A year after the release of True Story, InterVarsity Press has released a study guide for personal reflection or group discussion. It’s a free download from the InterVarsity Press website, so enjoy! When used along with True Story, it’s ideal for study in smaller groups.

On the front cover, it says that you have to get permission from me to make copies, so here it is: you now have permission. Go, therefore, and make copies!

A huge thanks to my friend CR and the folks at Duraleigh Presbyterian Church for field-testing the material. I hope this gives the people in your churches and organizations an easy way to learn step-by-step about how Jesus’ talked about the gospel, and discover why it’s really great news!

Christianity Today just published a Bible study based on the Big Story, the diagram featured in True Story: A Christianity Worth Believing In. It’s a follow-up to the article they published last July. It’s not free, but for a small fee, you can download it and make up to 1,000 copies for your church or organization.

Rating: 10

This is the first book I’ve finished in 2009, and if the rest of the books I read this year are in this caliber, this is going to be a very good year.

Postman deftly shows how the shift from the Age of Print to the Age of Television is having a disastrous effect on the tenor of our public discourse. He argues that the very nature of television makes it impossible to have deeper, thoughtful conversations about the burning issues of the day. And, he convincingly argues, TV affects everything else in culture. He has a clear intellect, and his sharp analysis on the way television shapes us is disturbing and should serve as a wake-up call to us all.

This book was written over 30 years ago, and was a prophetic call in an Age of Television. But it seems that as we’ve moved into the Age of the Computer or the Age of the Internet, some of the arguments don’t easily port over. The Internet is a somewhat more interactive form of media than, say, television. Or even books for that matter. And I’d be interested to know the prevailing metaphor that the medium of the Internet is introducing into our culture today.

Regardless, it’s a timely book that argues quite forcefully for the need to ask questions about the role of media in the shaping of not only our culture, but also our minds.

You can view its Amazon detail page by clicking the image above.

Click here to see other reviews.

As many of you know, True Story has a companion booklet called Based on a True Story that’s intended for giveaway use.

What’s news, however, is that InterVarsity Press has given me permission to post the first twelve pages of the booklet, so you can get a sense of what it’s like. If you like how it captures the central thrust of the Christian message, please feel free to get some copies for your friends.

Rating: 7

This book asked the right questions and challenged much of my current thinking. Basically, it asks: what’s the best form of church? And it shouts loudly against anything large and institutional, and argues for something smaller and incarnational — something that doesn’t merely invite, but goes out.

It seems idealistic. In the end, they argue for a church structure that has worked during Roman and Chinese persecutions of the church, and argue that it might possibly work here where there is no persecution. That’s where I’m skeptical: we, in the Western world, live in a time without persecution, and so these larger, more institutional forms of church do exist and provide alternatives. The fact that alternatives exist will create competitive structures against these smaller structures that the author is arguing for, making them harder to sustain.

That said, this book has a lot of insights and challenges for the institutional church today, if even to get us to stop thinking about inviting people to bigger rallies called worship services, and to think about being Jesus’ presence beyond our the walls of the church. And the author’s right: the megachurch model isn’t reproducible, and we should choose models that can be easily reproduced, like a network of house churches.

Much of these principles need to be reincorporated back into the church to remind us who we are and are suppose to be — a community that loves God and others. Yet, many of these ideas, especially if read by idealists like me, need a healthy dose of nuance and maturity to make these models sustainable.

You can view its Amazon detail page by clicking the image above.

My apologies — a 13-month old can drain every last ounce of creativity left over from work, leaving me shriveled up and pruned for content. New posts are hard to come by. But I still keep up with reading (more passive . . . *grin*), yet the reviews languish in their own section of this blog. So I’m going to start posting my reviews as well, and this is a great book to start with.

To see other reviews, click here to go to the library. So here goes:

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Rating: 10

This book is simply amazing. The premise alone is worth the cost of the book: if you want to change culture, critiquing it or consuming more of it won’t do. You have to make more of it.

But there’s more far more value than just that one idea. The book’s large in scope (what is culture?), clear in thought (what exactly goes into shaping culture?), sharp in intellect (who’s thought about the culture-making possibilities of an omelet?), humble in spirit (because we really can’t change the world, but. . . ) and hopeful in tone (. . . God can and is doing something.) It shows us both how we can’t change the world — thus, our need for humility — and yet, how we can still participate in the culture making enterprise in Christ.

