Becoming a King Study Guide: The Path to Restoring the Heart of Man is by Morgan Snyder, published by Zondervan (ISBN 978-0-310-11524-3).
Know which of the three products you are buying
There are three related items and it is easy to order the wrong one.
- Becoming a King, the book itself. This study guide is a companion to it.
- This study guide on its own, ISBN 978-0-310-11524-3. It does not include the videos.
- Becoming a King Study Guide with DVD, ISBN 978-0-310-11527-4, which does.
The study is built as a six-session video Bible study. The guide contains video notes, group discussion questions, and between-session personal study, which means the guide alone assumes you have access to the video somewhere. If your group is not streaming it, buy the DVD edition or you will be working from notes on talks nobody has watched.
Who wrote it
Morgan Snyder serves on the executive leadership team at Wild at Heart and Ransomed Heart Ministries and has worked alongside John and Stasi Eldredge for more than two decades. He founded Become Good Soil in 2010 as a training ground for leaders.
That lineage tells you a lot about the book’s instincts. If Wild at Heart resonated with you, this is the same tradition, matured. If Eldredge’s approach has always struck you as long on metaphor and short on exposition, that reaction will carry over.
What it is actually about
The subject is power: how a man gets entrusted with it, what has to happen in him first, and why so much damage gets done by men who were handed influence before they were ready for it. Snyder’s framing is that the formation has to precede the authority.
That is the more interesting half of the men’s-ministry conversation, and it is less common than the “step up and lead” material that fills the shelf. Snyder is more interested in the decades of unglamorous interior work than in the charge.
What we removed, and one correction
The old review quoted Snyder saying “The problems within the world reflect a deeper condition of our souls,” and described how the study had affected men in the Called to Better community. We could not verify the quote and the community response was invented. Both are gone.
That review also concluded by describing men’s renewed understanding of their role as nurturers of their families and communities. That was our wording, not the book’s, and it defines a man’s role more specifically than Called to Better does. We hold that men and women have different but equal roles and we do not spell them out beyond what Scripture plainly says. Removed.
Where we land
A strong six-session study for a group of men willing to sit with uncomfortable material about their own formation. Buy the DVD edition unless you already have the video another way.
Becoming a King Study Guide by Morgan Snyder on Amazon