The Russell Moore Show - Philip Yancey Survived the Bible Belt

[Music] hello this is the russell moore show brought to you by the public theology project at christianity today and i am your host having a conversation as we do here from a christian perspective about a variety of different issues and questions and before i get to my guest i want to remind you to send your questions in for once a month we have the listener questions edition and i'm i'm eager to answer whatever questions you may have about anything and so send that to me at questions russellmore.com and i'm really excited about this uh episode because i'm talking to someone who was of immense influence on my life at a really strategic time when i was a teenager some of you know i've talked about this uh here before and going through a real crisis with bible belt christianity and and wondering what's real what's true what's uh out there uh and and do i have to uh give up a mind and a soul in order to be a follower of jesus and one of the places that um that i found hope was in the writings of philip yancey yancy i was i think directed toward him i think he was referenced in some way in ccm magazine which is a magazine about the contemporary christian music industry and that took me over to campus life magazine where he was writing and also over at christianity today and then started to read his books and found somebody who was able to make sense and somebody who was able to actually grapple with the issues that i was grappling with and uh philippians thanks for being on the show today it's an honor for me well it's an honor for me russell i'm glad we finally get to meet even though it's virtually that's right that's right you know i uh remember uh describing you one time i was talking about um writers that had influence on me and i had you in the category of northern evangelicals at the time i i guess you just yeah because you were the places you were riding it seemed to me to be coming from uh the outside and from the north and only later did i find out what that you grew up in a very similar uh sort of setting to mine and then in reading your new book uh where the light fell i find out even more than that that we share a common distant ancestor in william lown's yancey the fire eater uh from alabama who was uh introducing jefferson davis at his swearing-in as president of the confederacy that was uh that was an odd an odd thing to find as i was reading your book yes he was credited with partially starting the civil war by you know by rallying the truth behind him and i found out also that some of my relatives were were slave holders i don't know about you russell but uh there we are we came out of that soil yep yep that's not anything to be proud of but we uh we have the genealogies of the the bible to show us that everybody's got a bad genealogy somewhere somewhere or the other you know i was uh really interested in reading this uh this book this is a very personal uh book and a reflection about your life uh growing up and and dealing with some of these key questions of life and family and faith and so forth and as i was reading it i i couldn't help but think not only did it resonate with lots of uh struggles that i've had in in recent years but also with almost everyone i know in some way or the other right now because the the primary question that i'm getting from people right now they're not about um how can i know that jesus was raised from the dead or how do i talk to my buddhist neighbor is usually about what do i do when i have a family that's splintering apart or i have a church that's splintering apart and i don't know what to do with it and i'm having that conversation so many times a day and everybody thinks usually that they're the only one in that situation and of course uh they're they're not so i think this is a very timely uh book and one of the things i wanted to to ask you about is you talk about in the book losing your father at a at a very young age um earlier than you would have been aware of his presence there and i'm just wondering if somebody um who has who has spent a lot of time in the literary arena if you think about how many people i just think about the people that have been influential in my life uh frederick beekner and walker percy and i can you and i can think of probably ten more examples right now all who lost their fathers early uh in in childhood and who um in many ways wrote out of that experience uh for the rest of their lives do you think that there's something to that that there's there's something about the experience of of losing a father that prompts someone to to write and to think through in a particular way well i've never thought about that before i i remember reading a book a long time ago by paul ternier who was the swiss psychologist or psychiatrist i guess and a deep thinking christian and he wrote a book about orphans and he named all these writers who were orphans and they lost not only their father but also their mother and i writers are usually introverts they're people who learn to stand on the edge and observe what's going on around them i would certainly like that but it may be that that sense of loss especially a father the father is the one that pushes you now get on back there you know you you got to stand up i don't care if you fell down you got to stand up you got to keep going you know be adventuresome be courageous that's the father's voice and if you lack that and you already are feeling odd because you are different than the people around you it may be you may be on to something well i noticed uh you mentioned and you mentioned several times in in the book uh a vowel that had uh had been very troubling uh to you in many ways over your life i couldn't help but think oddly enough in in reading a biography a literary biography of batman several years