"I have a small mass In my frontal lobe," Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church in Highland Village, Texas, wrote on his Twitter feed. "[I have a date] with the neurosurgeon early next week."

A note at the church's website reads, "Matt Chandler suffered a seizure Thursday morning while at home, was taken to a nearby hospital and is now at home resting with his family. Matt hit his head when he suffered the seizure and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. Doctors ran several tests on Matt and will continue to run tests in the coming days. We will keep you posted. Please pray for Matt, Lauren and the kids. The best we can do as a church body right now is to give him space and our prayers. He is surrounded by family members, the elders and friends."

Chandler, whose multisite church has a weekly attendance of about 6,000, has become a major conference draw and a leader in the Young Reformed movement. He talks about his ministry in the latest issue of our sister publication Leadership Journal.

Posted by Ted Olsen at November 27, 2009 9:24PM | Comments (14)

Zondervan President and CEO Moe Gerkins apologized on behalf of the company for publishing Deadly Viper: A Kung Fu Survival Guide for Life and Leadership, a book that uses Chinese characters and images for illustrations.

Gerkins said the company will remove the book and curriculum from stores permanently, according to an email to North Park Theological Seminary professor Soong-Chan Rah.

Rah called for an apology on November 3 on his blog because of what he perceived as insensitivity to Asian culture and to the Asian-American community.

Deadly Viper authors Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite have removed materials from their website, but their Facebook fan page is still up and Zondervan still has two chapters of the book on its website.

Rah cited the following examples as problematic:

This video clip is extremely offensive and portraying Asians in a cartoonish manner in order market your merchandise. Particularly offensive is the voiceover of a white person doing a faux Asian accent: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=35881373178&ref=mf

This image presents Asian as sinister enemies: http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=deadly+viper&init=quick#/photo.php?pid=2233965&id=101311418670

This quote reveals an insensitivity to the Chinese language and mocks Chinese names: “There is a killer called Zi Qi Qi Ren. No, this is not some communicable disease, but it certainly is deadly. This funky Chinese word”

The use of Chinese characters and kanji in a non-sensical manner.

Rah wrote that the authors were using cultural symbols to make a sale or to make a point.

"Mike and Jud, you are two white males who are inappropriately co-opting another culture and using it to further the marketing of your book," he wrote. "You are not from our cultural framework, yet you feel that you have the authority to represent our culture before others."

Rah had initially e-mailed Foster, who also founded XXX Church, saying, "What is the point of making an allusion to 'Kung Fu' and having a dragon on the cover. You need to respect the culture. Not mock the culture."

Foster responded:

prof rah…seriously?
dont you think its a little ironic that an associate professor of evangelism is practicing the philosophy of “judge a book by its cover”
do this…read the book first….then feel free to make any judgments or voice any concerns on its content….

On Thursday, Zondervan responded in their e-mail to Rah:

This book’s characterizations and visual representations are offensive to many people despite its otherwise solid message.

There is no need for debate on this subject. We are pulling the book and the curriculum in their current forms from stores permanently.

“It reflects a genuine repentant spirit and a deep willingness to hear and to act. I am moved by Zondervan’s willingness to act in this decisive and dramatic manner,” Rah wrote on his blog.

Several bloggers had weighed in on the issue, and several are now praising Zondervan's decision.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at November 20, 2009 5:03PM | Comments (37)

President Obama's recent trip to China provided quite a few photo ops. But unlike his presidential predecessors who added worship service attendance at a registered church on their official itineraries, the president chose to steer a pretty wide berth around the burgeoning Christian population inside China.

Leslie Hook of the Wall Street Journal Asia (registration required) observed:

In the northeast part of this city, not far from the old Friendship Hotel, stands a boxy little cinema specializing in anime. A nondescript building on a nondescript thoroughfare, it's hardly a place a tourist would notice, much less a visiting president. Yet had Barack Obama wanted to understand something of the real China, his time would have been better spent here than at the various state dinners, Forbidden City photo-ops, and carefully managed town-hall events that consumed the balance of his trip this week.

