Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - When The Church Disappoints You | An Interview with Philip Yancey

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

God created the church to pass on his message. But did he know just how broken the church would be? Author https://philipyancey.com (Philip Yancey) joins Keith Simon in today's episode to discuss Yancey's book, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56637947-where-the-light-fell (Where the Light Fell: A Memoir). Tune in for a conversation on the church, fundamentalism and how God moves through broken people. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/) Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast) Resources https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56637947-where-the-light-fell (Where the Light Fell: A Memoir) by Philip Yancey Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. And I'm Patrick Miller. Philip Yancey is one of my favorite authors, and he's recently written a memoir where he tells his life story of growing up in Southern Fundamentalism. When you hear his story, you're going to be very surprised that he is walking with God at all today. He's a guy who should have deconstructed his faith. have walked away. He should be known as an ex-evangelical, but he's not. He stayed with Jesus, and

his story has a lot to teach us. So stick with me here with Philippiancy. His memoir is where the light fell. We get into all kinds of good stuff. Here we go, Philippiancy. Philippiancy, welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks. Thank you very much, Keith. I absolutely love your writing. You've written a lot of books. I won't say that I've read them all, maybe not not even half of them, but all the ones that I've read have come at really important times in my life. How many books have you written now? About 25, so roughly two dozen. And are you proud of all of them still? Or do you have any that you look back on and think, man, I wouldn't have necessarily written that at this point in my life? I don't really go back and read them. A couple of

them I've revised over the years. I don't think I've changed my basic approach. I might add this little phrase. I might say, but I could be wrong more often because when you're young, it's easy to seize on something and say this is the way it is. And when you're when you get a little older, you realize, hmm, I could be wrong. I could be wrong. And it's helpful to add that so the reader can make up their own mind. Well, I just love that about you is that you always come across as someone who is humble and open to another perspective. And I think that modeled something good for me in my Christian life because I have a tendency, whether it's by sin or by personality, however you want to think about it, to be overconfident.

And you have a humble style in your writing. Is there somebody influenced you in that that taught you that humble road? Yeah, negatively. The church I grew up in was very authoritarian, and the pastor was up on a pedestal, and he was lecturing us and shaking his finger and telling us each week how bad we were and how sinful we were and how we're in danger of hellfire and brimstone. And then I would go to these revival meetings in the summer where even louder pastors would come from other states and lecturers and louder voices. and I learned to be resistant to anybody who comes across with that. I know the truth and you don't and you better get on my side. And I found safety and just kind of backing off and thinking,

well, this may be true, but I'm not going to accept it just because he says it. I need to investigate it for myself. And that's one of the things I love about Jesus, Keith. He never twisted people's arms. In some ways, he made it hard for them. He would just say, it's not easy to follow me. It's a narrow path. You may have to take up a cross. It's going to be tough. And if somebody walked away from him, the rich young ruler walked away from him, and Mark says,

and Jesus loved him, even though he just rejected Jesus, didn't become one of his disciples. And I learned that humility just by noting Jesus' style in the Gospels, frankly. Well, in all your books, you have this humility, but it's not wishy-washy humility. It's a humility of conviction. And so when you say, I could be wrong, it's not as if you are speculating and you aren't confident in what the Bible is teaching. It's just that you know that your own fallibility and that you're learning and growing and you're still in process.

You haven't arrived. And so I just want to thank you for that for modeling that for me and my life, and I'm sure others. You've written a lot of books, like you said, 25. Some of the ones that are the most popular, I think, are at least. that I'm most familiar with or disappointment with God. What's so amazing about grace? My all-time favorite before I read your memoir is Soul Survivor. Now, in all those books, you kind of obliquely refer to your personal story. If I remember right, you talk about growing up in kind of a

