About Philip
Growing up in a strict, fundamentalist church in the southern USA, a young Philip Yancey tended to view God as “a scowling Supercop, searching for anyone who might be having a good time—in order to squash them.” Yancey jokes today about being in recovery from a toxic church. “Of course, there were good qualities too. If a neighbor’s house burned down, the congregation would rally around and show charity—if, that is, the house belonged to a white person. I grew up confused by the contradictions. We heard about love and grace, but I didn’t experience much. And we were taught that God answers prayers, miraculously, but my father died of polio just after my first birthday, despite many prayers for his healing.”
For Yancey, reading offered a window to a different world. So, he devoured books that opened his mind, challenged his upbringing, and went against what he had been taught. A sense of betrayal engulfed him. “I felt I had been lied to. For instance, what I learned from a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or Black Like Me contradicted the racism I encountered in church. I went through a period of reacting against everything I was taught, and even discarding my faith. I began my journey back mainly by encountering a world very different than I had been taught, an expansive world of beauty and goodness. Along the way I realized that God had been misrepresented to me. Cautiously, warily, I returned, circling around the faith to see if it might be true.”
Ever since, Yancey has explored the most basic questions and deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, guiding millions of readers with him. Early on he crafted best-selling books such as Disappointment with God and Where is God When it Hurts? while also editing The Student Bible. He coauthored three books with the renowned surgeon Dr. Paul Brand. “No one has influenced me more,” he says. “We had quite a trade: I gave words to his faith, and in the process he gave faith to my words.” In time, he has explored central matters of the Christian faith, penning award-winning titles such as The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace? and Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? His books have garnered 13 Gold Medallion Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than 17 million books in print, published in over 50 languages worldwide. In his memoir, Where the Light Fell, Yancey recalls his lifelong journey from strict fundamentalism to a life dedicated to a search for grace and meaning, thus providing a type of prequel to all his other books.
Yancey worked as a journalist in Chicago for some twenty years, editing the youth magazine Campus Life while also writing for a wide variety of magazines. In the process he interviewed diverse people enriched by their personal faith, such as President Jimmy Carter, Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller, and Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement. In 1992 he and his wife Janet, a social worker and hospice chaplain, moved to the foothills of Colorado, and his writing took a more personal, introspective turn.
“I write books for myself,” he says. “I’m a pilgrim, recovering from a bad church upbringing, searching for a faith that makes its followers larger and not smaller. Writing became for me a way of deconstructing and reconstructing faith. I feel overwhelming gratitude that I can make a living exploring the issues that most interest me.
“I tend to go back to the Bible as a model, because I don’t know a more honest book. I can’t think of any argument against God that isn’t already included in the Bible. To those who struggle with my books, I reply, ‘Then maybe you shouldn’t be reading them.’ Yet some people do need the kinds of books I write. They’ve been burned by the church, or they’re upset about certain aspects of Christianity. I understand that feeling of disappointment, even betrayal. I feel called to speak to those living in the borderlands of faith.”
I recently read “Vanishing Grace” while on a mission trip to serve the poor in the appalachian mountains of Kentucky. You are a very gifted person. Thank you for this book. While on the trip, we worked on a trailer that really needed to be condemned and replaced but since we did not have the money for that, we did what we could to fix leaks and replace the rotting floor. This past week I told a friend about the terrible living conditions and wishing we could do more. My friend pointed out that even if we had put in a new trailer, it would also be neglected and in a few years end up in the same shape. I had to agree with him. However, this did not get me down but made me realize I had received grace.
You see even though I knew the physical work we were doing would not last, I was very happy doing it. Indeed, I was very grateful that I was being allowed to participate in doing something for someone else with no thought of any personal benefit, “no pressure” as they say. If I had spent my time dwelling on the negative that I could not control, as I often do, then I would have been discouraged and depressed as I often am but as it was I was happy, content and fulfilled.
If I understand the poem and my experience correctly, it seems the lesson for me is to relax, to trust God, to stay in the moment and to focus on what I can do to help and make things better, especially for someone else.
God Bless
Philip,
I’ve been an avid fan and faithful reader of your books over the years. Your best sellers, Where is God When It Hurts? and Disappointment with God, helped me and my wife navigate some very rough emotional seas when we found out our son, Jacob, was to be born with a fatal heart defect. We found a doctor (Dr. William Norwood) who developed a series of surgeries to ameliorate the defect.
In fact, back in 2001, we came to a conference you spoke at in Nashville, TN, and my wife, Karen, and I volunteered to take you to the airport. We ate lunch together before we delivered to the airport. You were a gracious captive as we discussed our journey with Jacob. And that is why I’m writing today.
I was listening to the April 13th devotional from your Grace Notes. You referred to how you have repeatedly had to field questions revolving around pain, suffering, and doubt. You shared how you have learned to not even try to address the ‘why’ questions but try to help people to see that God does care about us in our suffering.
Hearing that made me remember that that was exactly what my wife and I did to you. We peppered you with questions to help us gain some type of understanding as to why Jacob was born with such a devastating prognosis. We were very inconsiderate of your time and consumed with our own agenda. You had just spent the morning speaking to a group of ministers of education and, probably, the last thing you desired to do was to provide a free counseling session. I apologize for being so insensitive.
I know the purpose of that day’s devotional was not for you to complain about having to interact with people on this subject. You were endeavoring to point to God’s love and care for his children. And that has been the common theme in your books. Don’t drive yourself crazy in asking the ‘why’ questions, but to seek to see God’s love, concern, and care every day of our lives.
We lost Jacob back in 2009. It was and is a difficult journey. Occasionally, the ‘why’ question tries to bubble up but we try to let it evaporate. At this point, we seek to see God’s love and reflect that love in our daily actions.
Anyway, I wanted to apologize for our selfishness and being so inconsiderate. And I want to thank you for your career of authorship that helps address a subject that scars so deeply.
I remember that conversation, one of many in which I felt completely inadequate. My goodness, you certainly have no need to apologize. You were going through one of the most difficult passages of life–how could you possibly think of anything else. I am so sorry to hear of your loss. Jacob lived about as long as John Claypool’s daughter, and I may have recommended at the time his fine little book, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler. I know that you view Jacob’s time on earth, troubled as it was, as a gift. The other is A Grace Revealed by Gerald Sittser, who lost three generations at once in an automobile accident. They have endured far more pain than I have, and perhaps can offer some solace. “Why?” is indeed the question that never goes away, and I ask it myself all the time. May you know “the God of all comfort,” worthy of trust even in those things we cannot comprehend. Thank you so much for writing.
Philip,
I’m a new Jesus follower and your books have been very useful to me. Got baptized the other year a few days short of my 57th birthday!?
St. Augustine teaches that the future is unknowable, which is also hinted at in many places in the Bible. Because we are time-bound creatures, limited to sensing the present and recalling the past, it maybe bothers or disappoints or upsets (or better word?) us that get to see no glimpse or what will happen a year or a second! from now.
From God’s timeless perspective, our end is known…
Yes, Augustine wrote some remarkable reflections on timelessness–long before modern cosmology gave a theoretical basis to what he intuited theologically. Welcome to the family, Scott. –Philip