Strict Fundamentalism & Grace

With Philip Yancey

Whoever coined the proverb “the pen is mightier than the sword” must’ve had someone link Philip Yancey in mind. We have respected and admired this man’s work for decades.

Philip has given his life to discipleship through writing and has sold over 17 million books in 50 languages worldwide. This amazing author has brought to life Jesus, fear, and so many different topics we can't tackle in a single blog post.

Philip recently joined Jennie for a quick chat on the ‘Made for This’ podcast. This is the edited interview:

Jennie: How did you choose to go into writing? How did you know that you had that gift?

Philip: I didn't really. I just needed a job. I was in graduate school at Wheaton College, and a lot of Christian organizations were located in Wheaton back then. I finally got a job at a magazine called Campus Life. I had always been on the school newspaper and yearbook committee, but I never thought I’d become a writer. So, I truly learned it on the job. I had a very wise editor mentor who was gentle and patient, and I learned a lot from him and numerous other people over the years.

Jennie: One of the things I found fascinating was that you came to know Jesus, and yet, your brother never did. Talk a bit about your journey with Jesus and why you love Him so much.

Philip: We grew up in a small, fundamentalist, and unhealthy church with maybe 100 members. We lived in a trailer home on the church property.

My father died when I was just a year old, and my brother was three years old. And he died because people had a wrong belief about what God was going to do. My parents were planning to be missionaries, and then he got polio. He spent two miserable months in an iron lung at a charity hospital in Atlanta.

A group of Christians, including my mother, believed that God would heal him. So, they removed him from the iron lung against all medical advice and moved him to another clinic. He showed a bit of improvement for a few days but died within a couple of weeks. And that determined our life.

My mother didn't have a career. She had never driven a car or written a check. And here she is, left with these two boys. So, this little church supported her and gave her a lot on the property. As we became teenagers, we started questioning certain parts of the church, including racism, which was taught right from the pulpit. I found out that some of the things they taught about people of color were wrong.

It started to rattle my faith and I started questioning if I could trust them about the Bible or even Jesus. My brother and I went in different directions. He decided to get as far away from the church and God as possible. He essentially went through the rest of his life trying to break every rule in the book. He succeeded in doing that but to his destruction.

I was also on that route, but through a remarkable series of circumstances, God reached out. God showed me the good parts of life and set me up for a conversion experience I wasn't expecting or even seeking.

Jennie: All your writing is very in touch with the struggles we face, and I think that's why it's connected with so many different people. Is this passion for God coming from your story?

Philip: It does come from my story. I've written 25 other books in addition to the memoir. And they all start in the margins of faith because that's where I was. I was trying to figure out if I wanted to commit fully because I had been burned by the church. I was trying to sort out the messages I got, and I was trying to be honest about my experiences.

My first real book was ‘Where is God when it hurts?’ That's a question we all have at times. The second book was titled ‘Disappointment with God’ because that's where I was. It was only years later that I started writing books like ‘The Jesus I never knew,’ ‘What's amazing about grace?’ and ‘Prayer: does it make any difference?’

A lot of those books have questions in them because that's where I was. I started with the worst that the church has to offer, and I do tell some of those stories in the book. But at one point, I think God decided to show me what He had in mind for the human race.

For about 10 years, I worked with this veritable saint of a man, Dr. Paul Brand. He was a brilliant surgeon who had been offered posts as head of surgery at Oxford and Stanford, and he turned them all down to work with leprosy patients in India. 

I wasn't ready to write about my faith because it was still taking shape, but I could write with confidence about him. Truthfully, it only takes one person to show us what God had in mind. I was able to observe what a Jesus follower looks like closely because I was interviewing him and following him around.

In the process, I gave words to his faith, and he gave faith to my words. I saw those 10 years as a cocoon period to start writing about my faith, reviewing what I had been taught as a child, figuring out what was worth keeping, and dusting off the parts that didn't belong.

Jennie: You wrote the book ‘The Jesus I never knew.’ What did that entail for you? What was that journey for you to land with a different view of who He was?

Philip: I came out of childhood with this Mr. Rogers or Captain Kangaroo view of Jesus gathering the little children around Him. There certainly was that part of him because He loved children, but there was another side of Jesus.

