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.”
Please come and speak in South Africa, if you can find the time, Philip. We are a nation that is still horribly divided along racial, economic, and criminal lines. Its not just about black verses white, but also greed, inequality, poverty, violence, rape, and local people blaming foreign African shop owners for taking jobs away from locals. The dream of Nelson Mandela is still only halfway fulfilled. We desperately need people to speak some spiritual sanity here. If you can’t come, then please pray for us.
I’ve been there on speaking trips 3 times, and couldn’t agree more. You’ve avoided catastrophe, but unleashed a lot of bats out of hell. Indeed I will pray, and may show up again sometime!
Philip
Philip,
I wanted to let you know that I’ve been praying for you. I’m reading through Reaching for an Invisible God, savoring it by only reading a few pages a day and really considering what you say — and it occurred to me that I ought to be praying for this man who has, along with John Stott, been such a constant spiritual guide for me in the mornings when I pray & study the Bible. Funny (and a little sad) that it didn’t occur to me to pray for you & your ministry until after I’d been reading your books for awhile. I also just read about your harrowing car accident, and can now pray more specifically for your spinal condition.
Rod
You’re so very kind, Rod. Yes, writers need prayer, as we work in isolation and it’s a paranoia-producing occupation. We keep at it because of responses like yours.
This year is the tenth anniversary of my accident, and your prayers have been answered–in reverse! No lasting effects, other than a sore neck now and then after sleeping.
Philip
Hi Philip,
I just wanted to say thank you for your wonderful book: ‘Disappointment with God’. I felt the need to read it again (I’d read it before some time ago) and it was a tremendous encouragement. It occurred to me recently that authors can be like mentors to us – a thought that you have also expressed, and I’m grateful to God for you being one of mine through your brave, compassionate and honest writing.
Jason