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.”
Dear Philip
I love the way you write about the Christian faith. Your essay “Rumors Of Another World” always serves as a reminder to me about the brevity of life.
Earlier this evening I was listening to your talk on Suffering & Grace that you delivered at the University of Virginia in 2015. You quoted the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, as an example of human suffering and tragedy. May I humbly inform you it has been pointed out by numerous (sound-minded) people on the internet that the shooting was nothing more than a hoax? …[T]he so-called “parents” of the children who were “massacred” were merely Crisis Actors employed for a government-sponsored propaganda campaign to push for gun-control.
Mr Yancey, I want to thank you for giving me hope in a tough life. As a child I was sexually abused. As a teen I was beaten and abused by my mentally ill mother and sister and ignored by my father. Don’t get me wrong – my parents did many good things for me. But they equally did many evil things to me. Later, I was raped by my boyfriend when I broke up with him because God showed me that as a new Christian, I shouldn’t date a non-Christian. When I prayed, “God help me. God bring something good from this,” God clearly told me I was going to get pregnant from the rape. And that the child would be a gift.
We’ve had a lot of struggles – intense poverty and failed dream after failed dream. But my son is a delight and has grown into a fine man with a child of his own.
In the past few years where I’ve finally begun to process all the pain in my life because I didn’t have to be “mother” and just ignore the pain and push on, your books have meant the world to me. You’ve shown me both pain and God’s goodness. You’ve helped me in some of my darkest hours and I thank you for that. Life is still almost overwhelmingly hard and I know that none of my dreams are likely to become reality in this life. But I try to show God’s grace to others. And I’ve found that because of the evil done to me, I’ve been able to understand the sorrows in other people’s lives.
Keep up the good work. God bless you.
This is one of the most moving accounts of “redeemed pain” that I have ever heard. I’m so touched that my books were with you on the journey. You took my own questions, sought answers, and emerged wiser and stronger. I love your spirit, and feel such compassion for you and all that you have borne. –Philip
Thank you, Philip, for the honesty I see written into your books, not only regarding your faith journey, but your journey as a writer. You well describe the writing life as one of solitude in many ways, of being misunderstood, and seen as rather odd, and all of that has served to affirm that as a writer, I am ‘normal’! Thank you! You have expressed the writer’s life so well, in ways I could not articulate, or even understand about myself until I read your books. Of course, this is not to diminish my appreciation for your openness in finding your way to the real Jesus. I, too, was raised in a rather strict, confusing (Lutheran) church, seemingly focused more on law than on grace, even though the Word was preached by kind pastors. The biggest confusions came from the congregation, and my resultant feelings that we (my family) would and never could be ‘good enough’ to fit the white-picket-fence image of perfection. We simply didn’t fit in, didn’t fit the ‘image’. It has taken me over fifty years to find my way to the Jesus of the bible, and in so doing, to reach out in genuine love and compassion to the hurting, the lonely, the lost, the struggling. What a tragedy, all those wasted years pursuing some kind of ‘Focus on the Family’ image, instead of Jesus. I must admit, it took several health issues to break me, and in my brokenness, I found meaning, and I found Jesus. I now understand that when I am weak, I am strong (in Him, not in myself, my possessions, what people think of or admire about me, etc.) So thank you for sharing your story. It affirms mine. Your books are REFRESHING! Keep writing HONESTLY, because you build bridges to others who are struggling to figure out what the heck the Christian life is all about. You give others permission to question, to probe, to reevaluate what they believe, what they have been taught, and to look at their faith with honesty. And that is where healing and freedom begins.
Thank you for this vulnerable story of a search toward grace, beautifully expressed. –Philip