My partner and I have never prayed out loud together and it now feels far too awkward to suggest it. How do we start?

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

Joshua is old, the conquest is over, and he gathers the tribes at Shechem to make them choose who they will actually serve. In front of everyone he commits his household and not only himself. It is a public, slightly awkward, out loud commitment made on behalf of a family, spoken before anybody else in the room had agreed to anything. Israel remembered it because someone was willing to say it first.

“These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.”

Between the ascension and Pentecost, Luke describes a small group in an upstairs room continuing with one accord in prayer: the eleven, several women, Jesus' mother, and his brothers. That last detail is worth pausing over. His brothers had thought he was out of his mind not long before this. So it is a family praying together on the far side of real awkwardness, not a group who found it easy.