“Quiet Negotiations: Oral Prayer Diaries in a Secularizing World”

Description

“How good to do this! I find it very instructive to look in the mirror by keeping a diary like this,” one respondent texted me a few days after starting an oral prayer diary. Another reacted quite differently: “To be honest, I find praying complicated in general. I noticed that this diary added extra pressure, and it felt as though I was failing.” What are we to make of these contrasting responses? Why does the same method feel like a mirror to one person and a source of failure to another?
Studying personal prayer practices means positioning oneself, as Ward (2017) suggests, in the middle of a complex reality. Religion at the individual level is “an ever-changing, multifaceted, often messy—even contradictory—amalgam of beliefs and practices” (McGuire 2008). Researchers must step into this messiness, dwell within it, and become implicated in it, while still attempting to navigate it with a measure of order and methodological clarity.
Inspired by Ammerman’s (2014) multi-method approach to lived religion, the research project A New Prayer employs a multifaceted design to explore the multilayered practice of prayer in all its ordinariness and ambiguity. The project investigates the role and value of prayer for the future of the church—particularly the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, situated in one of the most prayerless countries in the world. The project follows a collaborative, appreciative, action-research framework with a touch of citizen science. As part of a four-month reflective trajectory of group sessions, participants keep a one-week oral prayer diary twice. These diaries are intended to capture daily, habitual practices and to bridge the gap between declared and enacted practice (Ammerman 2014; Ammerman & Williams 2012).
In this paper, I discuss the methodological use of oral prayer diaries and present early findings on how personal prayer unfolds within the wider reality of a secular, largely prayerless Netherlands, offering a micro-level window into the lived experience of prayer as it quietly negotiates broader global currents of secularization and religious transformation.

Period	26 Mar 2026
Event title	ISERT 2026 - International Society for Empirical Research in Theology: Religion, Globalization and the City
Event type	Conference
Conference number	2026
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International