ago that was trying to say what's at the core of the batman mythos and he said it's the vow after the parents are killed in the vow to uh to to take on the criminals who are a cowardly lot by becoming a bat you had a a vow in the background of your life that wasn't your own but you you talk about how the account of hannah in first samuel dedicating samuel her child after asking for him from from the lord was the most troubling passage of scripture for you why is that the case the bell came about when my father was planning to be a missionary in africa he was 23 years old he was working in atlanta for an orphanage at the time raising support he had as many as 5 000 people who were on his mailing list who had agreed to pray for him and support him and they were eager this was their lifelong dream and they ran into a pandemic in those days the feared pandemic was polio it was primarily feared because it attacked mostly children there were exceptions franklin eleanor roosevelt was one of course and then my father was 23 when he contracted polio and this vibrant strong man was suddenly reduced to a completely paralyzed person who couldn't move any part of his body couldn't even breathe on his own so he was put in an iron lung for two months in a charity hospital grady hospital you probably know it didn't get a lot of good attention and the people who cared about him and were praying for him and wanted to be wanted him to be a missionary wanted to be part of that became convinced that he would be healed they really felt that that was god's will why would god possibly remove somebody with that kind of potential at such an a young age so against all medical advice he had to actually sign his way out they removed him from that hospital from that iron lung and put him in a in a clinic russell i didn't find out about this i was 18 years old when i came across a paper a newspaper clipping and that was a few days after he left the grady charity hospital and he was showing some signs of improvement and it was a very upbeat article about there's a healing in process he's this man's going to be healed he's relying on the faith of others i looked at the date of the newspaper and it was nine days before he died and i did know what happened afterwards of course my mother the widow was crushed he represented all of her dreams and i'm sure she felt guilt because they had made this tragic mistake thinking they knew god's will which made sense these were people who loved him but they were wrong i learned very early that people who speak for god aren't always speaking for god and i learned you need to be very careful what you believe about things like pain and healing the way that worked out is my mother while he was still in the in the fresh mounded grave just a few days after the funeral took us back there and i'm one year old my brother is three years old and gave us to god just like hannah did samuel he she took samuel to the temple my mother just said lord if you don't want these children to take their father's place in africa then go ahead and take them now and both of us had childhood illnesses rheumatic fever and asthma and different things and at various times my brother and i both would would be in serious jeopardy health-wise maybe even convulsing with a high fever and she told us that each time she would kneel down and pray lord unless you want them to fulfill their father's place in africa then go ahead and take them and when we were young we kind of felt honored by that it was we were special we were set apart but in teenage days we started being teenagers we started going our own route and she was part of this very narrow fundamentalist type uh branch of religion way too conservative for southern baptists this was independent baptist and um she kind of went off the rails she she felt that her whole life was was being wasted by the way we were the persons we were becoming and that vow became almost a curse it certainly did in my brother's case he he decided to go to wheaton college which most parents would be thrilled to have their children go to wheaton college but to her it was a liberal bastion that billy graham was associated with billy graham who consorted with liberals and catholics and communists and so it became a curse she she told him if he did that rebellious act she would pray every day that he would either be in a terrible accident and be paralyzed like his father had been staring at the ceiling looking at what a terrible thing he had done or um die or lose his mind that god would break him in some way and that was the image of god that we had this this bully up in the sky just waiting to find anybody who might be straying so they could break them and that's kind of set my course as a writer because i i did as i say in the book i did taste of the the grace aspect i i found out that god is not a bully god is a god full of grace and mercy and kindness and beauty and i've been working that through with my books ever since trying to figure out okay if if jesus is not the person i was taught in sunday school who is jesus so i'll write a book of the jesus i never knew and if i didn't really experience grace growing up well what's so special about grace what's so amazing about grace all of my books are really my coming to terms with what i was taught because i was saturated in this religious environment and then recognizing whoa sorry something fell over here recogni i was saturated in this religious environment and then i recognized that parts of it were true but parts of it were not true and fortunately i've been able to work that out in in public in my writing you know i have noticed and i was just talking to someone yesterday i have noticed i'm working with a lot of college students right now and when i'm talking to the christian college students even the ones who often have a