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CHRISTIAN AUTHOR PHILIP YANCEY FINDS HIS VOICE WHILE TRAVELING ON HIS OWN PILGRIMAGE, HELPS OTHERS FIND MEANINGFUL ANSWERS IN HIS WRITING

By Michael Ireland, Chief Correspondent with Mark Ellis, Senior Correspondent ASSIST NEWS SERVICE

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA (ANS) -- Philip Yancey serves as editor-at-large for Christianity Today magazine. His books 'The Jesus I Never Knew' and 'What's So Amazing About Grace?' were national bestsellers. Yancey has written eight Gold Medallion Award-winning books, including 'Where is God When it Hurts?', 'Disappointment with God,' and 'The Gift of Pain.' More than 600 of his articles have appeared in 80 different publications, including Reader's Digest, Saturday Evening Post and Christian Century. ASSIST News Service reporters Michael Ireland and Mark Ellis met with Yancey at the recent Evangelical Press Association convention in San Diego, Ca. ___________________________________________________________________________

Philip Yancey confounds preconceived stereotypes about himself or his faith. A self-described “child of the Sixties,” his Afro hairstyle, wire-rimmed glasses, and willowy frame, set off by a yellow tie and blue shirt bring to mind Sergeant Pepper, not a voice speaking for Christendom. Self-deprecating, humorous, and soft-spoken, he sees himself as a fellow sojourner on the path of Christian experience, not one of its leading voices.

“I’m carving out a trail,” Yancey says. “My voice is the voice of a pilgrim, trying to figure out the Christian life,” he says. “I’m writing about my own struggles.”

Yancey believes the message of the church, at least in the West, has been corrupted by a Madison Avenue style ethos. “Evangelicals are a lot better marketers than Jesus was,” Yancey said. “Jesus never promised God is going to solve your problems,” he said. Yancey often finds himself speaking for those who have been wounded by life -- and their church experience.

“We should not be making it worse for Christians who are disappointed,” he said. Yancey’s desire to be a voice for those who are disappointed in life may spring from his own discontented church experience as a young man. “I was raised in a church that was not honest,” he said. While hesitating to describe the church of his youth as a cult, or to identify it, he does point to its aberrant theology, particularly regarding racial issues.

Yancey believes the church particularly lost its way in the political and social arena. “It’s easy to lose sight of our mission,” Yancey said. “We are not to clean up the world,” he says. “Jesus didn’t try to clean up the Roman Empire.”

Instead, Yancey sees the mission of the church in a mixture of metaphorical terms. “We are to be a light on a hill and attract them by appealing to their thirst,” he said. “Sinners were attracted to Jesus,” Yancey says. “They saw him as a place of healing.”

“When I grew up my view of God was a stern judge. Now I see him as a physician.”

The social gospel is not completely discounted by the author. “We have to be involved in social issues,” Yancey says. “It’s a tricky balance,” he said. “Christians get very angry about those whose sins are different than their own.” Yancey admits his own struggle with self-righteousness or pride may be as serious as some of the sins being fought over in protest marches.

Yancey refuses the lure of the bully pulpit, not feeling called as a pastor or theologian. He would like to do a memoir, but feels constrained by his sensitivity to family members who might take offense with his characterizations. Therefore he writes as one sojourner to other sojourners, walking precariously along the brittle path of sanctification.

“My books are an expression of my groping. I’m just a sinner whose found grace.”

In his recent book "Reaching for the Invisible God," (Zondervan, 2000), Yancey uses the image of a jungle explorer "with a machete hacking through the jungle."

"When I'm doing the writing myself I feel like I'm carving out a new trail and there's no trail there," said Yancey.

"I deliberately choose hard topics that I don't know the answer to, that I don't have the resolution to, because it's a wonderful privilege, really, to spend a couple of years trying to figure something out. And if I already knew the answers when I started I'd be very bored, very quickly. So, when I wrote 'The Jesus I Never Knew' I taught a class on Jesus, I'd learned a lot, then I decided 'I've read a lot of books about Jesus, but none of them really portrays the Jesus that I know. So I'd like to write that.' It's a very different book than the Jesus I grew up with and it always surprises me, once I've carved that path through the jungle to turn around and see that other people are coming down the same path because I'm not aware of them as I'm writing. You know, the only feedback a book writer gets is when it's too late to help. You get responses to the published material. So, it is an exploration, it is a journey, and I think increasingly I've learned that my 'proper ! voice' is the voice of a pilgrim representing the ordinary person in the pew trying to figure out this strange, mysterious, difficult, Christian life," he said.