The past 12 months have been very difficult inside China for Christians who wish to worship freely and openly, and hazardous to the human rights lawyers to defend them. Recently, China Aid chronicled new government efforts to use civil law to harass and discriminate against Christian worship:

Since the secret directive to dismantle Beijing house churches was issued in August, 2009, Beijing security officials have maintained their relentless campaign against house churches. On Sunday, November 8, Shouwang church members were forced for a second week to meet outside the frozen East Gate of Haidian Park.

It doesn't stop there.

According to China Aid, yesterday, Nov. 19, Public Security officers took a human rights attorney into custody shortly after this lawyer (also a Christian) returned from a visit to the United States. They beat his wife in front of their 7 year old daughter.

While in the US, attorney Jiang Tianyong testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission about the rule of law in China. To come to the US and testify in this way is an act of great moral courage. Jiang testified about one harrowing Sunday at his church:

My name is Jiang Tianyong and I come from mainland China. I am an attorney and most of the cases I take on involve religious belief, and are usually referred to as “sensitive cases.” I am also a Christian and as such a person, I need to worship God in gatherings with my brothers and sisters in Christ. I am going to discuss three things, and I hope I can give you an idea of the actual status of the rule of law and religious belief in China.
The first one is an event I would like to share: On the afternoon of Mother’s Day of May 13, 2007, I was praying and singing hymns of God with my brothers and sisters in Christ gathering. It was in a private large room in Beijing. Suddenly, several dozen people broke into the room. Only about a dozen of them were wearing uniforms and the rest were in plain clothes. One of them forced us to stop our activities and to remain still where we were. We were not allowed to leave the place. The intruders claimed that they were law enforcement officers from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Religious Administration. They said that our gathering was an illegal one and abolished it immediately! They sealed our donation box and took videos and photos of many of us. They also recorded the identification information of every one of us. After that, they conducted a long interrogation. It was after 1 am that I left the site. Between that day and July 2009, I had no place where I could meet with my fellow Christians in a gathering. This is my experience in China as a Christian.

Christianity Today for years has tracked the growth, change, and development of Christianity inside China. I believe we can confidently say that there are more Christians in China today than at any other time in China's history.

What are the implications for the United States and China (now labeled "Chi-merica)? Allow me again to quote Leslie Hook:

But freedom of faith is something not even history's most repressive governments have ever been fully able to snuff out: not the Romans in their suppression of the earliest Christians; not the communists in their efforts to substitute History for God; not Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong or Kim Il Sung, who attempted to substitute themselves for God. So while Shouwang has no place to meet this coming Sunday, the church will still be there, only more deeply steeled in its faith. This is the side of China—the one Mr. Obama opted not to see—that will ultimately determine its future.

May Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao soon come to acknowledge this new reality.

tmorgan@christianitytoday.com

(Photo: White House. President Obama at the Forbidden City.)

Posted by Tim Morgan at November 20, 2009 3:43PM | Comments (19)

Earlier this week, Purpose Driven Connection, the partnership between the Readers Digest Association and Saddleback church's Rick Warren, announced a transition to digital online content only, dropping the high-cost print edition.

The final print edition of PDC is due to roll out across the 2009 holiday season. No matter how you look at it, this decision is a hard pill to swallow for Saddleback and RDA.

When RDA and Saddleback first announced their partnership, hopes were (in retrospect) running way ahead of the economic realities of 2009. Since then, RDA has downsized and it is currently wading through bankruptcy proceedings.

The secular press has been rather doubtful from the get-go about a strategic relationship between old media (RDA) and faith-based media (such as Purpose Driven and other mega-church content providers).

Here are comments from a writer for Folio magazine, a trade publication that tracks magazine publishing:

I asked the spokesperson directly if RDA considers the Purpose Driven Connection venture a failure. Of course he said it wasn’t a failure. From an operational point of view, he said that shutting down an otherwise interesting product that doesn’t meet financial criteria “is every bit as important as green-lighting others to go forward.” He also said RDA gleaned “proof of concept” insights into serving a community like Warren’s that’s bound by faith or philosophy.

