Related articles and links |  1 of 4

I met Philip Yancey when we both were 22, newly minted editors at Youth for Christ's Campus Life magazine. He was of medium height, without a single ounce of fat on him, and had sandy, curly hair that would later puff out into a blond Afro. He was wiry—not naturally athletic, but he made up for it with sheer energy. To watch him swim was like watching the Buckingham Fountain at Chicago's Grant Park, water flying everywhere.

He came to Youth for Christ from a fundamentalist Georgia upbringing by way of Columbia Bible College and an M.A. at Wheaton College. His mother raised him as a single parent while teaching Bible classes; he grew up poor, in a trailer. He and his brother were raised to play the piano and to cherish classical music (as Philip does to this day). They learned to work hard and to respect authority, but most importantly, they learned fundamentalist Christianity. Nothing mattered much, compared to that.

I am sure some people shrug off a fundamentalist childhood like Gore-Tex in the rain, but Philip was not one of those. He absorbed its ardent narrowness, its fortress mentality, and its angry clasp on truth. Then he rejected it. When I met him, Philip had deliberately escaped fundamentalism. (So had his brother, but that is another story.) Philip had left that world, but I do not think he had gotten away clean.

The strength of fundamentalism is its forcefulness and purity. Fundamentalists know what they think, and they are fierce in promoting it. They can usually tell you what you think, too; they are often better at defining and critiquing others' positions than they are at listening to how others understand themselves.

What seems to stick with ex-fundamentalists is a sense of principle, a willingness to fight for the truth, yet also a strong reaction to the rigid all-knowingness of the fundamentalist mindset. At least that is what I see in Philip: a powerful sense of honesty and idealism, and a great wariness about making judgments. At Wheaton, Philip worked to reconstruct his world, trying to strip it clean of fundamentalist accretions while preserving (and discovering) genuine, honest faith.

Philip had come to Wheaton College to prepare for the mission field, at least partly because his father, who died of polio when Philip was just a tiny boy, had planned to be a missionary. If you know Philip, you know that what Philip plans to do, Philip does.

Campus Life, however, was an accident, no part of a plan. He had needed a job while he went to school, and the magazine offered one. Campus Life was almost entirely staff written. An editor's job was, first and foremost, to write. It was immediately obvious to Harold Myra, our boss and mentor, that Philip was a talented and energetic writer. That was a "find" for the magazine. Just as much, it was a "find" for Philip. Bright and creative, he could have succeeded at almost anything; he would have been a great missionary. Yet writing enabled him to put his wariness and watchfulness to work for his ideals and principles.

In my years working at Campus Life, I never saw Philip forget a single detail. He was a perfectionist—a determined, driven, controlled personality who threw himself unreservedly into everything he did. But he was far kinder than most perfectionists. I must have driven him toward madness with my forgetfulness, but he rarely showed impatience. That, I suspect, was also a reaction to his fundamentalist past. He did not want to judge others and wound them as he had been wounded.

next page... |  1 of 4

April 2008, Vol. 52, No. 4