Jesus was tough. People kept trying to trap Him, and He would turn the trap back on them every time. I was taken aback by how sharp, confident, and brilliant Jesus was.

You never knew exactly what Jesus was going to say. I like that He was so unpredictable. You would expect him to hang around the scholars and VIPs. But not Jesus. He would go to the people with leprosy, the prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. And He’d get criticized for that.

Jesus somehow had the ‘welcome’ sign open, and the least likely people would flock to Him. And He made them the heroes of His stories. You just couldn't put Jesus in a box, and I didn't come away from childhood with that appreciation for the upside-down approach Jesus had to what we would expect him.

Jennie: Let's talk about that church hurt. So many people are walking away from the church right now. How do we heal from church hurt and still engage and value the church?

Philip: Those are the very people I wrote this book for. A lot of people leave the church because of how their family was treated, whether it was a gay sibling or a divorced mother. But it would be a bad trade to trade away a chance to connect with the God of the universe because of the way some crank treated your family 10 or 20 years ago.

Of course, the wounds are real. The church is made up of flawed people just like us. There is no perfect church, even in the bible. And yet, that's God's great gamble in a sense. It was one thing for God to live among us and be subjected to the things on this earth. It's another thing to turn to ordinary human beings to spread the message of His love, forgiveness, and transforming power to people around us.

We don't always do it well in the church but don't trade it away. To people who are ready to give up, I say it's exactly people like you that the church needs. You see the flaws in the church. Why don't you become a missionary back into the church and address some of those flaws? Why don't you show them what a gracious and loving person is?

They're not showing that to you right now, but you can turn the table as Jesus told us to do.

When they expect rejection, give them grace and acceptance instead. That's what we're called to do. We're called to show what God is like in the most unexpected ways.

Jesus said to love your enemies because that's the only way people are going to know what God is like. God causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on good people and bad people alike, even the people who are offensive to you. If you show them that unexpected grace, then you're showing them what God is like. And that's what we're here to do.

Jennie: How do you approach conversations with people who’re going down the wrong road, but you know that's not enough of an answer?

Philip: I think God came up with the idea of the family to give us some kind of understanding of what it's like to be Him. God sees the choices we make, and some of them are terrible. Some of them are self-destructive.

And as any parent knows, you can't just twist your children’s brains and make them make those right choices. You can either choose to love them regardless of the choice they make, pray for them, and do everything you can. Or you can become this tyrant forcing them to do your will, but that will always come out against you in the end.

Some parents disown their children because they became an artist or writers instead of a doctor or lawyers. We have such little power over human beings. You can force behavior on a child, but you can't force love.

You can't make someone love you. God knows, which is why He doesn't crush us. I understand that God is a God of love, and He wants my love in return.

It's so easy to show up, point to someone’s problem, and tell them what they need to do. But that doesn't help.

Jennie: What is your hope for the future of the church? What do you pray changes or happens?

Philip: I have hope for the next generations because energy comes from youth. None of the great movements of God were predicted. Jesus told us that the Spirit of God is going to be like the wind. You don't know where it's coming from or where it's going, and you can't corral it.

None of the revivals we’ve seen so far have been in expected spaces. All these different movements in my lifetime came out of the least likely places. And I have hope and faith in the next generation because they've got the energy and enthusiasm.

They don't swallow the program; it's got to address the real needs they have. And that's uncomfortable, especially for the older generations, but it's necessary. We had the revival at Asbury College just recently, which was duplicated in a lot of other Christian universities. So, you can't tense the Spirit of God in.

The news media often see the word ‘evangelical’ through a political lens. So, they just talk about who evangelicals vote for. But we all know that there are people in churches visiting prisoners, adopting foster children, supporting missionaries, and giving to organizations that are involved in rescuing people from human trafficking.

The church is there doing it. Right now, racism and sexual trafficking are huge issues for young people. They are both important issues, and it’s great that we’re grabbing hold of them. I like to sit back and watch what's next. We can't predict it, but it's fun to watch.

Philip’s latest memoir is called ‘Where the light fell’ and it is really powerful and impactful. You can get a copy from any retailer. Philip has been writing books for many years, and some of his books are true Christian classics. You can hear more from him right here.