The Lord’s Prayer is in the gospel of Matthew (6:9-13) and Luke (11: 1-4). It is one of a number of prayers of Jesus but is the only one which is for others to say. In that sense it is a teaching prayer and indeed Luke puts it in the context of the disciples asking how to pray. The following materials are available for schools to use and adapt.
Collective worship
These resources, which explore the Lord’s Prayer, are offered to be used in your collective worship. You may wish to use them as reflections within your own patterns of worship or create a simple pattern around them. You can adapt the material to suit your own context and vision. ‘Wonderings’ and ‘explorings’ are provided to help pupils engage with the text on their own terms. The ‘explorings’ tend to be about factual or textual things, ‘wonderings’ are about ideas, feelings or opinions. The questions are progressive in that the later ones (in each section) are more demanding and more appropriate for older pupils.
- Five reflections, including leader's notes (PDF)
- Presentation slides (PDF) (also in PPT format)
- Worship text sources 1 to 5 (PDF)
The Lord's Prayer song
You may like to add a song at any point during the worship. You could use the specially written Lord’s Prayer song, which is available as sheet music and sung/instrumental mp3 files, which are available to play from this page or download to your computer.
RE material: the Lord’s Prayer
These sessions are offered as complimentary enrichment to RE in schools they are not intended to replace any part of an RE curriculum. The activities are largely built around explorations of text. This is mostly from the Bible, but other material is included too. The questions are designed to be useable with pupils in KS 2 and above.
For KS 1 children we suggest that things are kept very simple. The Lord’s Prayer is read and stories are taken from a children’s Bible - the references here are to The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones.
Format of each session
The Lord’s Prayer is read and then for each of the stories the following from a children’s Bible are used:
Week 1 – The Prodigal (lost) Son (Running Away p272)
Week 2 – The creation story (The Beginning: a perfect home p18)
Week 3 – The feeding of the 5000 (Filled Full p244)
Week 4 – Jesus in the Desert (Let’s go! p208)
Week 5 - The Lord’s Prayer (How to pray p222)
Each story can be discussed as you might deal with any story-time. This will allow the children to become familiar with the text and begin to associate it with other parts of the Bible.