How does a person recover from church abuse? The church is to be a place of worship, a place where one can go to experience true communion with other believers. It should be a place where everyone is welcome and everyone feels welcomed. A place free from the problems with culture, a place where everyone can feel peace and be recharged. A place where it is safe to tell others the problems of one’s life. The church should be free from any sort of abuse or mistreatment among its members. Yet, the church is not perfect and is full of sinful people. While the church should be a place that helps people explore Christian faith and what it means to believe in Jesus, many times it shows everything a Christian should not be. The church is filled with horror stories and sometimes shocking abuses from visitors and members alike. In the book Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church, author Philip Yancey describes how the church of his youth negatively impacted his life, faith, and view of God and the church. Despite being raised in a racist and legalistic church that displayed little resemblance to the Gospel, Soul Survivor recounts Yancey’s personal journey to develop and reclaim faith in Jesus as he experiences God through thirteen individuals who had a profound impact on his life. Yancey takes the reader along this journey through his life by recounting the mentor’s life, their impact on him, and what he learned from them. Soul Survivor reminds the reader that God can use a variety of mediums and artists to teach His children about Him, a situation, or how He can show up in the most unlikely of sources. Soul Survivor is a book to encourage those who have been hurt by the church, to inspire believers and non-believers to be open to the variety of ways God can speak to us, and instructional for how we can practice and apply the principles of love and grace described in the book.

Thesis and Supporting Arguments of Soul Survivor

“I have spent most of my life in recovery from the church.”[1] Soul Survivor examines Philip Yancey’s personal involvement with the church and how those impressionable early years in a racist and legalistic church would impact his life. Yancey had experienced some of the worst the church had to offer growing up. In fact, his brother turned away from the faith because of this church. The wounds he experienced from this church, like deception, judgmentalism, and small-mindedness, would profoundly impact his personal and spiritual life for many years to come. Throughout the pages, Yancey shares his personal life and struggles with doubt and religion. As God works in Yancey’s life to overcome his issues with the church, Yancey discovers the divine love and grace that frees him from the legalistic chains of his youth. Yancey chronicles how God used thirteen unlikely spiritual guides as mentors to bring him into a deeper and more loving relationship with Himself. Yancey discovered grace and its transforming power: the lifelong work that God was doing in Yancey’s life allowed him to return to that church and say that it “had now lost any power of me.”[2] Dealing with the effects of a church that had nearly caused him to abandon God, Yancey would later struggle with how to fit his religious and legalistic past with his present doubts.

Yancey describes the similar feelings of others he knows who have struggled with their religious past. He identifies with many people who have rejected Christianity because of the attitudes of Christians. Yancey ponders the questions of Walter Percy and others that if the Good News is so good, why do so few people perceive it as good news?[3] Soul Survivor provides background for Yancey’s experience by asking if God is so good and full of love, grace, and compassion, then why were the sermons and teaching of his youth showing God as an angry, vengeful tyrant? Yancey’s thesis for Soul Survivor is that while he was a person who absorbed some of the worst of the church, through a variety of Christian and non-Christian spiritual guides, he found a God of grace and Good News. Yancey supports his thesis by arguing that even though he rejected God and the church, he still landed in the loving arms of God because He used these unlikely mentors to show him the God of grace through their words and lives.

While Yancey wrestled with the damaging effects of religion on his personal faith and negative Christian role models he grew up with, God would use Yancey’s love for writing to provide him with some positive role models.[4] As a journalist, he met many people whose lives were indeed enhanced in every way by their faith. Their lives were abundant and it was something Yancey wanted to tap into and know more about. Yancey supports his thesis by showing how the difference between the two states of legalism and grace led him to discover what the Bible meant by living the words of grace, love, and compassion. He says this is what drew him to writing because writing opened up windows of light into another world he had never known. Writing became a way to bring life, air, and freedom to an otherwise closed off space

In contrast to the pastors he heard growing up who would raise their voice and play on emotions, Yancey met other representatives of faith – C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, John Donne – whose calmer voices journeyed across time to convince him that somewhere Christians were living who knew about grace as well as law, love as well as judgment, reason as well as passion.[5] Yancey, who identifies himself as a spiritual pilgrim, frequently questions and reevaluates his faith as he learns from and is challenge by the people identified in the book. Some of his mentors are Christians and some are not – like Mahatma Gandhi –  but each one was permanently changed by their contact with Jesus.[6] Half of the mentors he has met and interviewed, whom he may even consider a friend, while the other half he only knows indirectly through the writings they left behind. Strangely, and maybe sadly, the mentors that were the furthest from orthodox Christianity – Gandhi, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Endo – helped him the most by helping him understand his own faith and by providing a different angle on it that he had not considered.[7]

Each chapter is written to showcase a specific mentor; Yancey helps the reader understand the impact of the spiritual guide while providing support for his thesis by identifying the difference that mentor made in his life and how has he changed because of his contact with them. Yancey offers the reader an inspiring tale of these spiritual mentors, their own struggles with faith or other Christians, and how they lived out their lives. Each mentor reflects a specific focus whether it is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. regarding racism, or Dr. Paul Bland on the meaning of suffering, or John Donne and the issue of death, Yancey provides the reader with their personal impact on his life, a reason why we should pay attention to this person and why their work matters. Each mentor provides lessons for modern Christians to follow and reveals how our faith may come alive. These are the people that shaped his faith. Each person revealed to him what it looks like to be a person to live where their faith is made fully alive. He recognizes that no Christian is perfect, but the common thread among them is that these titans of their respective fields credit their faith as the reason why they have achieved so much.

Yancey does not set out to defend or critique the church, or even to defend the sins of the spiritual mentors, but he does present each one in touching tribute as those who have helped restore his “mislaid treasures of God.”[8] He does not pull any punches or hide anything on how the church has hurt and abused people. In many of the stories he presented, he goes so far to say the church obscures God, actually distorting the true vision and beauty of God.[9] However, through various trials, tribulations, and encounters, God used these thirteen mentors and their stories to make the Gospel message clear and to profoundly impact Yancey’s life that eased the pain of his religious past and cause him to love God more.

[1] Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 2001), 1.

[2] Ibid, 5.

[3] Ibid, 6.

[4] Ibid, 7-8.

[5] Ibid, 7.

[6] Ibid, 9.

[7] Ibid, 9.

[8] Ibid, 10.

[9] See the chapters on Mahatma Gandhi, Annie Dillard, and Frederick Buechner.