a really good and balanced sort of biblical theology at the cognitive level about god still often will find it very difficult not to think of god the way that you described him as as someone who's just on the hair trigger of being angry at you and and wanting to find some reason to so even one student was talking about flipping his bible open and every time he flipped his bible open it was it was coming to a passage of judgment uh and of course i mean as you and i both know it's because the way the physical bible is it's going to flip open to jeremiah or ezekiel or somewhere and you're likely to come on passive judgment but but he i think he knew better in his in his mind but there was something deeper than that how did you encounter a a more gracious view of god after having i mean i think it would have been really easy to have had all of those expectations on you to be replace your dad as a missionary to africa and if you don't god's coming after you to to say i i want nothing to do with this and just walk away well i had a role model there and that was my brother he was two years older and he went that route and when i was a teenager i saw him spiraling he was trying to get away from from this shroud that had been handed over us so he went to wheaton and this was the 1960s he wanted to be free he should have been a concert pianist but he decided they can't make me graduate from this school so his final semester he dropped out came back to atlanta became a hippie hung out in piedmont park doing lsd as hippies were doing in those days and and really messed up his brain and the rest of his life he moved to california and explored certain sexual perversions and all sorts of stuff so he he took that route of i'm going to be completely the opposite of how i was raised and i saw that many of those choices were self-destructive they were not healthy choices at all in my case well the name of the book is is where the light fell and that comes from a quote by saint augustine who said i couldn't look at the sun directly but i could look at the rays where the sun fell and that's where i was i mentioned that i was saturated in this environment and there's no way a gospel tract or a bible story or revival meeting could get to me i was i was immune to those i had been vaccinated thousands of times against that that kind of fear base and if god used a a very different technique with me he exposed me to to where the light fell for me those things were the beauties of nature i was a budding young scientist i thought i would be a scientist and classical music and romantic love and those three things softened me and got me ready for a rather dramatic conversion experience that i haven't talked about in much detail before and and in that process i learned the church had misrepresented god to me i had perceived god as this fearsome angry bully is the word i used and i i found out whoever was responsible for the delicacies of the beauties of nature whoever made our ears and made the potential for creating the kind of music that i enjoyed whoever came up with romantic love could not be that person i needed a new vision of what god was like and i finally got one and i i had this traffic accident a few years ago where i was uh i was lying strapped into a bodyboard as with a broken neck as they were trying to figure out if i would survive or not i thought i always thought that when you're raised in that environment and when you really face death all of those fears will come flooding back you know the smell of brimstone and the hell fire and all that because i heard it so much growing up and it really didn't i i didn't particularly want to die but i my primary response was trust i've learned to trust god there's a verse in in is it james perfect love casts out fear is that in james i think so perfect love casts out fear and one of the things that distresses me russell is that so much of my history and fundamentalism and then even in evangelicalism is fear-based so we're we always have something to fear what if america likes a catholic president what y2k fluoride in the drinking water communism uh secular humanism hiv aids you know all of this stuff we're always afraid of something and i don't think that should be our primarily primary stance in the world we should be the trusting ones we should be the ones who believe perfect love casts out fear and we trust a sovereign god who somehow will make it all come out right in the end we believe that that's foundational that's core and so we should go through life as paul told timothy with with a sense of calmness and power because we have a power that overcomes those fears why do you think that fear has such a uh a power i mean especially after we see the last set of things that we were supposed to be paralyzed with fear about simply being replaced by something else i mean when i was growing up i i laughed when i saw your reference to gog and magog because i in in my church there was an awful lot of gog and magog is uh the soviet union and uh and here is is the european common market and everything's about to uh about to all go down and there was that that sense of the supermarket scanners were going to be the mark of the beast uh listen to this music backward masked and and here are the satanic messages and music that now would be sort of the background music and commercials and and no one no one thinks anything about it why after so many times do we not say well maybe there are maybe there's maybe there's something else going on with some of the things that we're being told to be uh afraid of why don't we learn that i mean what what's the what's the incentive structure there do you think yeah well fear is an effective motivator up to a point those southern revival meetings where the pastor just keeps going on and on playing endless courses of just as i am