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.”
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Hi Philip,
I just wanted to say that your book, Reaching for the Invisible God, has brought me much-needed hope during an unprecedented and unexpected period of doubt in my life. I have always been academically inclined, and more likely to resonate with intellectual discussions about faith than stories of emotional experiences. Recently a friend of mine deconstructed his faith, and then decided to leave entirely. This amplified the discomfort I have been feeling for many years about the emphasis of evangelicalism on a personal relationship and emotional experiences with God that I simply could not relate to, as much as I wanted to. I am not an overly emotional person, but the journey of research and reading this has taken me on in order to better understand the Christian faith, why people deconstruct and what I truly believe, has been heart-rending. The ground feels like it has been shifting as I am re-examining much of what I was taught growing up in the church, and I have felt quite alone in knowing who to turn to to talk about my long felt but newly realised doubts. My husband is a pastor and has been wonderfully supportive, but as a pastor’s wife it is difficult to find a safe space to express these questions and doubts. I have been feeling quite overwhelmed, alone, discouraged and truly terrified that this journey will lead me to a place of unbelief, and what would I be left with then? A few days ago I was searching the book shelf for more books to help me sort through this time in the fog, and I found yours. The first few pages were a balm to my soul, somehow expressing perfectly what I have been feeling and the questions I have been wrestling with. I am not finished the book, or this process, but the knowledge that there are others who also wonder the same things is truly what I needed. It is also an answer to, not my, but my husband’s prayer that same day I found your book, that God would give me what I needed. I have hope that this process for me will result in a strengthened and more vibrant faith. Thank you.
This is so well-expressed. You bring joy to my soul. I’ve just published a memoir, Where the Light Fell, which details my own struggle with these same questions. Keep reaching!
Hi Philip,
I am currently reading your book ‘Whats so amazing about Grace’ and want to thank you for it. It has been a great help to me to bringing to realisation my thoughts around what my attitude to many of the issues confronting Christians today should be; the answer is to be graceful of course. Have you revised the book ever? I see it was written in 1997, if it was relevant then it surely is relevant today. It should be compulsory reading for Christians to learn how not to be full of ‘ungrace’, how it saddens me when I hear harsh words spoken of others by those in debt to the Grace of God. One of my favourite portions of scripture is Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well; how tender he was with her. It oftens brings me to tears when I read it because I see my own history in that woman, thats what is so amazing about Jesus, his Grace.
W.S.A.A.G. is the first book I have read of yours and it surely won’t be the last, thanks again.
Mr. Yancey,
This is the second time I have commented here. I tried replying to the initial comment and response you left, but my phone would not let me.
In my first comment I shared briefly about a crisis of faith I was in the middle of concerning evolution. You replied with encouragement that was so unexpected, that it was almost jarring.
You helped give me hope that there was resolution in the matter concerning my Christian faith.
That was five years ago.
I recently decided to write out my personal faith story over the Christmas holiday, covering my faith journey throughout my life and the crisis surrounding evolution that by the grace of God I did come to find peace and resolve in.
I quote a passage near the end from “What’s so Amazing About Grace” where you quote C.S. Lewis that was incredibly helpful to me.
Thank you again for being you.
~ David
I, too, grew up in Dekalb county GA though ten or so years later than you. And, fortunately, I had a much more traditional (loving) relationship with my parents and family. It’s impossible to read your books, though, and not sense some of the underlying pain that you feel about your early years. And, now, after reading “Where the Light Fell” it makes much more sense. I can’t imagine what you went through growing up though I do know a good bit about the south and its intricacies. I also grew up just a generation or so from Primitive Baptist much like your fundamentalist upbringing. I’ve lived in other areas of the country (including Colorado where you live now) though I have come back to Georgia as it truly is home for me. But, Atlanta has changed so much that I live an hour or so away (just far enough!). And, thank goodness, the South has changed quite a bit too. Haven’t we all? Maybe just not as fast as many would like. Like you, I have had quite a journey from that fundamentalist type upbringing to where my faith is now. And, as you know, it continues to evolve. I’m not a theologian but a surgeon and I enjoy reading and exploring about my questions of faith. As I mentioned before, I have read most all of your books but have also enjoyed reading Bishop Jack Spong, Marcus Borg and Brian McLaren and would probably categorize myself as a member of the “church alumni association.” I’m curious to know if you have ever read some of these authors, and, if so, what your thoughts are.