“We believe that we could take this forward with a community that had a somewhat different characteristic—larger, more open to purchasing memberships, more universal, global, etc.,” the spokesperson said. More open to purchasing memberships. That might be key. This shouldn’t suggest, though, that Saddleback hasn’t had any success from the venture. The church said subscribers to the Daily Hope devotions newsletter have grown to 400,000 since Purpose Driven Connection launched early this year.

If not for monetary reasons, I think the loss for RDA is substantial, despite the positive lessons it says it learned from giving it a shot. It has to be tough, especially for a company that’s now steering itself out of bankruptcy, to watch a product it called one of its most important ventures ever fail after only four issues.

I haven't personally talked with Rick himself about PDC. But he strikes all positive notes in his press release, saying:

"Our biggest discovery was learning that people prefer reading our content online rather than in print, because it is more convenient and accessible," said Warren. "Cell phones now allow us to take content everywhere. And, from our viewpoint, an online magazine allows us to minister to people internationally; provide more content and features than we could fit in a print magazine; create interaction and two-way dialogue; and offer it for free.
"So when we heard the feedback and noticed subscriptions to the print magazine lagging behind Internet usage, in spite of strong retail newsstand sales, we jumped at the chance to go all digital," Warren concluded. "Thankfully, Reader's Digest was willing to help us make the transition."

Some dreams die hard. Others are kept alive by human imagination (and capital).

Just yesterday, I received in the mail news that the Christian Science Monitor, which has transitioned to all-online, was about to launch -- guess what? A new, in-print, weekly news magazine.

It seems to me that the reality check for RDA and Purpose Driven is that they serve different masters. One is profit-driven. The other is change-driven. The partnership wasn't working institutionally.

In the current economic climate, I think hybrids are more important than partnerships. (Think Ford Fusion and Toyota Prius.) This means that a hybrid of old media and new media calls for innovative use of resources, but often does not require organizational partnerships in the same way they were done years ago.

Isn't that what the church might learn from Apple and Google?

Posted by Tim Morgan at November 6, 2009 10:45AM | Comments (2)

Update: Nov. 6, 2009.

As noted below, the Ortiz family has now commented about the arrest in the bombing case. Father, mother, and son extend forgiveness to the suspect, Jack Teitel.

+ + +

Original post from earlier this week:

A former US Marine who is now an ultra-Orthodox activist in Israel has confessed to security services inside Israel to a bombing that nearly killed Ami Ortiz, son of a Messianic pastor.

See: US-born Jewish terrorist suspected in series of attacks over 12 years.

Here are additional details from the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, a legal defense organization:

The Jerusalem Institute of Justice would like to congratulate the Israeli Police and the General Security Services for their successful apprehension of Yaacov "Jack" Teitel, the self-described "anti-missionary" activist, who confessed to the bombing of Ami Ortiz on April 20, 2008. Besides his violent activities against Messianic Jews, Teitel a 37 year old former US Marine turned ultra-orthodox, admitted to carrying out several other crimes, including the murder of at least two Palestinian Arabs and the bombing of Israel Prize Laureate Prof. Ze'ev Sternhall.

This religious hate crime is the direct result of the daily incitement which is spread without interference by ultra-orthodox extremists against minority groups in Israel, solely because of their faith and religious affiliation. These same extremists, who do not view Israel as a legitimate state because it is not a rabbinical theocracy, purposefully incite violence and persecute innocent citizens simply because these minorities do not fit into their warped definition of who is a Jew. Indeed, the prosecution of Jack Teitel is an important milestone for Israeli democracy.

The sad reality is that shortly before this religious hate crime in Ariel, posters were spread throughout the neighborhood inciting hatred against the Ortiz family, an act which was ignored by the local law enforcement authorities. It is impossible to overlook the fact that Jack Teitel probably received his evil motivation to murder the Ortiz family from those same posters.

I met with the Ortiz family in Israel in 2008 as their son was recovering from his injuries. I will update this entry, hopefully with comments from the family as soon as those are available.

See the CT editorial from last year, Israel Reconciled to All:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/june/12.20.html

Posted by Tim Morgan at November 2, 2009 7:10AM | Comments (7)