trying to appeal to one little sin that you have that might get you to join the crowd in front i mean i went through that again and again and again so it's an effective motivator but only to a point because after a while you stop being afraid some of those things turn out not to be fearsome after all and we all know that fear and guilt and shame have their limits and if you're on the outside and you see this group of people like the church i was involved in and their the pastor is preaching sin and hell fire every week to the same people who have all gone forward and accepted christ several times why would you be motivated to join a group like that and i think part of it is that that circle the wagons mentality when you're in a when you're in a minority faith we were proud of the fact that we had the truth that nobody else had so those southern baptists even they're liberals you know bob jones that's a little closer you know but you can trust our people why are there so many denominations in the world we want to define ourselves against everybody else and when you do that you've got to to somehow get the people to stay and then fear is a strong motivator for a while but again and again of course parents see their children after a while say well i've seen enough of that i'm not attracted to that i'd rather to go i'd rather go somewhere where i can feel free and i go back to jesus statements he said i i came with the truth and the truth will set you free he said i came to give you abundant life life to the fullest not less life than anybody else but more life um i came to set you free to show love to the rest of the world and we were in this tight little community just trying to kind of hang on to get through this life so we could get to the other side that was our motivation and now i read jesus and i realized no it's about showing love and service in the kingdom of god in in this world in this life and i didn't hear much about that growing up you know i was uh i was also sort of marking down when you you referenced in the book about um praying the sinner's prayer because i i identified with that completely and i think it's related to this this concept of god because i would find myself uh praying the sinner's prayer that i had heard a thousand times in those uh invitation hymns over and over again with the sense of well did i really mean it the last time if you if you pray this and you mean it uh the evangelist would say then then you will be saved but the question was always well how do i know if i really meant it and how can i look through all of these motives inside of myself and be able to know that this was genuinely authentic and it actually became almost a kind of secret code that god was uh requesting of me um that that turned faith into actually the very the very sort of ritualism that sometimes those very people were warning against uh but with trying to find just the right the just the right emotional mood and the right uh wording along with the right feeling of the heart in order to be received by god and as i i was noticing as you as you wrote that and then also when you started talking about this uh starting to understand acting and you talked about how you learned that you can pray from the pulpit give a tear-jerking testimony at camp and suddenly you're a spiritual giant do the opposite and you're a renegade and people can judge you by the outside as long as you keep the inside well hidden and when i read that i immediately thought of james baldwin who would talk about being a teenage preacher and that he was so familiar with the craft and he knew what to do if you reworded things in in just such a way people would say amen and if you did uh something else people would and he started to say it it became very uh fake uh to to him he started to see it that way as being not not genuine and you talk about in the book it comes up several times your your brother asking how do we know what's fake and what's true i think that's something that many people are are grappling with right now when they're looking at um some of the things that they've seen within the church and they're starting to say is this all fraudulent but then also when they start to look back and say they have these high expectations of what spirituality ought to be and they say how do i know that i'm not just following a script that somebody else has has written i mean how do we get out of that impasse yes there was a character i don't know if you know this name uh marjo gorkner do you remember that name russell he was a pentecostal preacher and then he lost his faith he was a healer in the in the oral roberts type tradition in the early days of oral roberts and he would go around and have these big rallies usually tent crusades and then he lost his faith and he wasn't doing well in other careers so he decided to go back he didn't believe a word of it but he knew he knew this the style he knew what to do with what the behavior was that he would get up there and preach and and shout and stalk the stage and and uh get people to come forward and he'd pray for the healing and slay them in the spirit and then he'd go back and collect the offering money and move on to the next town and they did a movie of him and he backstage he would he would tell the the the camera people the producers uh don't believe a word of this but boy it was a good night tonight wasn't it i had him coming streaming down the aisles and it's it's kind of a faith shaking movie because uh you start to wonder and and that is the risk and i i guess one of the most important lessons i learned is that not everybody who claims to speak for god actually does speak for god and another lesson is don't blame god for the church i i see the church as god's greatest act of humility frankly it's it's amazing what we celebrate on christmas that the lord