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Yancey is a somewhat difficult author for those who still have emotional ties to the imperfect, fundamentalist churches of their youth. Even if they have long since left these churches, it is sad for some who in contrast to Yancey have warm memories, to have the blemishes so clearly displayed. Yancey, an author and jounalist of note, gives us insights into the lives of 13 men and women, many with whom he was personally acquainted, who played an influencing role in his spiritual recovery from his fundamentalist upbringing. ( )

This was an absolutely wonderful book - the first I've read by Yancey, but it will certainly not be the last. Actually, I listened to it as a book on tape, and much of it by walking around the office park at Colonial Point with a tape player and earphones.

Yancey opens his book by saying that many times when he is in a waiting room or on a plane, people will ask what he does. When he says that he is a writer of books on spiritual themes, they tell him their horror stories. He response with, "Oh, it's worse than that. Let me tell you my story."

Yancey grew up in a small, strict, fundamentalist church in the south who believed that everyon who didn't agree with them was teetering on the edge of hell. It was not a healthy environment and many people left. In his book, he probes the question of why he survived. This book is a tribute to thirteen remarkable people who influenced him for good.

Yancey has forgiven the repressiveness of the church, much because of Chesterton who wrote, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and untried."

As Yancey reviewed his list of people who had influenced him, he sees flawed, not perfect people. From them, he learned how to handle his own longings. ( )

When I want to revert to my evangelical roots, I turn to the works of Philip Yancey. An editor-at-large for the magazine Christianity Today and the winner of many awards from the conservative Christian camp, he certainly has the credentials of an evangelical. In a book blurb, Billy Graham is quoted as saying, “There is no writer in the evangelical world that I admire and appreciate more.” Yet he speaks with none of that narrow, arrogant, legalistic dogmatism so characteristic of those leaders who represent evangelicals nationally and politically.

When I have read, and been enlightened by, the works of the modernist Marcus Borg, of the Jesus Seminar, I often turn for balance to Yancey. Though they represent what might be considered opposite poles of the theological spectrum, in many ways they speak with the same language: unpretentious, personal, candid, clear, stable, spiritual. Along with Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, I read Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew; along with Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, I read Yancey’s The Bible Jesus Read. Along with Borg’s The God We Never Knew, or even the New Age Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, I read Yancey’s Reaching for the Invisible God. The differences, of course, are readily apparent, but so is a sense of continuity.

In personal accounts of their youth, both Borg and Yancey speak of the narrow institutionalism of the churches in which they grew up and of their struggle with faith and doubt in their young adult years. Indeed, the subtitle of the book I am about to review, perhaps my favorite among Yancey’s works, is How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. Surviving the church? That’s hardly what one expects from a Billy Graham evangelical. But for many Christians, it's just what we need: how to survive the church.

The book is Soul Survivor (Galilee Doubleday paperback, 2003). The first edition had been set for release by the publisher just a week or so after September 11, 2001. In his preface to the paperback, Yancey tells how the book will always be associated in his mind with that disastrous day. “I grew up in a cloistered, fundamentalist environment in a South of legislated racism,” he says. Writing this book had helped him do what we all must eventually do: “define ourselves, carve out an identity”: “An event like September 11,” he insists, “speeds up the process by compressing time, chasing away distractions, and forcing us to focus on what matters most.”

The first chapter of Soul Survivor is entitled, “Recovering from Church Abuse.” It speaks frankly but eloquently of the damage churches sometimes do and of his own struggle to overcome the limitations of the religion within which he grew up. Just a few quotations capture his voice and something of his attitude:

“I kept reminding myself that I had nearly abandoned the Christian faith in reaction against this church [of my youth], and I felt deep sympathy for those [like my brother] who had.”

“Although I heard that ‘God is love,’ the image of God I got from sermons more resembled an angry, vengeful tyrant.”

“But alone in my room, controlling every turn of the page, I met other representatives of faith—C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, John Donne—whose calmer voices traversed time to convince me that somewhere Christians lived who knew grace as well as law, love as well as judgment, reason as well as passion.”

“Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals. How can I fit together my religious past with my spiritual person?”

“The people in this book are select representatives of those I have learned from and am challenged by. . . . Not all are orthodox Christians and one, Mahatma Gandhi, decided against the Christian faith. Yet all were permanently changed by their contact with Jesus.”

“The thirteen people you will meet here have one thing in common: their impact on me. For that reason, in each chapter I have asked myself what difference they made in my life.”

In the book, Yancey traces his own growth and development as a writer and believer, under the influence of his own heroes. Look at his list of thirteen: Martin Luther King, G. K. Chesterton, Dr. Paul Brand, Dr. Robert Coles, Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. C. Everett Koop, John Donne, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Shusaku Endo, and Henri Nouwen. If some of those names sound unfamiliar to you, they won’t be when you read Yancey’s chapters devoted to them. You will know and admire them, and want to know more.

On a practical level, each chapter ends with a note for those wanting to get started reading works by and about that mentor. A lifetime of reading and of spiritual growth could be enhanced by these notes. His advice is straight-forward and to the point. For example, of Endo, he says, “Start with Silence, Endo’s acknowledged classic. I deeply admire Scandal also. One of his last novels, Deep River, revisits many of the themes of the earlier novels. . . . Many readers find Endo’s fiction repetitive or difficult to relate to, perhaps because of cultural differences; these might prefer the short stories collected in The Final Martyrs.”

In his epilogue Yancey gives another sound piece of advice: “Make a list of the people who have shaped your life for the better, and try to figure out why.”

The impact of Soul Survivor on me was twofold: (1) It made me keenly aware of the mentors so important in my life. All of us, I think, have surrogate fathers and mothers, who help us discover who we are and encourage us to become who we become. It is important to recognize and credit their impact on us. (2) It helped me articulate for myself the nature of my own faith, its basis in what William James called “our inarticulate feelings of reality”; its persistence in spite of the certainty of uncertainty; the sense of wholeness it sustains, and the calm and confidence it imparts as I contemplate the reaches of infinity and eternity from within my own narrow sphere of time and space. “God is spirit, and they that worship must worship in spirit, indeed.”

An easy book to pick up and put down. The chapters all sit independantly of eacother, which is a very good thing. I've learned a lot about the different people in this book: GK Chesterton, Mo T, Nouwen, MLK, and others. ( )