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 have said that quote, or something very close to it, at public speaking venues. I don’t think it has made it into any books, however. It’s always hard to pin down an original source. There’s a good chance I adapted it from something I heard from someone else! –Philip
Philip,
My father died about a month ago and one of the things he left me was a book — your book, The Jesus I Never Knew, given to me almost 20 years ago. It’s been on my shelf all this time, and I didn’t think to crack the cover until recently. Dad inscribed it, saying he thought my reading it would leave me hungry for more in the way of spiritual things, and that has been true. It is true. A number of things related to his passing away into a sure expectation that he would meet Jesus have inclined me toward a new understanding of and desire for God. I wake up in the early morning and start my day in a quiet house with prayer and meditation on two books — the Bible (currently the Book of James) and your book. It has been life-enriching. So many of the themes you touch on match the things I’m praying about or reading about in the Word. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with all of us. Though that book was written in the 90s, not much about it is dated, and what you write about the relationship between humans and God is as fresh as it gets.
Your father left you a legacy, and you are embracing it. I know he would be (is?) pleased that you honor him in this way. Nothing in life is more important than encountering and accepting the love of God. –Philip
Hello. I’m Korean. I read your book “the question that never goes away”.
I am saddened by the atomic bombings in Japan during World War II.
But we must also consider the damage that Korea has suffered in Japan.
Korean young girls were dragged by Japanese soldiers, and they were terrible.
Korea was able to become independent because Japan lost the war.
I hope you know this history. Thank you.
Dear Mr. Yancey,
I am a mainline evangelical, currently using Vanishing Grace as curriculum in an adult Sunday school class. The members of the class are diverse theologically, including some whose beliefs are evangelical but who would shun that identity given the current political environment.
I have trouble using your books as curriculum because of your overt, explicit identity as evangelical and your constant implication that evangelical is the default setting for genuine Christianity. Tony Campolo’s writings are similarly infected, and in CT it is a terminal disease.
Might you consider writing your next book as a Christian and for Christians? Your publisher wants niche marketing to increase sales, but you have the stature to defy that impulse. I hope to hear from you.