of the universe who created a trillion galaxies would become so small to join one tiny little planet in one tiny little galaxy or solar system in one tiny little galaxy out of a trillion that that god would shrink down and join us on this planet to express god's love that's pretty amazing but what's even more amazing is that god would turn over the mission to us because when jesus left he said it's up to you now so here's here's the good news it really is good news so i want you to take it to judea in samaria and the end of the word of the earth and i'm leaving now bye and he floated away in the ascension and and to me that's an amazing act of humility sometimes i shake my head and say man if i were god i wouldn't have done it that way because it opens up to exactly what we've been talking about we're fallen human beings we're corrupt human beings and some people are going to say hey there's a scam you know i can make some money on that one but but the core truth that we've been given is here's the message the message of of god being love at the at the center of the universe i truly believe that and and god wanting the very best life for us wanting to be fulfilled human beings and i i i believe the reason god went through creation process in in the very first place back at the very beginning was because god is love and if you're loved it's not a it's not a verb it's there it's a noun god is love god can't help loving but if that's your essence you have to love something and he created human beings in his own image to express that love and somehow we miss that it becomes all tied in with an institution and structures and rules and all that and we i certainly did miss that's the core of the universe the core of the message of the gospel is is god's love i frankly i got i think the entire bible could be summarized pretty well in jesus story of the prodigal son because it's really about the prodigal god the prodigal father prodigal with his love standing on the edge of the porch every day scanning the horizon looking can today be the day i get my family back and i believe that's the story of the bible god finding a way to get god's family back well you in in the book a great deal of it is is about um i would say you're standing at the at the front porch and scanning the horizon about your own uh family and one of the the striking things i think about the book is that um it doesn't end with this neat resolution that i think many people might be expecting where uh eventually your mom realizes how hard she was uh on you and your brother and there's this this sort of uh tying up of everything in a a resolution which as we know doesn't often happen in the way that we experience life uh in in a neat neat narrative sort of uh sort of a way i suppose as you're looking um at this and you were very honest and and vulnerable i think in talking about uh your your family i wonder about there are many people who as they read this they're going to think about great pain in their own families and with that will often come a great deal of fear so if if you think of for instance a john mayer's song in the blood where he's he's talking about this fear that maybe he will repeat uh the the sorts of patterns that his mom and dad and others and his family had and was that just them or is it in the blood um what what would you say to someone who's who's really having that fear and maybe they're at the front end of life uh and and just you know they haven't really haven't really experienced life to a great degree to see who they are and they start asking am i just going to repeat these same these same patterns yeah well i'll speak first to parents because there's so many parents these days who are watching their kids just walk away from the faith and they may have had intense experiences they may have been kind of the poster child sunday school kid and now they went off to college and they don't want anything to do with it anymore they never want to go to church again and and that is a great wound for the parents for sure you you care about these ultimate things you want your kids to experience what you've experienced and what i have learned is that there's there's very little control you have over that in fact the more you try to manipulate it you'll probably get the opposite effect the best thing we can do is pray and my prayer for my brother for example who's one of those people is that he'd be surrounded by healthy christians because he was surrounded by unhealthy christians for his growing up years and he he got his image of what god is like and what life is like from watching them and he wanted to get away from it and i understand that and and my mother has has wanted to when he stepped away from that control she kind of freaked out and did some things that she probably now regrets so i'd start there just be careful pray pray good prayers not not try to control their lives but pray that they run into healthy people i that certainly was my salvation early in my career i ran into this dr paul brand who was a saintly surgeon in india and we wrote three books together and that became a cocoon period for my own faith to take shape to form because i could write with great integrity his own life his own words while i was trying to figure out what i believed and these things take time some kids need to stay away from church for a while just to cleanse it you know to get that out of their system and then hopefully find a graceful church that indeed does present good news and i guess for for the ones going through it i would say uh a word of advice and that is find people that you want to be like when you're their age david brooks uh i know you know wrote about uh the difference between resume virtues and um uh lit eulogy yeah eulogy virtues that's right resume virtues are what we tend to focus on in the united