southern fundamentalist culture, but you don't tell many of the details in those books. Now in your memoir, where the light fell, you have kind of come clean. You've told your whole. story. Why did you wait so long to tell us all the details? Were you trying to protect someone? Why did you wait so long? There were personal reasons. I was hoping for some reconciliation in my family, and there have been some movement toward that. However, it's hard to write about people when you know you're going to hurt them. And some of the things I say probably will hurt people who are close to me. I wrote it because I know there are a lot of people who have been wounded by the church and by their own families. I wanted to speak to them. And I also wanted to

capture that group I grew up in. A lot of us share some of those experiences from summer camp and Youth for Christ Club or Young Life Club and going forward at a revival meeting, you know. And I've read great books on fundamentalist Mormonism like Educating. by Tara Westover, great books on growing up Orthodox Jewish or Irish Catholic. But I hadn't really found a book that captured that whole subculture that we grew up in. And it's got some good parts. It's got some bad parts. And I'm not writing an analysis. I'm just trying to tell what happened. This is my story. And I happen to grow up in one of the more extreme forms of fundamentalism

and in a more extreme form of the dysfunctional family. And at first, I regretted a lot of that. And then later when I became a writer, I thought, that's great material. Not only that, I was coming of age in the middle of a very chaotic time of history, the 1960s, when everything was up for grabs, when there were hippies and civil rights protests and anti-war protests. And lo and behold, here we are 60 years later. And many of those things are recurring. So the racial issues have come back and mass street protests and all that. and the country was divided once again.

So I thought, I need to get this down. I need to try to capture that whole story. Yeah, I think your story, your memoir does that. It shows us kind of a humble path into cultural engagement, a humble path of learning to love people who are very different than us, a humble path of processing your past, your hurt, your pain, the dysfunction. And I want to get into your church experience a little bit in a second, but you start the book by telling a story about how you found out the truth about your father's death. And that's the opening pages of the book.

Could you share that story with us and then tell us how what you found out there framed your childhood? Yes. The pandemic in the 1950s was polio. It was scary a pandemic because unlike coronavirus. It mostly affected children. My father was an exception because he was 23 years old. He was an ordained pastor, was planning to be a missionary, had several thousand people lined up to support him and to pray for him.

And they were getting ready to go to Africa. And then boom, overnight, he contracted a severe case of folio so that he was paralyzed completely. He couldn't move any part of his body except his head a little bit. He couldn't even breathe on his own. So he was put in an iron lung, this machine, big cylinder around his body that had a vacuum and forced his lungs to expand and contract. He was in a charity hospital, and it wasn't a very pleasant place. They didn't take particularly good care of them.

Often he would signal for a nurse, and the nurse wouldn't show up. And he was in there for two months, didn't have a lot of hope. but because of his commitment to Christ and his commitment to missions, a lot of people around him decided, well, maybe God will heal him. Let's pray that. So they started praying for a faith healing. This is the part I didn't find out until I was 18 years old. Of course, I knew that he died.

I was only 13 months old and have no conscious memories of him. But I knew that he died. And it was when I was 18 years. that I found a newspaper clipping in that period where he was removed from the iron lung because these people believed that he would be healed. They believed so strongly that they took him out of this machine that was keeping him alive. The newspaper article made it look like he had good potential for regaining some of his feeling. It was certainly happier.

He was in a little clinic. He had no machines around him. His wife, my mother could spend the night with him. And the article was very upbeat. what I looked at the date of the article, and it was nine days before he died. And I had never been told that actually he died because, against medical advice, these people took a leap of faith and believed that he would be healed. And I learned from that early on that what we believe matters,

and that not everybody who claims to speak for God actually does. These were people who cared about him, who wanted the best for him, and they believed that God would heal him, but they took on a prerogative that we really don't have the right to take on with tragic consequences. When I think about Southern fundamentalism, I don't think of it as faith healing. Was your dad a, who you said he was a pastor? Was he from kind of what we would think of now as the prosperity, health, wealth, gospel kind of church? Or was this out of character for him the best you can tell?

