Epic Resilient E-book

Much thanks to Brian Virtue for putting this together and for your written contributions!   The link to download with instructions are below!

Reposted verbatim from Brian Virtue: http://www.brianvirtue.org/2012/04/epic-resilient-e-book/

This past week was the national staff conference for my ministry (Epic) which I had the privilege to direct with an awesome design team and the help of many. As part of the conference I helped put together an e-book from many of the different great writings from Epic staff this past year.

I hope you enjoy it if you ever get the chance to check it out. It’s starts with a series that we ran on the Epic Resource site called, “Nine Elements of a Servant Leadership Reproduction Culture” with an additional intro and conclusion to it.  Part Two is my friend and teammate Adrian Pei’s new article called “A New Kind of Charge: Reframing Contextualization and Mission.” Part Three is a collection of 23 blogs from Epic staff from 2011-2012. Then finally, there’s an article I wrote after coaching many of our staff last summer in an Introduction to Hermeneutics course on the connections between Hermeneutics and doing cross-cultural ministry.  It’s called “A Three Cultures Approach to Engaging Scripture and Cross-Cultural Ministry.”

Both mine and Adrian’s articles are drafts so feel free to pass on any thoughts.  All in all – 101 pages of resources from about 17 authors (all Epic staff and interns) in total.

The mobi version works if you have a kindle or a kindle app on some other device.  If you can’t upload it manually to your device, you should have a kindle assigned email that allows you to send it to your kindle app.  I included an epub as that’s a common format for many other ereading devices.

Right click and save as…..

Epic Resilient E-book Kindle Version (mobi)

Epic Resilient E-book    .epub format

And for the non e-reader folks….here the pdf version…

Enjoy!

Quick response to Deadly Viper & Asian American controversy

I’m fascinated by the discussion going around the blogosphere regarding the marketing of “Deadly Viper: Character Assassins”, a book apparently about Christian leadership. You wouldn’t be able to tell that from the dragon emblazoned on it’s cover, the Asian characters printed by the title, or the subtitle: “A Kung Fu Survival Guide for Life and Leadership”. I’m sure the authors of the book had no idea that their innocently packaged book of positive and potentially life-changing truths would offend so many. If you haven’t gotten around to following the discussion, I totally recommend it. I personally learned about it starting from Pastor Drew Hyun’s blog: http://drewhyun.wordpress.com/ [Side note: Pastor Drew will be speaking for our Epic East Coast Conference...very exciting!]

What intrigues me about this conversation are people’s responses to the basic statement, “your portrayal of my culture offends/upsets me.” These responses have ranged from “why are you offended? can’t you take a joke?” or “you should feel honored that they’re using your culture to promote such great values.” The most interesting response is, “Well, I’m Asian, and I’m not offended, so you shouldn’t feel offended either.”

It makes me think about the verse, “But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” (1 Cor. 12:24-26)

If one part of the body considers something hurtful or humiliating, shouldn’t the whole body make every effort to understand why and corrrect it? I’m sure that the writers and publisher of this book have learned a lot through this conversation. Hopefully they’ll be able to present their message in a more culturally-aware and sensitive manner.

As for the authors, I’m sure they have suffered much from all the angry, sarcastic, mean and unloving responses posted on blogs, FaceBook, and Twitter. For that, we need to apologize (which many have already). Let’s suffer with each other, and honor each other….I pray we may quickly rejoice with each other too as we see our culture begin changing for good.