---
title: 'Smyth: Children Must Be Taught to Pray For the Heathen'
type: post
author: 'R. Andrew Myers'
date: 2025-09-15
url: https://confessional.org/blog/2025-smyth-children-must-be-taught-to-pray-for-the-heathen
---

# Smyth: Children Must Be Taught to Pray For the Heathen

“Children should be taught also to pray for the heathen. This is as binding on them, as on those who are grown up. The glory of God in the extension of his church and kingdom is the great burden of the prayers of scripture, and occupies three petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, which is essentially a missionary prayer, and which we are all bound to teach to our children in their earliest years. They must, therefore, be made to understand what is meant by ‘God’s name being hallowed, his kingdom coming, and his will being done on earth even as it is done in heaven.’ Every child, therefore, as well as every grown up Christian ought to be taught that in this prayer he is daily expressing to God his earnest desire on behalf of those six hundred millions of fellow-creatures, who along with himself are passing on to eternity, ‘without God, and without hope in the world.’” — [**Thomas Smyth**](/authors/thomas-smyth), *The Duty of Interesting Children in the Missionary Cause, and How This is To Be Done* (1846), p. 16