To leave the hospital against medical advice because he thought, God was going to heal him. Is this normal for him or is this foreign to him at this point? I would say it wasn't normal at all. He was Southern Baptist and they weren't real big on signs and wonders. It wasn't part of their ethos. However, there was a church in Philadelphia that my mother came from and they just concluded that someone with that much potential, he already he had a string of people that he had led to the Lord, God couldn't possibly take a 23-year-old boy, a young man, with that much potential who was going to be a missionary in Africa.

And so they just decided, God's going to heal this person. We haven't seen healings of polio very often, but maybe that'll happen. And he was miserable where he was in the iron lung. So that was his best chance. And, of course, it didn't work out well. And your mom was the one who had a desire to go to Africa. And if I remember right in the book, she had made a commitment to God to go to Africa.

And your dad had to agree to that commitment before she would say yes to his marriage proposal. And that's quite a commitment, right? You get a wife and a missionary assignment in Africa. Now, of course, he died before that ever happened. but that commitment to go to Africa, that shaped your childhood. Yes, it did. She made a vow, much like Hannah in the Old Testament, who wanted a son badly, but she was infertile. And she prayed to God.

She said, if you just give me a child, I will give him back to you. So Samuel was born, and she took him to the temple and gave him away and said, here, you raise him to be a priest. And I was told early on that that's why my mother. had done, that she had given the two of us, my older brother and me, to God to replace our father as a missionary in Africa. So we were kind of a guilt offering or an atonement offering. We could, how can you make sense of this tragedy that happened? Well, one way to make sense is to have his sons fulfill what he was never able to fulfill. And did you know that that was a kind of a deal she had made with God as you were growing up, that there was this pressure on you to go

be a missionary? Or was that more in the background and you weren't aware of it? No, we were quite aware of it. And when we were young, it made us feel kind of special, chosen by God to do this thing that can give meaning to our father's death. When we were teenagers, though, we were teenage kids. We were boys. And we started acting out in ways that really put off alarm bells, set off alarm bells in our mother. And in a lot of ways, she just kind of went off the rails. And that vow became kind of cursed, especially for my brother who would take her on. And she ended up rejecting us. She doesn't read my book.

She doesn't approve of them. She thinks I'm a liberal. And then she broke with my brother. They haven't seen each other in 51 years. It's sad to hear that a vow to go to Africa to represent Jesus ended up breaking a part of family. it's hard to put into words. It seems like it shouldn't fit together. Your mom, I guess, I don't know her, obviously,

but it seems like she loved Jesus and wanted other people to know about Jesus. And yet, there is something about her faith that, I don't know, how would you say it? What's the right word that ended up becoming toxic for her own family? Toxic is a good word. And it happens, you know, know, there are some people, apart from a religious basis, who are disappointed when their kids

become artists instead of a doctor or a lawyer. I know a lot of Asian families who have that kind of pressure, and kids want to go one direction, be a musician, and the parents say, no, you've got to go to law school. It's just the culture. In our case, it wasn't just a culture, it wasn't just a preference. It was a solemn vow. And it hung over us like a sword. And when my brother, particularly being older, started straying from that vow, then the anger surged up. And I think, you know, I wrote this book, Disappointment with God that you mentioned. And I think my mother must have had a deep sense of disappointment, even betrayal by God. He or she trusted God to heal her husband. And God didn't. God let her down. But she couldn't express anger at God,

disappointed with God in her theology. So she had to take it out somewhere, and she ended up picking it out on us or sons. Earlier you mentioned the church that you grew up in. Can you describe more about that church experience? Here's the thing is that I didn't grow up going to church. I didn't become a Christian until I was in college. And so I don't have this, I guess you'd say baggage that a lot of people who grew up in church bring with them into their adulthood. I just don't have that. And I've never been a part of exactly

the kind of church that you were a part of. Can you help us understand those who didn't grow up in your era? What was this church like that you were a part of? Sure. It was small. There were maybe 120 people. And we lived on church grounds. We could never get away from it. So when we were young before school age, mother couldn't afford babysitters, and she made her living as a Bible teacher. And we were taken from one Bible club to another Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, hearing the same stories over and over. So we got a good biblical education. And then we were always involved in church. She would be the head of Christian education for this church or that church. And we had to go to every meeting. We were kind of the model, teachers, kids. And in high school days,

