“Prayer is not about letting God know your will; it’s about completely submitting to him. You die to yourself,” he said one recent Sunday.
A wide reach
Batterson is already a popular author and blogger who speaks before tens of thousands of evangelical pastors each year. His new book, “The Circle Maker,” was picked by Christian publishing giant Zondervan as one of its top three to promote this year to tens of thousands of churches. The book, a how-to on prayer, debuted as a New York Times bestseller in the advice category and sold 50,000 copies in its first two months.
The devout from both the Obama crowd and the Liberty University crew seem attracted to Batterson’s focus: finding a way in a secular culture to have an intense, submissive relationship with God. In a town filled with strivers, Batterson teaches that if you pray deeply and specifically, God will provide that job, that piece of real estate.
“God is for you,” he writes in “The Circle Maker.” “If you don’t believe that, then you’ll pray small timid prayers.”
Batterson came to Washington to take over a church of 19 people after a small church he tried to start in Chicago failed. Five years later, the church, using the theater at Union Station, had grown to 500 followers.
Batterson and some experts think his business model may be the future of urban Christianity: Make “church” the places where people already are. He has been known as the icon for the “theater church movement” for a decade.
“In an urban environment, a church building is a thing of the past. We’ll approach this like a developer,” he said in an interview.
Prayer circles are another Batterson trademark. He talks about walking around neighborhoods or buildings in prayer, meditating on things he thinks God is calling him to do in those places. Sometimes the prayer circles are in his mind. The concept is to keep prayers, and goals, specific. “The Circle Maker” tells of a 4.7-mile prayer walk he did one sweaty August day in 1996, a route that now encompasses all the properties the church would eventually acquire.
This is classic Batterson: an orthodox concept — a real God, who intervenes in your life if you seek His will — presented in motivational language. The church’s core values and beliefs include the literal truth of Jesus’s resurrection and the inherently sinful state of humans, as well as self-helpy axioms such as “Everything is an experiment” and “Do it right and do it big.”
Many churches have “small groups” for prayer and support; National Community Church has a “free-market society,” encouraging people to form groups based on shared interests, from the Book of Job to milkshakes and stopping sex trafficking. Congregants can put the group together. If it flies, great; if not, kill it.
Batterson is known for pithy sayings: We don’t brainstorm, we praystorm. Coffee shops are post-modern wells, like the ones where biblical characters would gather. If Christianity was a company, his church would want to be R&D.
Kinnaman said it’s this merger of faith and communications skills that make Batterson a pastor who can thrive in today’s culture.
“No one is quite putting the package together quite like he is,” Kinnaman said. “He has this extra optimism and hopefulness at a time when people are really struggling.”
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