Is his target audience people who have similar questions to Yancey's own ?

"To tell you the truth, I don't think I have a target audience. I certainly did when I was a magazine editor (at 'Campus Life'). But nowadays, I'm writing about my own questions and struggles. The people I tend to hear from are people who are either wounded by the church, disaffected Christians, or suspicious of institutional Christianity. And I think they respond to my own suspicions, my own honesty about the propaganda that doesn't always turn out to be true. And so I gain some trust from them by being just very honest about the church.

What does he mean by "propaganda" ?

"I think Evangelicals are a lot better marketers than Jesus was, for example. I look at how Jesus handled the Rich Young Ruler, in fact, all of Jesus' invitations. He makes it as difficult as possible. The three invitations he gave are 'Take up your yoke,' that's no fun, 'To bear our burden,' take up a towel and wash each other's feet, and 'Take up your cross.' None of those are appealing. Whereas in America, it's 'God's going to do something good for you,' you know, 'God's going to improve your life,' 'God's going to solve your problems.' Jesus never promised that God's going to solve your problems. In fact, he said 'On my name you'll be thrown into prison, God's going to create your problems.' People who are attracted to the Evangelical invitation that this is going to solve your life often end up disillusioned, it doesn't work that way, and they feel burned; that was the propaganda.

Yancey continued: "I look at how he handled the Rich Young Ruler, he didn't say 'Well, let's start with a ten percent tithe and then we can work up from there -- he made it as hard as possible, because Jesus knew this Christian life is not a game, it takes your whole soul and he didn't want hangers-on, he wanted committed people. And we in the church tend to twist arms, we try to talk people into something. Jesus never tried to talk them into something, he didn't want to talk anybody into it, he wanted committed people who were willing to risk their lives for him. So, I think there are a lot of wonderful things about the Evangelical movement, but I think, in a lot of ways, they misrepresent what the Christian life is going to be like and then people end up being disappointed in it," Yancey said.

Yancey's book titles are thoughtful in nature. Does he have to think about what questions to ask, or is he a natural questioner ?

"I usually start with the title, frankly. The original title for 'What's So Amazing About Grace,' was 'What's So Amazing About Grace And Why Don't Christians Show More Of It.' The publisher said we're willing for that, but it's a lot of words to put on the spine of a book ! And, about half of our books are gift books and it might be a deterrent to give somebody a book and you're implying why don't Christians show more grace. So we shortened it. With 'Disappointment With God' the publisher originally suggested that's a negative title, why don't you have something like 'Overcoming Disappointment With God.' And there's that propaganda thing again. I want to reach disappointed people, and we went around and around on 'Reaching for the Invisible God.' There are a lot of different words; we tried 'seeking' or 'searching for'. 'Reaching' is a little more active, not just looking around, I'm actually in the process of grasping toward. So, we do put a lot of thought into titles, ! but it usually comes early on and gets refined later," Yancey said.

Does he start with a question in mind (when planning a book), does he have a thesis in mind and how does he start tackling difficult questions ?

"'Where Is God When It Hurts?' came out of experiences I had as a journalist. I would interview a lot of people who had been through tragedy and they would tell me consistently that the church made it worse for them, rather than better. They're just trying to get well, and Christians would come in with these very mixed voices, either saying 'You sinned, God's punishing you,' or 'No, no, it's not God, it's the Devil,' and it didn't seem to me that we should be making it worse, you know, 'The God of all comfort,' is the phrase that Corinthians uses. I wrote that book, a lot of people wrote me and said 'Thank you, very helpful, but my problem is really physical pain. This book is written about physical pain. Mine is more of a feeling of betrayal, emotional pain. I've poured my life into my children, now they won't have anything to do with me. You know, it's other issues.' That's really where the book 'Disappointment With God' came from. It came from their questions. And that's often the way it is. The 'Reaching for the Invisible God' book -- I also got a lot of letters from readers saying 'I want to know God, but it just doesn't work for me, I don't even know he's there. How do you have faith? How do you believe?' Good question. So, I was trying to pin down for myself how the Christian life does work, or how it's supposed to. I read a lot of books on how it's supposed to work and they don't really reflect my experience, so I'm trying to be honest.