we actually lived on church property so we could never get away from that. The church talked a lot about sin and hell and very little about the love and mercy and grace of God. So it was a fear-based, shame-based environment, and we tried to be different. We heard this verse a lot, come out from among them and be separate. So anything that smacked of any kind of marginal behavior was disapproved, bowling, well, they might serve alcohol in the bar and the bowling alley. So, probably shouldn't go bowling. Roller skating, no, it looks too much like dancing. Mix swimming, oh, you can't do that. You know, girls over here, boys over here, you can't go together.

And lipstick, makeup, jewelry, the women were pretty plain. They were supposed to be very modest. And so many of these things that are so common today in other places where we're bowl. in the church we grew up in. So this small group of people trying to be different from the world, and they were different from the world, and trying to be as strict as possible. And yet we would hear these sermons of judgment at hell. And when I got out of there, I realized that they had misrepresented God to me. And that's really my story, discovering that God is a God of grace and love and mercy and

forgiveness, and that God wants the best for us, not the worst. His job is not to make us miserable. His job is to have what Jesus said. He said, I came to give you life to the fullness, abundant life. And I later realized that Jesus stood for freedom. He said, I stand for the truth and the truth will set you free. And you can have this abundant life. And then there were certain things in this church that they got flatly wrong.

Racism was one. They were doctrinaire racist. They talked about the curse of ham, this crazy theory from Genesis, that people of color of black people were cursed by God and could never amount to much. They could be good servants, but not anything above that. I later found out that was completely wrong. And that sparked a crisis of faith for me. If they're wrong about that, maybe they're wrong about Jesus.

Maybe they're wrong about the Bible. And my whole career ever since, Keith, as a writer, has been to go back and take what I was given and pick it apart, look at it. in light of the Bible and decide what is worth keeping and what I should discard. That's what I do in book after book. What is Jesus? He's not the Sunday school character I was taught in this church. So who was he? What was he like? How does prayer work? Okay, here's a prayer that didn't work. What is prayer for? What can we count on in prayer and grace? I didn't feel much of it. So where does it come from and how do I experience God's grace?

now that all those books are done was the time for me to look back and figure out in this memoir to kind of paint a picture this is this is my story how does it relate to what followed it and that's what I hope the memoir where the light fell does yeah it's almost as if you publicly wrestled with God through all the questions that your childhood experiences raised and I want to get to this in just a second it almost feels like you were deconstructing your faith. You know, that's a big term everybody's using now. And I want to jump into that one second, but I got a question first. You're talking about the shame-based, rules-based, guilt-based, racist church. And when I hear that, it sounds so unappealing. Like, why would I want to go

to that church? Who's signing up to go there, right? So how do you answer that question? What is it about these toxic church environments. We're listening to the rise and fall of Mars Hill. Lots of people are, as you and I visit today. And we're hearing stories. Now, that's a bigger church. And so probably everybody at that church wasn't aware of what was going on in different pockets. But in your small church of 120 people, everybody kind of knew everything, I would guess. Is there a personality type that's attracted to that kind of church? Is there something in the human soul that is hardwired to want that kind of shame or guilt? What drove people to go there? I assume they were sincere in their tending of that church. They thought it was good, I guess, for them. When I look back, I do see some positive

things. For one thing, it was it was biblically based. Now, you could have arguments as I do with how the Bible was applied, but the sermons were biblical exposition. So if you believe the Bible is God's word, and there's a pastor there saying, I will interpret God's word for you. There's an appeal. And beyond that, it forms a tight community. So often a church like that, this church does attract a marginalized. Someone who's got an alcoholic husband who may beat her occasionally. In our case, you know, we're living in a trailer. We wouldn't have felt comfortable in an Episcopalian church. We went at a down-home place with people with fingers missing in one eye and things like that. I don't know if you've ever read the Southern writer Plannery O'Connor, but she writes

