is true, he overlooks the substantial historical and textual evidence that supports understanding the term as a daily ration—food for today or tomorrow. The word appears in truncated form on ancient shopping lists (found in the Dead Sea Scrolls), and many church fathers held a shared understanding of its meaning, despite claims that the Gospel writers invented a compound word to convey a unique idea. This is underexplored in this book and explained away by saying it’s “debated.”
I do agree with Boers at the end of the day, “When we pray for bread, we pray for our needs, not our wants. We do not pray for any more than we need” (1992, 98).
Two Final Criticisms
Two final criticisms of this book that are worth noting. First, Boers explains that learning to forgive as we have been forgiven “immediately raises many theological problems” (1992, 116). Forgiveness, however, sits at the very heart of the Gospel, the way of Jesus, and even Anabaptist theology. In attempting to explain these tensions, Boers fails to engage the verses in Matthew that immediately follow the framework for prayer that Jesus gives. Jesus himself provides commentary on forgiveness in these verses, directly addressing and resolving the tension Boers raises, yet this material is largely left unexamined or considered.
The second final criticism that genuinely shocked me was Boers’ claim that “no one believes that the Lord’s Prayer concluded with ‘lead us not into temptation’ or with ‘deliver us from evil’” (1992, 147). This assertion is difficult to sustain. In fact, most scholars do believe the prayer originally ended at this point, and very few argue that Jesus taught the benediction. Scholarly consensus acknowledges that the doxological ending does not appear in the earliest manuscripts and is instead drawn from the Didache, a mid-first-century document outlining church practice. Despite this, the benediction itself is rooted in David and was likely used liturgically in prayer. Even so, when Jesus taught the prayer (not as liturgy but as instruction) it most likely ended, as Matthew records, without the benedictory line. That is my own conviction.
Praise for Teach Us To Pray by Arthur Paul Boers
Despite these concerns, I picked up this book as a student of the Lord’s Prayer at Kairos University, and I did appreciate much about reading it. Boers is a reasonably capable writer, and some of his one-liners are succinct and pithy, capturing moments of theological and practical beauty as they relate to what it means to live out this prayer. I agree on the major things with Boers; he gives us a practical resource that reminds us that “all true prayer, teaches and reminds us of our basic dependence on God” (1992, 22). This prayer is not to be explored for any sort of “level up” it can provide. In a world of promises of fame, brands, and prosperity, Boers is right, this is a prayer that is realigning us, and it does not “promise us security, wealth or prosperity” (1992, 25). However, out of the 10,000-plus pages I have read on the Lord’s Prayer in my research, this was my least favorite.
This prayer starts us with owning that “God is as close as a loving parent. But he is also far away in heaven” (1992, 52). This prayer then outlines a very specific set of petitions that “keep our life focused on his purposes” as Boers contends prayer does (1992, 54). This is an act of hallowing God’s name through our lives. As Boers points out, “Hallowing God’s name, then, is not only, merely, or even mainly about our words or language or vocabulary. It is primarily about our lives, the way we live…God’s name is to be hallowed and glorified in our lives” (1992, 64). This is something we do in the here-and-now aspects of the Kingdom, as we pray for the yet to come, both which are central at the aspect of this prayer, a prayer for God’s reign “today and now” and “for the kingdom is yet to come” (1992, 71).
To be focused and interceding for God’s kingdom to come, we are also learning to surrender. Boers does a great unpacking of this. He unpacks one of my favorite trendy Anabaptist words, gelassenheit. Boers remarks;
that “the early Anabaptists had an important word, gelassenheit. It means yielding and surrendering to God’s will. It includes the possibility that one will have to suffer for God’s purposes. Gelassenheit means “thy will be done.” It means to make God’s will our priority, our most important goal” (1992, 82).
This is most certainly what it means to pray and live thy will be done.
Why This Book Matters
If you can hold the above criticisms in mind while reading this book, then this is a book with redeeming value. Boers is good to point out that we have often become tired of the Lord’s Prayer, because it has been a habit, not something we know or understand. A few times through a prayer like this leads to familiarity, but it does not bring about revolution, until we work through it again and again, through many angles and studies, as Boers says, until “it becomes ours to own, explore, and understand” (1992, 162). Therefore, as followers of Jesus, we are called to pray this prayer, over and over again. This is a prayer that “involves repetition,” and it is an act of repentance each time we do it (1992, 162). This book is an important but underwhelming look at how praying this prayer is learning to “pray these words even as we learn better how to pray it” (1992, 162).