Yancey said his honesty comes "as a reaction to being raised in a church that was not honest.

"Where they used certain words but didn't really live up to the words. The transparency -- I think it took me awhile to find my voice. I moved to Colorado from Chicago. As I look back on it, my early books were very strong questioning books, 'The Problem of Pain,' 'Disappointment.' Then there was a period when I did three books with Dr. Paul Brand, and in those cases I piggybacked on his faith. I didn't have to express things for myself, I could express his faith., and I could do so with great integrity because he was a solid person I admired. Then I got to the place where 'now it's time for me to be honest about my own faith.' And that's really when I moved from Chicago to Colorado. Because Chicago is great for being a journalist, you walk outside the door somebody gets run over by a motorcycle -- there's always something happening. But it's bad for an internal, reflective writer, because there are always car alarms going off, there's too much sensory overload," s! aid Yancey.

Yancey said his 'sense of peace' comes working hard at 'being balanced' -- he exercises, he takes walks, climbs mountains, he skies, he travels. "You're assuming that I have peace," said Yancey.  "If I just stayed in a room and did nothing but write I'd go crazy. I think any writer does. I do work hard at putting myself into a 'preacherly' context. But I'm not sure I am a peaceful person in a lot of ways, with the issues of inequities in the world, the problems of the environment, these are unsolvable problems and they're just going to get worse. I'm aware of them, but I just have to faithfully tackle whatever is in front of me. I can't tackle the whole world, and I can't solve the world."

Yancey alluded to being a 'messenger for the wounded,' but said he doesn't ever just sit down and think "what does the world need that I can contribute.

"I think 'What do I need, period.' And my books are an expression of my groping. The 'messenger' part comes later. It doesn't come in the process of writing -- it comes when I hear from the people who receive that message. I don't know who they are until I hear from them and often they'll guide me towards something new. But I'm really writing for myself rather than for other people."

Having grown up in a church that preached a "straight racist doctrine, taken from Genesis 9 'Curse of Ham,'" Yancey classified himself as a "child of the Sixties, growing up believing that America was perfect and we thought that industry was great, and a growing economy was great, all these things are great. And then suddenly we found out that the American economy was built on the back of people who were being oppressed, and where I lived people were destroying the environment and exploiting other people. This was what the Sixties brought to consciousness and I'm sure I captured that spirit, because I had felt lied to. I threaten sometimes to write a book called 'Lies My Church Told Me,' because I did feel betrayed. When you're a kid growing up 'this is what the Bible says,' and then later you find out 'No, they're wrong.'"

As to his longevity as a Christian writer, Yancey said: "Looking back on my environment growing up, I learned where the land mines are, I learned the things you can write about and probably shouldn't write about. I had a lengthy schooling period at Campus Life magazine under some wise people, Harold Myra, now the publisher of Christianity Today. I had a ten-year period being tutored by Dr. (Paul) Brand who had a different perspective on the world that I learned from, and it was only then really that I started writing in a reflective way. If I had started 10 years before I would have been the angry young whatever, and by the time I got to being meditative and reflective I had put in enough time. I'm still trying to be honest, but I had a foundation under me. Iook back and a lot of that is God's grace, just being exposed to the worst side of the church growing up. Since then, I've been exposed pretty much to the best side. The people I've had close contact with are some of! the great people on God's earth."

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Michael Ireland is a British freelance journalist in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A former reporter with a London newspaper, Michael is the Chief Correspondent for ASSIST News Service of Garden Grove, CA. Michael immigrated to the United States in 1982 and became a US citizen in Sept., 1995. He is married with two children. Michael is a frequent contributor to United Christian Broadcasters, Europe, Radio, a British Christian radio station. E-mail: mireland@usfamily.net.

Mark Ellis is a Senior Correspondent for ASSIST News Service. He is also the Assistant Pastor at Calvary Evangelical Free Church of Laguna Beach, CA. He grew up in Southern California and worked for 18 years in the commercial real estate industry before entering Christian ministry. He may be contacted by e-mail at marsalis@fea.net

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