about these kind of people, fundamentalist people, in the South, not far from where I lived. In Millageville, Georgia, she lived. And they're seeking affirmation. They're seeking meaning in life. What they're really seeking is for God to say, I love you for who you are. We didn't get much of that in our church, but we did get a sense of community and a sense that what you do matters, the choices you make matter. And if you just follow this script, life will work out for you. That was the promise. It didn't always work out that way, but that was the promise that attracted people, I think. Well, that makes sense that people who are having a hard time in life would want to bind together to hear a message that says, we're the good people, the people out there are the bad people,

but we're the good people. And if we follow God's instructions here, literally, and to the letter of the law, then we will be blessed, I guess. And it's nothing new. If you read Galatians, First Corinthians, you know, those same problems, legalistic, narrow, fundamentalist, authoritarian pastors, they were there within 30 years of Jesus death. Okay, I'm so glad you said that because that's exactly what I want to talk with you about. Today, there are people who are disappointed with the church. And why not? There are a thousand things to be disappointed about.

I'm sure you and I would count ourselves among those who are disappointed with at least some things within the church. You could be disappointed with the over-politicization of the church or the hypocrisy and the scandals or maybe church teaching like purity culture and the damage it's done or conspiracy theories abounding or how the church has treated people in the LGBTQ plus community or there's so many things that you could be upset with the church about. But like you said, it seems like every generation is disappointed with the church. So today people are disappointed at the church. When you were growing up as a kid in the South people were disappointed with the church. In the New Testament, people are disappointed with the church. There's hypocrisy. There's leaders arguing.

There's legalism, ethnic divisions. Jews and Gentiles don't want to go to church together or love or serve one another. There's drunkenness at the Lord's Supper. There's arguments between church leadership. I'm thinking of Philippians 4, between Eodya and Senectity. there's all kinds of problems in Corinth. So is this just the way it always is, that people are always disappointed with the church, that we just need to kind of get over it?

Or how do I think about it? Is the church always this dysfunctional? Or should I be looking for this church to be something better than it is? Or is that an unrealistic expectation on my part? Well, everything you've said is true. There is also another side. When I go to a prison, for example, I'll meet people from various churches around Denver, where I live, who come every week and visit prisoners and conduct Bible studies and even a kind of a seminary program. When I go to homeless shelters, when I go to rescue missions, the Christians are there.

They're volunteering to serve food and prepare food and clean up places to stay. There are a lot of ways in which the church is doing exactly what Jesus taught us to do. We are humans. I read somewhere, I think it was in Dorothy Sayers, who said that God underwent three great humiliations. The first humiliation was when the Lord of the universe became a human being, The one who created a trillion galaxies became one little two-legged person in one little part of the country of the world, rather, called Judea and Galilea. That's a humiliation. The second humiliation was when that person was killed when Jesus went to the cross.

Voluntarily, he knew what he was doing. He said he came to do that, not a surprise. But what a humiliation, especially the way, the brutal way that he was tortured and killed. And then she goes on to say, the third humiliation is that. the church because we're called the body of Christ. We're representing who God is. And in Jesus' day, if you wanted to know what God was like, you could go up and ask him. And he would say, well, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. God is like me. That's what he told his disciple. Then Jesus left. And he said, it's actually for your good that I'm going away, because it's up to you now.

I'm turning it over to you. And we're called the body of Christ. So when people in the world want to know, what is God like, their best clue is to look at the church. And that's what a humiliation. God certainly knew what was going to happen and to trust us, but somehow it gives God pleasure to see us do in our mixed up ineffective ways what God could do himself with a snap of a finger. And I often think, why did God create the world

in the first place, and especially human beings? knowing how it could turn out. And I go back to there are four times, I'm sure you know this, Keith, in the Gospels, when God in heaven spoke aloud audibly. And people would say, what was that? Was that thunder starting in Jesus' baptism? He said the same thing every time. He said, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

In a sense, he's saying, see Jesus, that's my boy. He makes me proud. He gives me pleasure. And I think that's why God, who is a God of love, created us in the first place. He wanted to be able to point to us and say, that's what I had in mind with the human race. And occasionally we do that. A lot of times we don't. But God thought it was worth the gamble, worth the risk.

