The Lord's Prayer

I have come to the difficult part of this study as things jump around a lot and I am having to make decisions as to whether I should include passages that only occur in one Gospel (the Good Samaritan, and visiting Martha & Mary for instance). For right now I will skip the single occurrence ones and come back to them later. Today's study is most commonly referred to as the Lords prayer. It is probably the most well known prayer after,

"Oh My God!"

which is uttered almost universally throughout the English speaking world during times of stress whether they are believers or not .
The Lord's prayer is used often in the CofE, and I believe also in other more "traditional" churches However I have noticed it's lack of use in Baptist/Evangelical churches. I think this is because they want to ensure that people pray about what they mean, and mean what they pray rather than just repeating things verbatim. However I know from experience that this isn't always the way it works as I have become effective at praying without thinking, usually in short phrases. Interestingly if you pray with someone else enough you will recognise their standard phrases too.
Is this practice bad? Well the fact that someone is praying on a regular enough basis for it to become standardised is in some ways good, but overall it's not really helping with our growth. We need to remember that prayer is meant to be a dialogue (not monologue) with God, the creator of the Universe, and yet also our Father. As such it should be reverent, and yet intimate. If we spoke to our real Dads using the same words each time I don't think they would really look forward to our conversations - even though they would be happy to see us. So next time you pray, try and remember why you are doing so, and be real about it, and then hopefully it will be longer than three words .