In short, I’m a true fan of your work and I hope you continue to write. I enjoy getting your monthly newsletter as well. We met one time at Montreat as I am also familiar with some of Dr. Brand’s hand surgery and I asked you about him.
Thank you for all you do
I haven’t read much of Spong, but Borg was helpful in researching The Jesus I Never Knew, and Brian McLaren is a friend and a favorite of mine. We’re all somewhere along the Order/Disorder/Reorder paradigm that Richard Rohr describes–especially those of us from the South.
I have just finished reading Where the Light Fell. It is a powerful book with a needed message, as are your other books.
Though my life was different than yours, there were elements of your story that sparked memories for me. We are about the same age (I’m two years older). We each grew up in a conservative church. We each attended a Bible college, though the school I attended has closed its doors. We each had learned pastors who were regarded as Bible scholars; mine sometimes illustrated his sermons with humorous stories about “darkies,” and was the first person I recall using the “curse of Ham” justification for racial hierarchy.
Though different forces had shaped her personality, my mother was given to angry, hurtful outbursts (my dad sometimes advised me to “walk on eggs” around her). Though I was raised as an only child, a picture of my infant brother in his casket, the brother who died before I was born, hung in our living room for most of my childhood; his death seems to have inspired my mother’s fascination with death and dying. Tragedy and death were so often on her mind that she couldn’t stop talking about what had happened to neighbors or in nearby towns, telling us in detail even when her two young and obviously unnerved grandchildren were visiting. She was often judgmental and unsympathetic. When I failed to be accepted by a graduate school I had applied to, she said, “God knew it would make you proud, so you didn’t get in.” Later, when I left the rural church I had served for a dozen years in west Texas to go to a suburban church in Ohio, she accused me of abandoning those good people for a big city church; again, because I was proud. The city was bigger, the church not that much bigger.
Enough of this. While our life-paths did not run parallel, they sometimes veered close enough we might have offered each other a knowing look—though my look would have included a touch of pity for you; as a Pentecostal, I had been taught your spiritual experience was deficient. I’ll share another incident I hadn’t thought about in years until I read your book.
I attended a Bible college where the dean announced one morning in chapel that anyone who wore a black armband to protest the Vietnam war would be expelled immediately. We were there, he explained, to devote our lives to more important matters than politics. No one wore an armband; the dean’s rules were unquestioned. At the time, I thought he was right.
This same dean initiated a program where during one chapel service each week, a senior preached. So, during the spring of my senior year I was invited to preach to my fellow students and the faculty. I preached on Colossians 2:8-15, talking about how Christ’s work had made us “complete” (KJV language), stressing how Christ’s death had broken legalism’s power over us. When I finished, the dean commended me for the message and announced that following the benediction, all the female students were to remain in the chapel. I hadn’t crossed the campus before I was told how each woman was being required to come forward and kneel in front of a female faculty member. If a student’s skirt didn’t touch the floor, she was sent to her dorm to change and told never to wear such a short skirt again. Those who gleefully told me what was happening had not missed the irony of my message being followed by the dean’s actions.
For a variety of reasons, I eventually left the Pentecostals and became a Baptist. Of course, I eventually realized legalism is not the province of just one group. Thank you for your efforts to help us all see the liberty Christ offers.
What I love most about reactions to my memoir is that readers tend to tell their own stories in response. Yours is a prime example, truly heartfelt.
Philip