Jesus could have stayed around. He chose not to. He said, it's up to you now. And I'm sure Jesus knew, because he had been around his disciples who were pretty dense themselves, I'm sure Jesus knew it wasn't going to turn out perfectly, but he wanted us to experience the connection with the vine, the connection with God the Father, and through that to somehow get across the good news of forgiveness and love that he came to proclaim. I like how Dorothy Sayers said it, that it was a great humiliation to turn over his reputation

to the church, to Christians. It seems like a huge mistake from my perspective, right? Yeah, I often say, if I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way. No, I mean, I agree with that. One of my models in life is that a key to a happy life is low expectations, right? Because disappointment is the gap between your expectations and reality. And I think we have these expectations for the church to be all the positive things you mentioned, pursuing racial justice, serving the poor, being open arms to offer great. grace to those who need it, loving and serving and giving. And yet, the church never is that

in the way we would hope. It never quite lives up to that reputation because in the church, it's people like you and me who are broken and flawed and sinful and selfish and miserly, all these unfortunate sins that we still struggle with. So it feels like we're set up to always be critiquing the church because it can never live up. to what God wanted it to live up to. So when you talk to people who are disappointed with the church today, you know, you've had a lot of experience doing that, I'm sure. Where do you give them hope?

Or how do you help them process their disappointments? Well, I start by, after I hear their story, I usually sit back and say, oh, the church is worse than that. Let me tell you my story growing up in the church. And they say, wait a minute, I thought you were a Christian writer. Well, I am. But what I've learned to do is not blame God. for the church. And for all of its flaws, the church is the place commissioned by Jesus to carry on the

message. And I've seen it happen. There are some healthy churches. There are some unhealthy churches. I went to a pretty toxic church, I call it. And I also say to them, if you're looking to be entertained, church is not going to work for you. There are places with better music, more scintillating stories, you know. But we are commanded to come together and worship God. It's about remembering why we're here and who we are. And I think it's important for us as human beings to have that reminder to be among other people who are committed to Jesus and hold us accountable. And if a person is healthy, I would say the church needs your health. We need more people like you. Don't give up in the church. They need you.

Don't think of the church as a place where you're going to only get good things. It's a place where you can also give. Any relationship that has meaning will have those frustrating times. Think of being a parent. How many women going through childbirth have said, I will never go through this again. And yet they do. Second, third, fourth, in some cases.

How many parents with teenagers, man, I wish I had never had these kids. They've ruined my life. but later when they're older, they look back and they have a different point of view. And maybe that gives us, that's why God has portrayed as father in the Bible. That's something we can relate to. No family is perfect. Families are frustrating.

Families are full of pain and wound and all of that. And yet, that's why that helps form us, helps us become the people we are. And toward the end of life, you look back, what's the most important thing? How many people say, I should have worked less, and spent more time with my family, family matters most, despite all the frustrations. And I think the church is like a dysfunctional family. It is dysfunctional. It's not perfect. Every family is imperfect. And yet there, in those places, sparks of communion, sparks of community can happen. And that's why we were created.

I like I said that we shouldn't blame the church on God. We shouldn't hold God responsible. We shouldn't think we know what God is like perfectly by looking at the church. While that should be a goal that we represent him well, we can't run that backwards and look at the church and come to these conclusions about God. And there's the verse in 2 Corinthians that says that we have treasure in jars of clay to show that this joy inside of us, this treasure inside of us is God and not us. And maybe the church is that way too, broken and flawed, to show that the grace that has been shown toward us is from God. It's not something that we have come up with ourselves. So you share in this memoir, where the light fell, this story of growing up in a family where there was, my word, hopefully you won't take offense out of it, a lot of cruel It drove your brother away from church and maybe even contributed to his psychological breakdown.

