There comes a moment in the club when you ask a Pathfinder to "say the prayer" — and they freeze. They go blank, repeat what they heard the counselor say last week, or blurt out a memorized line that has nothing to do with what they are feeling. It is not a lack of faith. It is that nobody ever taught that child to pray.
And teaching someone to pray is different from ordering them to pray. It means showing what prayer is, introducing the types that exist — because you do not ask God the same way you thank Him — and giving the Pathfinder space to practice until it becomes natural. It is the difference between drilling the multiplication table and teaching a child to enjoy math.
This article is about that: what prayer is, what the types are, and how you, as a counselor or instructor, teach a Pathfinder to truly talk with God — in simple prayer, in the journal, in the unit's prayer moment. No sermon and no magic formula. Data and references checked on 07/22/2026 in the official sources listed at the end.
What is prayer, after all?
Before any list of types, a definition that fits in the head of a ten-year-old: prayer is a conversation with God. Speaking and listening. It is not a chant to recite, not a secret code with hard words, not something only the counselor or the pastor knows how to do.
That is the foundation Adventist guidance repeats when the subject is children: showing that "prayer is a real conversation with God" teaches more than a thousand words. The Pathfinder who understands this stops treating prayer as a task to complete and starts treating it as a way of being with Someone.
The Bible gives the size of that conversation in three words: "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17). It is not an order to spend the day on your knees — it is the idea that you can talk with God at any hour: in the snack line, before the test, in the middle of the hike, when a friend hurts you. Prayer has no mandatory schedule or single posture. It has sincerity.
Keep this starting point, because it changes everything that comes after: if prayer is a conversation, then nobody needs to "know how to pray properly" to begin. They only need to start talking. The rest — the types, the rhythm, the depth — comes with practice, exactly as it happens with any conversation we learn to have with those we love.
What are the types of prayer?
Nobody talks in just one way. You do not speak to a friend the same way when you thank them for a favor, when you apologize, or when you ask for help. With God it is the same — and that is why the Christian tradition recognizes different types of prayer, each rooted in the Bible.
There is no magic, fixed number of types, but five always come up and cover almost everything a Pathfinder needs to learn:
| Type | What it is | Biblical example |
|---|---|---|
| Praise and worship | Recognizing who God is and how great He is, without asking for anything in return | The Psalms ("Praise the Lord") |
| Gratitude (thanksgiving) | Giving thanks for what you have already received — the day, the food, the family, life | "with thanksgiving" (Philippians 4:6) |
| Confession | Owning your wrong before God and asking forgiveness, with honesty | "If we confess our sins" (1 John 1:9) |
| Intercession | Praying for another person — a sick friend, a classmate, the unit, the world | "Pray for one another" (James 5:16) |
| Supplication | Asking God for a need of your own, with persistence and confidence | "let your requests be made known" (Philippians 4:6) |
Notice something most children do not catch on their own: four of the five types are not requests. We tend to teach that praying means asking, and the Pathfinder grows up thinking they only seek God when they need something. Praise, gratitude, confession and intercession turn prayer inside out — instead of "what I want", they put "who God is", "what He has already done" and "who else is in need".
Intercession deserves a special place in the club. Teaching a Pathfinder to pray for the sick friend, for the classmate who does not know Jesus, for the unit and for the missionaries is teaching them to step out of themselves — it is one of the most generous gestures the Christian life offers. A unit that prays for its members, one by one, learns to care in a way no team-building activity can reproduce.
You do not need to pour out all five types at once. But over the course of the year, it is worth going through all of them — because each one shapes a different part of the heart.
The model Jesus left: the Lord's Prayer
When the disciples asked "teach us to pray", Jesus did not give a theory lecture. He gave an outline — what the tradition calls the model prayer, recorded in Matthew 6:9-13, within the Sermon on the Mount.
It is worth making this crystal clear to the Pathfinder, because almost everyone gets it wrong: the Lord's Prayer is not a magic formula to repeat word for word. Adventist sources are direct on this point — it is "a guide, an orientation for praying to the Lord", not a text that must be recited exactly to work. Memorizing the Lord's Prayer is nice; understanding its outline is what teaches you to pray.
And the outline has an order that teaches on its own. The model prayer begins by looking to God — recognizing who He is ("hallowed be thy name"), handing the world over to Him ("thy kingdom come", "thy will be done") — and only afterward brings the everyday requests: bread (sustenance), forgiveness and deliverance from evil. God first, then us. Adventist commentaries sum up that structure as three requests directed to God and three directed to our needs.
For the club, this is pedagogical gold. Instead of ordering the Pathfinder to "pray", you give them the skeleton: start by recognizing God, give thanks, confess if needed, pray for others, and last of all bring your request. Notice that this skeleton fits exactly the five types from the previous section. The Lord's Prayer is not the opposite of praying in your own words — it is the map that teaches you to do it without getting lost.
Read alsoUnit WorshipHow to teach a Pathfinder to pray in practice?
Here theory becomes action. The official Adventist guidance for teaching children to pray brings together principles any counselor can apply in the unit — and the first of them is not a technique, it is a mirror.
