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.”
To contact Philip,
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email Joannie: pyasst@aol.com
Thank you so much Philip for sharing your story. I grew up as an adoptee in a Mennonite Brethren Church. We could not dance or go to movies or date girls who did. If one used the Lord’s name in vain they were doomed for eternity. That was the gist of it. Even so I accepted Jesus as my Saviour at about 7 yrs old. I am now going to be 66 yrs old next month. Many years ago I wrote a piece for you. I do not remember now for which publication. Writing is what I’ve always done best.
I still struggle with lack of self-confidence and procrastination when it comes to writing. I will never forget a parent-teacher conference in high school with my English Lit. teacher. He strongly advised my parents to steer me into a writing career.
At any rate your writings never fail to inspire me! If anyone will manage to get a fire going under my butt to get me writing more just reading your writings would do it!
Sincerely,
Ken Wiens
B.A., Mdiv., ThM
Mr. Yancey,
Just curious…do you believe that John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey? (Matthew 3:4)
I wouldn’t doubt it. Some folks in Northern Africa still do! –Philip
Phil,
You and I enjoy similar authors. I love to read C.S. Lewis and St. Augustine. They are passionate authors! I also enjoy reading your books. They are sincere and genuine.
Keep writing, I read each of them.
Mark Brown
South Dakota
I’ve been meaning to send you a message for a while. I’m 23, a recent college grad, and I’ve been telling my friends that you’re my favorite author since high school, when I first read What’s So Amazing About Grace. I’ve grown up as the daughter of a pastor and an apologetics professor, and of the countless Christian books populating the shelves inside my house, yours were the ones my twin sister and I gravitated toward.
I just wanted to say thank you, for your blog posts and student bible as much as your books. I’ve found life through so many of your words. The summer after my junior year of college, I led a small group in the fellowship I was a part of. We read through Reaching for the Invisible God. And for perhaps the first time, I was able to articulate so many of my experiences – or lackthereof – with God and the church. I was able to let go of the shame I’ve always faintly clung to for the fact that I always felt like “that person” who went to the retreat and didn’t get the experience I’d hoped for, the person who closed my eyes during “listening prayer” times and was not blessed with a profound image, the one who yearned and longed and prayed for a tangible sense of God’s presence and overwhelming love and, more often than not, didn’t get it. I’d listen to others talk about “hearing from God” so easily and felt two layers of shame – one from my own doubts (is my faith not real?) and one from the imagined doubts I perceived from others (is her faith not real?). But in your book, your honesty gave me hope. And, inspired by some of your words, I began to see faith as not unlike personalities – that we have different “types”, that some people may experience and hear God often (and it is not my place to doubt those experiences), while I may long and doubt and wait far more than I hear…and that that is okay – that these different kinds of relationships with Him might be something He delights in, something He finds beautiful. How boring it must be to have the same kind of relationship with billions of people.
At college, I often encountered friends who found themselves in the shadows between belief and unbelief. Again and again, I would offer them your name, hoping they would find a similar freedom in realizing their doubts and questions did not disqualify them from faith.
I often feel different than the Christian community that surrounds me – far more skeptical, far more embracing of doubts, far more comfortable discussing the persistence of my questions than any answers I’ve been offered. You have made my journey of faith much less lonely.
Thank you.
Katie, I can’t tell you how this warms my heart. I’m 68, a year shy of three times your age, and to hear that somehow my words leap across time and even generations…well, that’s a great gift that you gave me. You express yourself so articulately, and I appreciate the care you put into this note. I had many “toxic church” experiences, and now I look back even on those with gratitude, for them spurred me to a kind of gritty, honest pursuit of God, one that, as I later discovered, the Bible honors. “How boring it must be (for God)…”–that’s a remarkable insight Katie.
You make me feel less lonely, and spur me further down the same path. Keep feeling different…you’re not alone.
Philip
Dear Philip,
My husband and I have been fans of your writing even before we met each other. We felt so understood when we read your books on the realities of suffering. I’m 39 weeks pregnant and we decided to name our boy ” Ephraim Yancey ” in your honour. Our prayers are that people who ask him the meaning of his name, will read your books, feel understood and rediscover their faith.