It drove you away from church where you had to process a lot to come back. You saw firsthand a lot of racism and a toxic fundamentalism. You are the classic person who should have left the church. We hear the term ex-evangelical now. the person who has deconstructed their faith and walked away, turned their back. How come you have it? Civil reasons. My brother went that route.

He wanted to get as far away from the church as he could. He wanted to try every single thing that was forbidden in the church that we grew up with. And he did try those things. And most of them became self-destructive. They weren't healthy. So he struggled with addictions. He struggled with sex issues. He struggled with suicidal thoughts.

And instead of being a concert pianist, he turned out tuning pianos, hitting the same note over and over again because of the effect of drugs on his brain in a lot of ways. So I saw that what looks like freedom can actually be a form of slavery because he was seeking freedom to be free, unlike that church, that narrow, restrictive church. And he found his freedom, but it turned out to be a freedom. a form of slavery. So I saw that negative way to go. And then also, by God's grace, I was led to people who really did have a healthy faith. If you truly find a person who's committed to Jesus, who is made larger in every way, it gets your attention. Pretty early in my career, I came in contact

with this man, Dr. Paul Brand. We wrote three books together, Fearfully Wonderfully Made in his image, and the gift of pain. I was a reporter. I'd interviewed a lot of people, some famous. He was the most brilliant and wisest person I had ever run across. He was British, an orthopedic surgeon who worked among people with leprosy in India. So he was offered the head of orthopedics at Stanford University and at Oxford University. And he turned it down to work among basically the lowest people on the planet, people in the untouchable cast in India.

who had leprosy, kicked out of their homes, kicked out of their villages, living off in a pile of rocks somewhere. And here's this brilliant orthopedic surgeon devoted to them, and he spent his life among them. And I've never met anyone more joy-filled, grateful, engaged with life. He knew the name of every bird, butterfly plant. And he did that because of what Jesus said. Jesus said, you don't find your life by,

accumulating more and more by acquiring. That's kind of the American way. Let's acquire more and more. You actually find your life paradoxically by giving it away. And in the process of doing that, you find your life. And I came to believe that that was true. And I went through a period of about 10 years where I couldn't write much about my own faith because it was still taking shape. I was in that deconstructing period you talked about. But I could write with great integrity about his life because I had investigated it and he stood up to scrutiny. So I would encourage people who are going through the kind of experiences similar to what I went through. To find people that you want to be like, David Brooks writes about two kinds of virtues. There are resume virtues and eulogy virtues. Resumet virtues are what school you went to, how much money you made, what private clubs you belong to,

how high you got in the corporate world or the military. that's resume virtues. Eulogy virtues are the kinds of things they talk about at your funeral. And you go to people's funerals and they don't, the pastor doesn't say, this man was smart enough, he bought 1,500 shares of Microsoft stock when it was only $10 a year. I've never heard that at a funeral. Talk about this man was generous. This woman was charitable.

She had compassion. She always reached out. This man was kind to his children, always seemed to have time for people. those are the eulogy virtues. And when you're exposed to someone who shows those, it makes you want them. It makes you want to be like them. And I would encourage people to look for people you want to learn from and be like

and be that kind of person when you're reflected on at your funeral. And let the good virtues chase out the bad. Dr. Brand did that for me, really helped me in so many ways believe that not all. all church life, not all of the Christian life is toxic at all. In fact, it can make you healthy. And when I saw someone who was living as best I could tell as a follower of Jesus, it made me want to be that way, too. When you were talking, I thought of Jesus telling the disciples in John 6 that they could leave also, the crowds at all left. And he asked them, do you want to leave? And they say, well, where are we going to go?

