“I tend to go back to the Bible as a model, because I don’t know a more honest book,” Yancey explains. This morning time, he says, helps him “align” himself with God for the day. So, just how does a man who’s been through all Yancey has, draw close to the God he once feared? He spends about an hour each morning reading spiritually nourishing books, meditating, and praying. My books are a process of exploration and investigation of things I wonder about and worry about.” Yancey writes with an eye for detail, irony, and honest skepticism. I feel overwhelming gratitude that I can make a living writing about the questions that most interest me. “I’m a pilgrim, recovering from a bad church upbringing, searching for a faith that makes its followers larger and not smaller. My interests include skiing, climbing mountains, mountain-biking, golf, international travel, jogging, nature, theology (in small doses), politics, literature, and classical music.”

“Writing is such an introspective act that I found myself looking for ways to connect with the planet bodily. His writing took a more personal, introspective turn even as his activities turned outward. In 1992 he and his wife Janet, a social worker and hospice chaplain, moved to the foothills of Colorado. 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. 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 including Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, National Wildlife, and Christianity Today. He currently has more than 17 million books in print, published in over 50 languages worldwide. In his new 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. “We had quite a trade: I gave words to his faith, and in the process he gave faith to my words.” More recently, he has explored central issues 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. “No one has influenced me more,” he says. He coauthored three books with the renowned surgeon Dr. 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. Cautiously, warily, I returned, circling around the faith to see if it might be true.”Įver since, Yancey has explored the most basic questions and deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, guiding millions of readers with him. Along the way I realized that God had been misrepresented to me. I began my journey back mainly by encountering a world very different than I had been taught, an expansive world of beauty and goodness.

I went through a period of reacting against everything I was taught, and even discarding my faith. For instance, what I learned from a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or Black Like Me contradicted the racism I encountered in church. So, he devoured books that opened his mind, challenged his upbringing, and went against what he had been taught. 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.”įor Yancey, reading offered a window to a different world. We heard about love and grace, but I didn’t experience much. I grew up confused by the contradictions. 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. “Of course, there were good qualities too. 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.

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