Add the author’s skillful command of the language and mix in more wonderful concrete illustrations and examples, and the result is a brilliant and satisfying read.

You can view its Amazon detail page by clicking the image above.

The Urbana Student Missions Conference made True Story their book of the week. Check out their review.

Since Amazon.com is shipping True Story as of yesterday, it really must be out there. Gulp.

Over two years ago, I was stuck fast to my chair. The Sunday service at Coast had just ended, and I didn’t want to move. I knew there was more for me. So I just sat. Waiting. And I asked God: if you want me to stop writing this book, I will. I don’t want to do this for my sake. Only if you want me to. And I didn’t have to wait long to hear these three words: bless my Church. With those words, my body shook and tears streamed down my face.

Back in my 20′s, I would’ve thought that a clear message from God would mean that life would be easy. Didn’t God say to do it? Wouldn’t all the red lights just magically turn green? Now in my 30s, I realize that when I hear something that strongly from God, the road will probably get much more difficult. Perhaps God knew that I needed to hear him strongly, because I’d doubt his promises otherwise.

And there were good reasons to doubt: my book was originally rejected by InterVarsity Press. They took four months to decide because the editors were split, so they sent the proposal to outside readers. The readers shared enough negative feedback to kill it. But in my rejection letter, an editor was kind enough to say that he thought the book was “publishable.” That was June 2006. Then another publisher rejected me a few months later, saying that they thought it would sell respectably, but they didn’t know me. But how was I going to get known if I wasn’t published? Catch-22. I wasn’t just hitting red lights, but potholes, construction sites and roadblocks. But I thought God said…

But in December 2006, I asked for some time with that same IVP editor at a conference we were both attending. After we met, he gathered an impromptu meeting of five or six other editors on the publishing committee and asked me to share the same story. And they invited me to resubmit the proposal. The rest, as they say, is history. Or at least, it’s in print.

So now it’s in my hands, and I can’t read more than a few pages before putting the book down. I’m too antsy. It’s been at my house for over two weeks, collecting dust on my book table, and I still can’t get myself to read it through. What if there’s a mistake? Or what if it’s not the way I thought it would be? Neurotic, eh? Well, one day, I’ll be ready. In the meantime, I hope the book does what it’s supposed to: I hope it’s a blessing to His Church, and ultimately, to Him too.

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Some news: the book was mentioned in a Christianity Today column.

And if you liked the book, please go over to Amazon.com and review it. It would help get the message out. Thanks!

Almost every night for about a month now — ever since we watched the movie — I’ve been reading the Chronicles of Narnia to Jinhee before we go to bed. I’m a huge fan of C. S. Lewis, and have read these books before. But Jinhee hadn’t, so I wanted to share with her some of its magic. We’re on book 3: The Horse and His Boy (if you dare to count chronologically within Narnia’s timeline instead of by publishing date — there’s a huge debate on this).

We really do love these books, but allow me some color commentary — literally.

The book’s main character, Shasta, is a slave who lived among Calormenes, but now is running away to Narnia and the North. The Narnians are carefree, happy, friendly and honorable. In contrast, the Calormenes are depicted as political, materialistic, pretentious and conniving, willing to step on their social inferiors to make themselves feel important. Narnians are handsome or beautiful, and even more fashionable in the eyes of both cultures. Calormenes, however, are overweight or humpbacked and usually ostentatious in their choice of clothes. And ultimately, Lewis reminds you over and over again that Narnians are fair-skinned people modeled after the Anglo-Saxon culture of the Middle Ages, while the Calormenes are darker, styled after older Middle Eastern cultures complete with turbans and scimitars. Yet does it really have to be this way? Isn’t it always this way?

I know that Lewis (along with friend Tolkien) was trying to create British-centered folklore, but both seemed to make their enemies darker, and both pitted Middle Eastern-type cultures and other uglier, darker enemies against the good, fair-skinned people of the north. These depictions, given our current world context of Americans occupying Iraqi lands, seem even more insensitive and out of line. It’s sad that even our most revered Christian writers fall into the trap of stereotypes, making it tougher to see the truth of “there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Being one ain’t easy.

I’m still reading these books to Jinhee, and we’re still enjoying them. And I feel terrible giving even this small critique, which may cause some to question my faith for finding fault with C. S. Lewis. These books still do have great treasure to offer, but this book in particular seems slightly tarnished.