Be a model. "Children learn from what they see" — the fundamental element in teaching prayer is to be, yourself, a person of prayer. The Pathfinder who sees the counselor pray naturally, and not only in formal moments, learns without anyone explaining. Example teaches before words do.
From there, the official guidance points to concrete paths:
| Practice | How to do it in the unit |
|---|---|
| Simple language | Prayers that are "brief, simple, sincere and direct"; no hard words or long sentences |
| Time and place | A moment and a welcoming corner — prayer gains routine when it has a place of its own |
| Spontaneous prayer | When a Pathfinder comes with a worry, stop and pray right there with them, on the spot |
| Vary the types | Teach gratitude, worship, request and praise, and not only "asking when you need something" |
| Concrete activity | A "Thank you, God" collage, drawing or writing the prayer — the abstract becomes tangible |
| Specific reason | Pray for people and situations by name, not for "everyone" in general |
| Celebrate | Recognizing the child's prayer ("what a beautiful prayer you made!") strengthens the courage to pray |
A common mistake that jams the child: demanding a long, polished prayer. The Pathfinder who thinks they need to "pray beautifully" is the same one who freezes when you ask. Make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that a short, true sentence is worth more than a memorized paragraph. "Thank you, God, for today" is a complete prayer.
Here comes a layer that varies from club to club — and it is fine that it varies: how much you formalize these moments, whether the unit's prayer is always the same person or rotates among everyone, whether there is a shared notebook or not. That is a decision for the club leadership and the counselor, within the church's routine. What does not change is the principle: the child learns to pray by praying, not by hearing about prayer.
The prayer journal: turning requests into memory
Of all the tools for teaching prayer, the prayer journal is the one most people underestimate — and the one that works best with a Pathfinder, because it is concrete and visible.
The idea is simple: a small notebook where the Pathfinder writes down, on one side, the requests and the people they are praying for; on the other, the date the prayer was answered. It does not need to be sophisticated. A sheet folded in half, two columns — "I asked" and "God answered" — already does the job.
The power of the journal is in what it does to memory. A child (and an adult too) quickly forgets what they asked for, and with that forgets what was answered. The journal keeps it. When the Pathfinder flips through it months later and sees request after request marked as answered, they are not reading a notebook — they are seeing, with their own eyes, that their conversation with God did not fall into the void. That builds faith in a way no sermon does.
You can adapt the journal to each type of prayer, which ties this whole article together: a gratitude page (what I gave thanks for this week), an intercession page (who I am praying for), a requests page. Adventist guidance suggests precisely tangible activities like "drawing or writing your prayers" and putting together a thank-you collage — the journal is the ongoing version of that.
For the unit there is the collective version: a unit prayer notebook, where each Pathfinder writes a request, and the unit prays for them over the weeks. It is intercession in practice, and it also teaches the group to care about what weighs on each person's heart.
The prayer moment in the unit and in the club worship
Teaching prayer does not happen only in theory — it happens in the moments the club already has. And the club has several: the opening worship, the unit devotional, the prayer before the snack, the circle at the end of the meeting. Each one is a chance to practice a different type.
A practical way to organize this is to give each moment a prayer focus. The opening can be praise and gratitude — recognizing God and giving thanks for the meeting. The unit devotional can set aside space for intercession, with each Pathfinder naming someone they want to pray for. The closing can be supplication, handing over the coming week. That way, without becoming a class, the Pathfinder goes through all five types over the course of the month.
Beware of the trap of always the same person praying. When only the counselor or the captain says the prayer, the others become an audience — and an audience does not learn to pray. Rotate the turn. Start with those who find it easiest, leave the shy ones for last, and never force it: the Pathfinder who does not want to pray out loud can pray in silence, and that is also prayer. The goal is to build courage, not embarrassment.
How that moment is conducted varies from club to club, and that is up to whoever leads — the Bible commands us to "pray without ceasing", but it does not dictate the format of your unit's worship. What holds as guidance is the principle: the more the Pathfinder truly prays inside the club, the less they freeze when their turn comes. Constant practice, not perfect instruction, is what forms someone who prays naturally.
Why is teaching prayer the club's role?
It might seem that prayer is a matter for home and church, and that the club only does activities. It is not quite like that — and the reason is what the Pathfinder Club sets out to be.
The club exists to develop the Pathfinder completely: physically, mentally, socially and spiritually. Knots, honors, camping and citizenship take care of a good part of that. Prayer is the thread that cares for the spiritual part day by day — not as classroom theory, but as a habit the Pathfinder carries for life, long after leaving the club.
And there is a pedagogical reason why the club is such a good place for this: here prayer happens in the middle of real life. The Pathfinder prays before facing the zip line that scares them, gives thanks for the hike that ended, intercedes for the friend who got hurt at camp, confesses the fight they had in the unit. It is prayer glued to experience — and that is how it stops being a ritual and becomes a relationship.
If you are a counselor, keep this: the Pathfinder will not remember the most beautiful prayer you made. They will remember that, with you, they learned they could talk with God in their own words — short, trembling, sincere — and that it was enough. Teaching prayer is, in the end, teaching that the conversation with God is always open. There is no greater gift to give a child.