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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Philip, I just listened to your conversation with Carey Nieuwhof, and was deeply moved by it. Thank you for your gracious honesty. Thank you for your hopeful vision of ‘suffering redeemed’. Thank you for for being you.
Grace and peace,
Mike
Dear Mr. Yancey,
I can’t begin to thank you enough for writing ‘Where The Light Fell’. I just finished it this morning and found myself reading out loud portions of the final chapter to my husband with tears falling down my face. We both are graduates of the counseling graduate program that CCU hosted under Dr. Larry Crabb and Dr. Dan Allender in the early 1990’s. We had the privilege of meeting you and your lovely wife a few years ago when you were the guest speaker at Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church’s Chautaqua@Creek event.
Growing up in an evangelical home centered on ministry service I’ve come away with gratefulness for being introduced to Jesus at a young age and yet as an adult woman, have needed to untangle many threads of what beliefs were founded on Jesus and what were from cultural Christianity. It’s been an important journey and one that I hope is resulting in opportunity to invite others to a walk with God based on grace and not fear. I’m grateful for how your memoir allowed me to reflect on my own journey and recognize His embrace and mercy weaved throughout.
Thank you for struggling well and for your gifted, grace filled writings.
Susan
Yancey is a famous writer who has written 25 books and this one should make him even more renowned. Autobiographies can be vain and boring, but this one is not. It is a catalogue of stories that reveal the lives of three main characters: Yancey, his brother Marshall, and his mother.
The stories are vivid and highly personal, revealing the good, bad and ugly of each life, often with emotional descriptions that will make you cry. It is also well edited and has a professional literary aura about it. There are few Christian books that I have read that uncovered my own personal and emotional responses like this one.
I can identify with Yancey in a number of ways: his fundamentalistic churches and strict Bible school teaching mirrors my own. However, my family was not religious like Yancey’s and my brother turned out better than his. I was never bothered by stories of drugs, although alcohol was a big part of my father’s life.
I too met my future wife when washing dishes in the college kitchen. I also questioned the sincerity of Christians and legalism but, unlike Yancey, music was not important early in my life, mainly because music lessons were forced upon me.
Yancey’s father died of polio when young and his mother was left to provide for the brothers, the eldest whom she vowed should be a missionary. She was in the service of churches and pastors for most of her life and expected her sons to follow in her steps.
However, Yancey was fortunate and did not. Although he was raised in the south with the racial prejudices of his sub-culture, he had a wide variety of friends and experiences that allowed him to evaluate what was right and good. His mother was poor and eked out a living by working for churches and living in what today would be called “substandard” conditions. She did send her boys to Bible school and fully expected them to “serve the Lord.”
Yancey gives humorous as well as pathetic accounts of his early life, including living as “trailer trash” and getting in trouble in schools—most often because of his renegade brilliance.
Several long stories center on Marshall, his older brother, and chronicle his decay into drugs, women and failed marriages, followed by physical and mental problems. It is a sad story and one that can be repeated, in many ways, by other families. Yancey doesn’t attempt to tell us the theological reasons for his brother’s downfall, concentrating more on his own short comings and eventual repentance and forgiveness. Most of the credit for his success must surely go to his wife Janet.
This is probably not the book to take along to a “spiritual retreat” for discussion, mainly because it is far too raw and honest. Better to read it at the seashore with sunglasses and a drink of lemonade in your hand. You might not want people to see you wiping your eyes and reflecting on your own shortcomings and repentance.
I applaud Yancey for his disarming honesty and for giving us a story that will cause us to reflect about our own life and also to thank God for his wisdom and grace. As we say at our church, “To God be the glory.”
Karl Franklin
March, 2022
I just finished rereading What’s So Amazing About Grace, since my pastor chose it as this year’s Lenten study book. I finished it with a renewed sense of God’s grace in my life, and that multiplied after reading Where the Light Fell. I spent my childhood and early teenage years in a strict fundamentalist church, and I found myself saying, “Me too!” throughout the book. I don’t think I realized how profoundly those years shaped me in both positive and negative ways until I finished Where the Light Fell.
After reading What’s So Amazing About Grace for the first time, I wrote a short devotional about it for my church’s Lenten devotional book written by members of the congregation. It is a little snapshot of my “Me too!” and my journey to a deeper understanding of grace. I wanted to share it with you to let you know how you have been part of my faith journey,
“In love he[b] predestined us for adoption to sonship[c] through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” Ephesians 1:5-6
I was well aware of my sins from a very young age. In my childhood church, sermons on Sunday mornings and evenings were filled with images of hellfire and brimstone, and in Awana some of the first verses we memorized included Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and Romans 6:23a, “For the wages of sin is death.” Around Halloween, the church youth ministry would host a “hell” house with frightening rooms filled with “demons,” darkness, and large knives and bloody bones (thanks to a butcher who was a member of the church)—followed by a message on hell and an invitation to repent and be saved. Much of my childhood prayer life was spent begging God to save me from the horrors of hell, in the fear that I was not sincere enough in my young faith to truly be saved. My parents changed churches when I was a junior in high school, and it was then that I began to more fully understand grace and that God’s grace was greater than all of my sins. I did not need to live in fear but could find peace in God’s grace and forgiveness. I love the way Philip Yancey explains this in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace. He writes about breaking the cycle of ungrace (my childhood understanding of sin), and he relates it to the story of the prodigal son. I grew up being told that we were either one son or the other—a prodigal who needed to repent of his sin, or a brother who needed to repent of his self-righteousness and resentment. Yancey says that this misses the point of the story–the point is actually the father’s outrageous love for his son. For the first time I understood that the story of the prodigal son is really about extravagant grace and forgiveness, and that is what I had missed in my childhood church experience.”
Thank you for this, Cheryl. Well said.
Just a word of thanks & encouragement. Your book “Soul Survivor” gave me fresh & richer insights into 8 or so of the people who had also touched my life (I’m now 68) as well as introductions to others of mere acquaintance. I just sent the book to a former high school student of mine now in college (I send her one a year) because, as I wrote her, it can help her see and experience how richly diverse Christians & Christianity are, helping us avoid (as the Japanese proverb puts it) being a frog in a well that does not know the ocean (and in some cases helping us survive wounds from those wells). Living in Africa & Japan as well as the US and working with & reading about many different kinds of Christians as a pastor, missionary & bookaholic has helped me so much, and your book will help my younger friend broaden her horizons a bit more quickly. How fortunate we are to be able to grow through fellow pilgrims across the globe and the centuries, so like and unlike us. And how fortunate I am to read your writing & share it to help with that. Their 13 lives & testimonies still live to edify so many more through the gift of your book. Thanks from the heart.
May he who set the galaxies ablaze keep your heart burning for him. – Ted B