Abstract: The religious functional style is currently being actively studied not only in theology, but also in philology. On the one hand, this fact is substantiated by the change in the sociopolitical situation in Russia, while on the other –by the need for scientific comprehension and description of the experience of religious communication implemented in particular genres. Prayer is one of the genres of religious functional style, which are referred to as basic or representative. Both in literary studies and linguistics, prayer is viewed from the perspective of different approaches; therefore, the researchers offer various classifications for the genre of prayer. The subject of this research is a prayer as the religious genre. Analysis is conducted on the existing classifications of prayer based on the material of Christian prayers, and generalizes them for the purpose of deriving general classification and its further application to the corpus of prayer texts created within the framework of the New Apostolic teaching. As a result of the conducted research, the author provides a summary table, which indicates seven criteria for the classification of prayers: position of the addressee (type and number of addressees); type of addressee; method or form of saying the prayer; formal-substantive rigidity of the text; leading intention / content / key function of the prayer and their number; place of creating the text; time of creating the text. The article also presents an example of application the summary theoretical data to particular material—a corpus of 220 prayers created by New Apostolic parishioners, and records of the prayerful life of the Christians from the catechesis of the New Apostolic Church.