states what school you went to how much money do you make you know where you rank in the social order and brooks said i've observed that when i go to funerals nobody talks about those they talk about this person was kind this person always had time for you this person cared for his family didn't let work take over his life those are the the eulogy virtues and we kind of sense that and it when you run into somebody who really does have their life together there's this little bell that goes off that says that's good i'd like to be like that person and for the young people i would just say choose some people you know you tend to choose people who will show you a good time well okay part of life is having a good time but think about the end of your life how do you want to end up and and look for models and and very often they will be people who were who were formed by christ the the fruit of the spirit these the kind of virtues that people talk about that he was a good man he was a good person he cared he loved she she cared she loved so that's one word of advice and when i when i was a young writer in those days this was back during watergate so bob woodard and carl bernstein were in the news every day and bob woodard still is i guess and uh and i thought man wouldn't that be great to be an investigative reporter to to write these articles exposing these politicians and preachers and people like that and i did a few of those and i found it very unfulfilling because you have to spend so much time among jerks the people you're writing about and instead i looked for people i could learn from and i i wrote this book called soul survivor which accumulates those people there are about 13 of them some of them were historical people and others were once i interviewed as a young reporter and and that was a that was a soul-shaping book for me because i realized i i need to learn from somebody who's different than me like martin luther king but i need to overcome some of the wrong impressions i had in childhood i can learn from gandhi i can learn from people who aren't directly jesus followers but yet who were challenged by by the sermon on the mount what jesus preached and just keep those eulogy virtues in mind what do you want people to say at your funeral i know it's hard to think about when you're 22 years old but sometimes you do some people die at that age and if you're sitting at a funeral ask yourself if they're talking about me what will they say and what do i want them to say you mentioned uh paul brand and your work with him and you know it's been a quarter century since i've uh since i've read this so i i haven't gone back to look at it so it may be entirely out of my imagination but it seems to me that one of the points that you made uh coming out of bran's work with with leprosy victims is the way that leprosy would work to to cause the pain sensors not to work in a way that sounds utopian what wouldn't it be great not to be able to feel pain but that that leads to uh great uh destructiveness though the pain is the warning signal that that someone needs and i i think about that when i look at in your book uh you talked about something i've seen very few people talk about and i haven't really thought about it in my own life until i read that and it was about this numbing of the emotions because of how scary emotions can be and i know exactly what that was like as someone who had on the one hand a very emotional uh sort of church context that sometimes could veer off into the manipulation or uh or or fear-based sort of um sort of manipulation but then but then also one side of the family that came from the william yancy fire eaters of the south and another side of the family that were iowa abolitionist uh catholics um and were very calm and it was you would have very uh very extreme emotions both in terms of showing affection and celebrating but also in dinner tables that could go the wrong way in that extended family compared to another that was very uh sort of sort of emotionally calm and tranquil and i found myself i remember just a few years ago i was talking to this older man and i was talking about some really painful circumstances dark circumstances and he said do you notice that every time you talk about those things you smile he said you're you're kind of protecting yourself from that uh emotional experience and you talk about in the book that sense of uh of sort of protecting yourself from from emotions in that way and almost becoming numb i think there are probably many people who experience that what's the way out of that or around that in your view yeah yes i had this brother who was two years older and he would respond by taking people on so first he tried to be the the perfect christian and that didn't work so well and things were going going south at home and he would be fighting with our mother and he's a kid so you usually lose those fights she had this perfectionist theology where she thought she had never sinned so therefore she's never wrong so she never apologizes and he's always wrong and and he would just fight and i saw this and i i learned that people go through different ways of coping with a really unhealthy environment like that like some kids harm themselves they do cutting or some of the uh anorexia those kind of diseases these are ways of coping with an environment you can't control so you find an environment that you can control watching my brother i decided i've got to have a shell around me that nobody can crack that nobody can get to the real me whatever that is i had no idea what that was but i watched i watched how emotions were dangerous you'd say things you get punished for and what i what my brother did was probably healthier but it didn't it didn't do any good for him what i did was unhealthy but it helped me survive that several year