In other words, you almost hear in their voice, you almost hear them thinking, well, we wouldn't mind leaving, but where else are we going to go? You have the words of eternal life. And I hear that in my head when you tell about your brother, Marshall, who I know you love deeply, he left. And he went in search for things that didn't end up where he wanted. He didn't find life. And so you had the sense, I think you're saying, that to leave Jesus is to. to leave life. And I don't want that. I got to fight through this. I can't, I can't bail. I've got to work through the issues. And I appreciate it because you don't, you don't sugarcoat it. You don't

put on rose-colored glasses. You're very honest about the issues. And you process them in this book where the light fell. But in all your books, you're honest about those issues. If somebody wanted to start, like, as I already said, haven't read all your books. I think I would tell someone that my favorite is soul survivor. Where would you tell him to start? Should they start with this memoir? Or if they've never read Philippiancy before, what's the best one to start with? Maybe what's so amazing about grace? Because we are all in need of grace. And Paul's very clear, it's by grace that you're saved through faith. Grace is that free gift from God. And a lot of people emerge from different church experiences with a twisted version of who God is, whether God,

God is a bully, which is the image I had. God is into punishment and breaking people and looking for sinners so they can squash them. Or just a librarian who wraps your fingers. People have different visions. And then, of course, people who have been abused. I know a lot of women, when you say, our father, they flinch because maybe they had some father issues that created deep wounds. And so foundationally, I think we need to believe that God is a God of love and that grace is free. You don't have to get God to like you. God already loves you, not just likes you. And let's start there. And then once you do that, you have a different idea of what God is like and what you were created to be.

God does want us to live in a certain way, but he wants us to do it to please him, not just for fear of punishment. And I eventually learned coming to God out of gratitude rather than fear was important for me. I heard a lot of fear and shame growing up. I felt a lot of fear and shame. And now I don't fear that at all. I went through a near-death experience in an auto accident.

And as I lay there, I realized I trust God with my life, with what happens today, whether I live or die. and I believe God is a loving and merciful God, and I've experienced that and been piping that tune of grace ever since. Philip, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. I'm sure there are people who are listening who have one foot in the church and one foot out, who are holding on to Jesus, but their strength is waning. Or if that doesn't describe them, that describes someone that they're close to. could you pray for us for the people who might be listening to this who are struggling to hold on? I mean, I think you've walked that road so you know the issues they face. So I'd love it if you just would close our time by praying for them.

Dear God, we have so many wounds. They come from all sorts of ways, directions. And you're the great physician. You're the healer of wounds. and I truly believe that, as I've experienced in my own life, that nothing happens to us that can't be redeemed, that you can somehow use for our good. I look back on my own past, which includes a lot of pain and a lot of unhealth. And I see how you use that. And as I look back now, I see that nothing was wasted at all was used by you to form the person that I am now.

And I pray for those who are alone, maybe without help, without hope, rather, and don't know where to turn. I pray that they would see you as the great physician, one who would love to just gather us up in your arms. For those arms in person, you've chosen the church. And we've been struggling with that this whole hour as we talk because the church is not perfect. the church is not God. And yet, somehow, you saw that love is best expressed person to person. You showed us that in person when you came to earth in Jesus,

but you left and said, now it's up to us. And I pray that we would do a better job. The commission you gave to your disciples that last night was to be marked by love, to be marked by unity, and to be marked by service to others. And I pray that that would become the motto of the church, that we wouldn't get distracted by these crazy divisions about politics or vaccines or masking and all of that, that we would remember why we're here. We're here and we're called to you because it's the only way that people will know what God is like.

That's a heavy burden, I know, but it's a beautiful burden at the same time. and I pray that we would show grace toward each other toward people who disagree with us and indeed remember those qualities of love and unity and service. And remember, too, that you're a God of love and that you're the great physician. You specialize in tending wounds. We thank you for that.

Thank you for Keith and crossing and the good work that so many churches are doing around the world. May we be aware of that. as aware as we are of the church's flaws and its imperfections. You love us regardless. We thank you in your name. Amen. Thanks, Philip. I really appreciate your time. You were great to work with. I love all your stuff. And so I appreciate all the work you've done. God's really used to you in a lot of people's lives, including mine. Thank you. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find

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