It began as a search for Chinese food and ended with one of the country's largest Christian publishers revising a book and issuing a public apology to Asian Americans.

On a recent Friday evening, the Rev. Soong-Chan Rah was searching online to find a Chinese restaurant in his neighborhood. The 39-year-old assistant professor of church growth and evangelism at North Park University in Chicago typed in "Chinese delivery Mee Maw" (the restaurant name). Up popped a link to Zondervan, which publishes everything from Bibles to The Purpose-Driven Life.

"I was a little confused," Rah said. He followed the link to a sample page from Skits That Teach, where he read the following script.

Rah found the material offensive and initiated a conversation with Youth Specialties, the arm of Zondervan that created the product, and authors Tommy Woodard and Eddie James, known as the Skit Guys. Eventually, both Mark Oestreicher, president of Youth Specialties, and the Skit Guys issued public apologies. Oestreicher called the character in the skit a "horribly, inexcusably, and unquestionably racist" portrayal of Asian Americans, pointing to an underlying "systemic racism" within the organization for okaying the skit's publication.

Zondervan also took the extraordinary steps of destroying every copy of Skits That Teach left in stock, revising and republishing the book without the Chinese delivery man skit, and offering to replace purchased copies with the re-released version.

Journalist Alice C. Chen recently sat down with Rah. The professor shared his concerns about the book and the encouragement he found in the authors' and publishers' willingness to admit and correct their mistake, regardless of the cost. This, Rah suggests, is what true racial and ethnic reconciliation will require.

I didn't believe it was real. I thought it was some kind of mistake. It doesn't seem like anything that would appear in a Christian book. I had a flashback to several years ago, when I stumbled upon the Rickshaw Rally Vacation Bible School material, published by the Southern Baptist's publishing company, LifeWay, which was also offensive to the Asian American community. I was kind of stunned.

It was a caricature of Asian Americans. The way they spelled the words was clearly mocking the Chinese delivery person. The person was portrayed as very angry, hostile. When you see something like this, you recognize how marginalized Asian Americans are, how we're often portrayed as outsiders whose language skills are deficient. There are always stereotypes of the Asian American community. You deal with them in society and in secular media. But it's shameful to see something like this in a Christian book.

I tried to get in touch with the publisher. I e-mailed the Skit Guys, who had created the product. I went to their website and discovered they had an MP3 of the skit. It was clearly a white person mimicking or mocking the voice of an Asian American. I blogged about it.