period so i could eventually thaw that shell or god could thaw that shell and it's taken me a long time but i've learned all of those emotions are good in themselves they're much like dr branstad of pain pain is not your enemy pain is your friend it's telling you there's something wrong that you need to pay attention to you would never go to a doctor if you never felt pain and pain is it's a it's a very effective language it forces you to deal with it so you you touch the hot stove and you have to remove your finger you don't even have a choice it's an instinct built in it's a healthy thing it's a good thing fear fear is a healthy thing as long as you're fearing things that are that are legitimate fears when i'm climbing the mountains in colorado i feel a lot of fear and it makes me a much more cautious climber and sometimes it makes me a more effective climber because fear also gives me adrenaline and it gives me more friction on my fingertips there are a lot of ways in which fear help you it's part of uh when you meet a wild animal what what do you do well fear is is what you should be feeling and it's going to make you good make you a better combat person in that situation guilt guilt is a good thing because again it tells us there's something wrong that you really need to pay attention to the problem is each one of those can get completely out of control so we've talked about the fear-based religion and people go around and just feel there's something wrong with them all the time and guilt becomes shame it's not just i did something wrong i am wrong i'm a bad person i'm worthless god would never forgive me those things get out of control so maturity to me is finding what that emotion is for and how it can most healthily be expressed and i'm not a counselor i'm not a psychologist but there are people who are very helpful guides in in figuring that out and when we when we get it a little askew it could be a dangerous thing so the fear can turn you away from all religion or the guilt can can keep you from ever having a healthy self-image we need to find out what are they good for and what are they bad for and they're bad usually when they're in excess and unbalanced and you don't have those positive feelings that are balancing them off you you aren't convinced that god is a god of love so therefore you hear the hellfire brimstone sermons in in and you have that image of god those are the the tricky parts here we have this package of good news but boy it doesn't always sound like good news when we proclaim it yeah you you talk also in the book about um an experience of uh people of african-american people being denied entrance into a church where you were um and told by edict from the deacons that they they couldn't they couldn't come in to worship and the effect that that had on you and sort of thinking through where why is the place where i'm inhabiting right now so full of contradictions and i thought that you really effectively talked about this sense of contradiction of people who were losers in a war who then took that out on uh on people with less power than they had and the way that demagogues would use that to say at least at least you're not whoever the other person is who you can feel superior to but you know as we're reading that it would be it would be one thing if we were reading that as something that was in the past and this is an anecdote about something that happened and yet we look around right now and every day i'm dealing with pastors and leaders who will do so little as pray for the family of george floyd after his murder and immediately face backlash from people who know how to sing jesus loves the little children all the children of the world uh as well this is critical race theory or your your woke or all of these accusations coming over this issue of race that seems to not not have let up it's it's just being expressed in a in a different way those same impulses how how are we to as people who name the name of christ how are we to reckon with the fact that we have so much of this in our own circles we have a lot to attend to don't we russell and i appreciate your efforts on this very issue in in my day it was different in that it was it was more overt and it was actually legal so growing up in atlanta georgia in the 1960s it was illegal for a black doctor to treat a white person it um it was every movie theater every drinking fountain every department store had separated the races white's over here the coloreds they called it over here and the sad thing is that you mentioned that the church just followed right in lockstep so the deacons in my church posted themselves at each entrance and they had these little cards and i print one of the cards in the book that said we know you're not a sincere worshiper you're a troublemaker and you're not welcome here you're not part of the family of god well one of those people the church softened over time and started letting a few african-americans in especially those who were students at carver bible college which was a christian college on near the near the uh historical black campuses here in atlanta and he liked the church because of its bible teaching and he applied for membership and the deacons all met together it was a it was a tense meeting and finally unanimous unanimously decided he doesn't belong in this church and pounded the gavel and he was rejected his name was tony evans who became a pastor of oak cliff bible fellowship in dallas with 10 000 people wonderful man who has children who are in the faith priscilla and his son anthony works as a scout for the voice how silly we look looking back and some of the divisions going on now i know i talk to pastors and maybe you talk to pastors who say some of my best people in the church have left over vaccines and masks and i'm thinking you know i can understand