The Circle Maker

For our most recent bible study we’re going through The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson. From his website:

According to Pastor Mark Batterson in his book, The Circle Maker, “Drawing prayer circles around our dreams isn’t just a mechanism whereby we accomplish great things for God. It’s a mechanism whereby God accomplishes great things in us.” Do you ever sense that there’s far more to prayer, and to God’s vision for your life, than what you’re experiencing? It’s time you learned from the legend of Honi the Circle Maker—a man bold enough to draw a circle in the sand and not budge from inside it until God answered his prayers for his people. What impossibly big dream is God calling you to draw a prayer circle around? Sharing inspiring stories from his own experiences as a circle maker, Mark Batterson will help you uncover your heart’s deepest desires and God-given dreams and unleash them through the kind of audacious prayer that God delights to answer.

I have to admit that I don’t have the best attitude about this book. Just reading the summary and the first chapter have already made me feel like I’m not going to like it all. Why? Well, the reason has little to do with this book and a lot to do with Sunday school. My current teacher is doing an overview of bible characters and stories and in addition to having us read from the bible, he’s also adding in information from lots of other sources like Josephus, the Talmud and Midrash, bits from Islamic tradition and there was a couple of weeks where we learned the beliefs of the Ethiopian Orthodox church. All well and good, except it means that I leave class most Sunday’s with a long list of stories that I’m not sure are biblical.

Part of the problem is that I’m not as well versed in my bible knowledge as I need to be, and I’m working on that. Another part of the problem is that this is a new church and I’m struggling to feel like I fit in and I don’t always feel comfortable asking questions…which, again, I’m working on. All that aside, there are times when I have a real problem when we take what the bible says and try to temper/augment that with other texts. When we say that this other story or other belief better explains than what is in the bible. Or instead of using the examples we’re given in the bible, we turn to something else that teaches us something different. Which, after reading the first chapter of The Circle Maker and it’s non-biblical tale of Honi, is something I’m worried about.

I don’t want to be close minded. I love learning and history and finding out new things and I believe that God is big enough to use all things to bring us closer to Him. But I also don’t want to follow along with something blindly without making an effort to hold it up to God’s word. So, in that vein, I’m going to be doing The Circle Maker study and blogging along, thinking about the problems I have with it and how the book does or does not line up with scripture.