The Chinese Surprise

Our book cover in Chinese

Several months ago, out of the blue, my sister Sharon Clymer Landis and co-author of our book The Spacious Heart: Room for Spiritual Awakening, received an email from Simon Ye. He wanted to know if she would be interested in doing a seminar with a Chinese Christian Book Club about her (our) book. 

Sharon immediately forwarded the email to me and asked: "Is this legit?" Little did we know how legitimate it was.

Today Sharon and I participated in a zoom session with four Chinese people in order to plan for our upcoming seminar on March 31. We discovered that the event was sponsored by a seminary and publishing house in China, which was promoting the reading of Christian literature for Chinese Christians who previously had little access to such reading material. As the meeting went on, we both became increasingly astonished about what we were experiencing. 

The president of the organization showed a short video of their ministry. Their seminary included several different certificates in theology as well as full Master of Divinity degree programs. 

The reading program involves choosing a book, then training discussion leaders with the chosen book to disseminate the material across a wide geographical area where Chinese is spoken. Our zoom seminar is to be with around 11 of the discussion leaders. Those discussion leaders will gather others to join in reading and discussing our book. The numbers of readers could reach hundreds, and then multiply from there. 

Original book cover
in English 

To our surprise and delight, our book had already been translated into Chinese and published here: (https://www.cclm.com.tw/book/08252). Then the organization who is sponsoring our seminar published it as an ebook here: (https://ebook.endao.co/book-641#). It was chosen because of their sense that a more contemplative spirituality was necessary for their Chinese Christian churches. How our book, which was written with a Western, North American audience, would translate into an Asian/Chinese culture is highly fascinating to me. The conversation with them reaffirmed my belief that a longing for God and a deeper relationship with one's spirituality is universal even despite cultural trappings.

One of the participants in the planning zoom session is to be our interpreter. She spoke with emotion about her growing up in an atheistic family and society. After becoming a Christian, she sensed a need for a deeper connection with her soul. The emphasis in the Chinese Christian churches she attended was mostly evangelical and narrow in its view of spirituality. She was highly moved by our writing, feeling that it gave her some new insights into spirituality while being delighted that it was written from a Christian perspective. 

The fact that we are both Mennonite at first bothered them, not knowing what that all meant. However, as they read our book, they saw how we quoted and learned from a large variety of faith backgrounds. That eased their concern about us being too sectarian. I am overwhelmed by this opportunity. 

As Bach wrote at the end of all his church compositions: Solo Deo gloria.

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Our next adventure is to get our book published in Spanish. I have both a potential translator and publisher. Stay tuned . . .