Philip Yancey has sold millions of books and become a sought-after speaker because he tackles tough issues of faith that many Christians prefer to avoid.
But after confessing this week to an eight-year extramarital affair, the evangelical author is faced with a tough question that even he won’t be able to answer:
Will evangelicals extend to him the same grace he has written about so often in his books?
The initial answer to that question is no, according to some evangelical pastors and commentators who reacted with shock and sadness to Yancey’s confession. They doubt that many Christians will rally around the man who encouraged so many others struggling with their own failures of faith.
“Christians have become the best at eating themselves,” Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, senior pastor of Oklahoma’s Sheridan Church, told CNN.
“Those who have been forgiven so much should be willing to forgive others,” said Lahmeyer, who revealed his personal struggles with pride and anger in a recent book, “Divided.” But, he added, “There is a righteousness that comes upon many Christians. They will look at the speck in their brother’s eye, totally ignoring the plank in (their own) eye.”
Yancey’s “Great Shame.”
Years before social media, Yancey went viral for his columns in Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine, and for his books, such as the 2002 bestseller “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”
A slender, bespectacled man with a sandy brown afro, Yancey embodied the thoughtful, erudite evangelical. He could quote both Dostoyevsky and Deuteronomy. He peppered his books with candid admissions about his personal struggles, such as growing up as a “born-and-raised racist” in the segregated South before evolving into a man who championed racial justice.
In his writings, Yancey often returned to the theme of grace.
“Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more…And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less,” he once wrote.
An inmate at a prison in Denver, Colorado reads a book by Philip Yancey in 2007. Yancey’s books have sold more than 15 million copies. – Karl Gehring/Denver Post/Getty Images
Yancey is 76 years old and has been married to his wife Janet for 55 years. He had alluded to marital struggles in previous interviews.
But his public persona took a hit on Tuesday when he issued a statement published in Christianity Today. In the statement, he confessed to an affair and said he would retire from writing, public speaking and social media.
“To my great shame, I confess that for eight years I willfully engaged in a sinful affair with a married woman,” Yancey said. “My conduct defied everything I believe about marriage. It was also totally inconsistent with my faith and writings and caused deep pain to her husband and both families.”
Yancey said he has committed to professional counseling and an “accountability program.” He said he realizes his moral and spiritual failure will disappoint readers who “trust my writing” and that “I grieve for the devastation I have caused.”
He also said he would not share more details out of respect for the other family affected by the incident. Yancey was scheduled to speak Wednesday night at a service in Pasadena, Calif., but canceled his appearance. He did not return a request from CNN for comment.
Yancey has been open about his marital challenges
Yancey had faced a number of massive personal challenges in recent years. In 2007, he nearly died after losing control of his Ford Explorer while driving on an icy road in Colorado and breaking his neck.
Yancey said in an interview eight years after the accident that it became a “landmark event” that strengthened her marriage. He said he and wife Janet “walked away, avoided the emotional landmines and resigned themselves to living with certain recurring issues.” He said he and his wife had very different personalities, were both “control freaks” and it took them years to learn how to operate as a team “rather than rivals”.
“We both married with wounds: mine from church and family, and Janet’s from trying to find her identity as a third-culture missionary kid,” Yancey told a reporter. “I fell madly in love. I thought she did too – only later did I realize she had adopted me as some sort of welfare project. However, when we said the ’till death do us part’ vow, we meant it.”
In 2023, Yancey revealed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was already experiencing mild symptoms. In a Christianity Today column that year, he said his wife displayed “selfless, fierce loyalty” as she faced the prospect of being his caregiver.
Janet Yancey offered her own statement to go along with her husband’s confession this week. She said she was speaking from a place of “trauma and devastation” that only people who have been betrayed can understand.
“However, I made a sacred and binding marriage vow 55 1/2 years ago, and I will not break that promise,” she wrote. “I accept and understand that God, through Jesus, has paid and forgiven the sins of the world, including Philip’s. May God give me the grace to forgive myself, despite my unfathomable trauma. Please pray for us.”
TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart’s $12 million-a-year empire collapsed in the early 1990s after he was caught with prostitutes. – Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Yancey’s revelation is just the latest scandal to rock the evangelical world. Many involve famous evangelical men accused of sexual infidelity, sexual harassment, or other behaviors that some Christians would classify as sins. The list includes men like former Hillsong Church pastor Carl Lentz, the Rev. Bill Hybels, a megachurch pioneer, the late evangelist Ravi Zacharias and, more recently, televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.
Other Christians may give Yancey less mercy than his wife does
Some of Yancey’s peers in the evangelical subculture may not be as forgiving as his wife, according to pastors and fellow Christian authors who spoke to CNN. And they say the scorn of those colleagues won’t be limited to Yancey.
Jonathan P. Walton, an evangelical author and speaker, said women are often doubly shamed when Christian commentary focuses on them.
“Now she (Janet Yancey) is forced to comment on these things and is not a public figure,” said Walton, author of “Beauty and Resiliency: Spiritual Rhythms for Formation and Repair.” “She didn’t ask to be raped and betrayed and processed as public information.”
The mystery woman Yancey had an affair with will suffer, Walton said.
“Women in the church are framed as temptresses and home-wreckers,” said Walton, a senior resource specialist at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a campus evangelical ministry. “I guarantee someone will try to figure out who she is and blame it on her.”
Others say some Christians will try to turn Yancey’s model of compassionate Christianity against him.
Diana Butler Bass, historian and author of the popular newsletter Substack The Cottage, said Yancey embodied an evangelical Christianity that valued grace and respect for differing opinions. That kind of evangelism, however, has narrowed its definition of grace in recent years, she told CNN.
“I think evangelicals are going to have a very mixed response (to Yancey’s business),” said Bass, author of “A Beautiful Year,” a mediation book based on the Christian calendar. “There will be some who will feel sorrow and might extend grace in some way, shape or form, but in recent years evangelicalism has become increasingly closed to expressions of empathy and narrowed its definitions of grace.”
Bass said he suspects many evangelicals will turn against Yancey.
“They will say that his open theology was a result of moral sinfulness and that the two things are always linked in their minds…” she said. “The failure in his personal life will likely be used as a way to undermine his more generous theological message.”
Lahmeyer, the Oklahoma pastor, said pastors and Christian leaders often labor under the burden of expectations. Lahmeyer said he did not know Yancey’s private life, but added that in his experience, Christian leaders must learn how to “fill themselves up” to avoid the emotional droughts that lead to sin.
“When they (Christian leaders) are tired and weary, we will make the stupidest decisions of our lives,” Lahmeyer told CNN. Those bad decisions are compounded when they become shameful secrets, he said.
“When you live a double life, that secret sin can grow. It gets worse, and the only way to free yourself from the double life is… to shine a light on that secret sin.”
Now that Philip Yancey has shed light on a personal failure, he and his wife may now need something that words alone cannot provide.
In a 2015 interview with Plow publications, Yancey seemed to foreshadow what that might be. He said something about suffering that takes on new meaning with this week’s confession.
“Suffering is not a mathematical puzzle,” he said. “It is a desperate human need. We should respond not with words, but with practical acts of love and compassion.”
John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”
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