Grace Matters Home Page > Guest Interviews > Phillip Yancey

April 15, 2007

Growing up in a strict, fundamentalist church in the Deep South,
a young Philip Yancey was impelled to view God as an abusive parent – rigid, legalistic, angry, ready to bring the gavel down for one wrong misstep. Perhaps the most confusing aspect of Yancey's early years was that a residue of Christian mercy remained in his church. If a neighbor's house burned down, Yancey's congregation would be the first at the scene to show charity – if, that is, the house belonged to a white man and someone who shared his church's unbending theology. His church leaders even urged Yancey's ailing father to take himself off of the iron lung machine that kept him breathing, assuring him he would be healed. The elder Yancey died a week later, when Philip was only one year old.

Yancey's only window to the real world as a young man was reading. So, he devoured books – books that opened his mind, challenged his upbringing, and went against everything he had been taught, like 1984, Animal Farm, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The more he read, the more frustrated he became. A sense of betrayal engulfed him. "I was an angry, wounded person emerging from a toxic church, and I've been in recovery ever since," says Yancey.

As Yancey researched, pondered, and explored deep questions about faith, he wrote--taking millions of readers with him as he passionately crafted best-selling books, such as Disappointment with God and Where is God When it Hurts? (He currently has more than 13 million books in print.) More recently, he has felt the freedom to explore central issues of the Christian faith, penning award-winning titles, such as The Jesus I Never Knew and What's So Amazing About Grace?, which have won the ECPA's Christian Book of the Year Award. His most recent book, Rumors of Another World is written for both the person of Christian faith and the inquisitive non-Christian.

For more information go to: http://www3.zondervan.com/features/authors/yanceyp/bio.htm.