theological divisions if you doubt the trinity or the resurrection you know these are important things to get straight but to leave the church maybe even leave the faith over whether to wear a mask or not something's wrong with the church that does that yeah when when jesus was leaving he spent one long night with his disciples the last supper and john 13-17 spells that out in great detail and he said this is this is what's most important i'm leaving i'm turning it over to you and and here's how people are going to know you're different than anybody else first he washed her feet he said you're here to serve not to be served and uh i want you to look for ways to serve and then he said i want you to love i give you a new commandment you'll christians will be known by their love that's the mark of a christian and then the last thing he said is and and my prayer for you is unity if you would just have the unity that we had in the trinity then again people would look and say all those christians say they love each other they're unified service love unity and i look around me at some of the conflicts going on in the church in the united states right now and i don't see those three prominent characteristics and jesus told us that's what should make us different than other people in the world well i want to ask you one last question and it's a question that you uh that you posed in the book several times and so can you tell us how do you know what's fake and what's real i've spent my whole career digging that out and one of the things i love is that if you ask jesus a question like that he would throw it right back to you and he would say these are the characteristics go and look for them and you tell me and he said by your fruits you should know them and the evangelical movement of which we are both apart the evangelical movement has done great great things much of the mission work in the around the world that i've seen in various countries came out of that impulse that followed world war ii for a while there it was kind of the the most prominent branch of faith in the united states and now it's it's splintering in ways that cause us a lot of grief and it's up to every one of us to take the instructions and the template that jesus and paul gave us and this is what the church should look like this is how we should act and ask that question for ourselves what's fake and what's real and what do we need to do to restore the church that jesus had in mind when he turned it over to us we're not doing a very good job right now and we need wisdom and guidance in discerning that very that very distinction what's real and what's fake i know i've been listening to the ct podcasts on the whole mars hill episode where uh church after church leader after leader starts off with a bang and ends with a whimper and something is wrong when that happens and we need to analyze it we need to humbly i think that's the critical word humbly take a look at what we've been doing and try to restore the original impulse that jesus said loose when he said i want you to carry the message it's a message of good news and it's a message that changed the world because in the roman empire this little sect became the dominant religion why because people looked at christians and said i i like what they're doing better than what i'm doing i want what they've got they have a better life than i have and and they saw the difference between the fake and the real we need to recover that i've seen it in other countries that are new to the gospel who are who are still floating with that that first gulp of grace that they understand but in the united states we've been around a long time we feel kind of surly because culture is turning against us and we need to learn how to live as christians in a pluralistic culture i'm not in charge of the united states you aren't either i am in charge of my little branch of the kingdom i'm i'm part of a of a unit here my little private church here and it's a small one but that's my responsibility and if we all did our job and return to what jesus said loose then the rest of the world would take a look at us and say i want what they've got i want to be that kind of person that is a good word on which to end the book is called where the light fell by philip yancey and philip thank you for taking the time to be with me today i enjoyed it and thank you for all you've been doing too russell well thank you for listening be sure to subscribe on apple podcast or spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a review there it helps people to find the show if you're listening on a smartphone just tap the cover art and you'll find notes including where you can get a copy of where the light fell or learn more about our guest philip yancey and of course check out christianity today lifting up the sages and storytellers of the church you can by clicking on the cover art find out a way to become a member and to be involved this is russell moore and you're listening to the christianity today public theology projects russell moore show [Music] the russell moore show is a production of christianity today eric petrick is our chief creative officer russell moore is the executive producer and host mike kosper is our director of podcasts production assistants by core media beth gravencourt serves as coordinator kevin duthu producer audio mixing on today's episode by kevin duthu our theme song is dusty delta day by lennon hudden administration for christianity today by christine kolb and pam vodanova [Music] if you like what you heard on today's episode make sure you subscribe to catch the upcoming episodes [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Christianity Today

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Length: 56min 7sec (3367 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022