Philip Yancey

You Gotta Start Somewhere

June 2015 by Philip Yancey

I know William Willimon as an outstanding preacher as well as a professor and chaplain at Duke University. In this vignette, he gives an account of two elderly women who made a wrong turn into a sketchy part of town and proceeded to invite a most unlikely guest to their suburban church service. Verleen lived … Read more

Word Power

June 2015May 2015 by Philip Yancey

As a child I would hear my mother and other adults use a secret code in my presence: for example, “I think we’ll stop for some i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m for the boys.” Again and again I heard that code: strange word gaps in a sentence replaced by short nonsense sounds that somehow made sense when linked together—made sense … Read more

Small is Large

April 2015 by Philip Yancey

I visited a local megachurch recently. My friend described it as, “You know, one of those big-box churches with one-word names, super-loud music, huge video screens, and long sermons.” Currently, 1300 U.S. congregations qualify as megachurches, averaging more than 2000 in weekly attendance. The one I visited has more parking-lot volunteers than my church has members. … Read more

A Dispenser of Grace

March 2015 by Philip Yancey

In Vanishing Grace I describe people I call grace-dispensers. You don’t have to be a professional, or educated, or especially skilled, to be a good grace-dispenser. A new book by John Ortberg, the pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California, tells of an ordinary woman in San Francisco who makes an extraordinary dispenser of … Read more

Words Sacred and Profane

February 2015 by Philip Yancey

My latest book, Vanishing Grace, explores how Christians relate to the broader culture, which got me thinking about how words flow back and forth in a linguistic exchange between the sacred and the profane. (I am using profane in its original meaning of nonreligious—the word comes from Latin, “outside the temple”—not in its modern sense … Read more