Philip Yancey’s confession of sin recently, and consequent withdrawal from public ministry, has grieved me profoundly.
To say that Yancey was and remains a seminal voice in my understanding of, and application of, the Christian faith is not an exaggeration. During a time I struggled with the flaws of the Church, his writing called me back home. He encouraged me to think Biblically about grace and “ungrace.” His experience of God’s love, his journalistic perspective, and his empathy made a profound impression me both as a young person and as an adult.
That impression, of course, hasn’t changed. God uses many instruments to play His music and makes manifest His truth in the darkest of places. He can and does use the most broken of people. And yet I find myself sorrowful over so many things: the impact on his wife and his family and friends as well as others touched by his actions, the fact that his penitential withdrawal from public ministry (which is right and good) means the loss of future writing from him, the fact that many who engaged with him or his works may now through his sin question the God he represented. Yancey, too, mourns this in his public statement.
I am grateful that he has confessed and is engaging in repentance. His soul will benefit, even as his public image and the ministry that he built must suffer as a result of his actions. I pray God’s mercy and the grace he so often testified to for Yancey and his family.
Sin will come, for all of us, at any time and at any place and very often when we are at our most effective and impactful and beloved. Beth Moore on X wrote about this particular danger for older believers nearing the end of their race:
“We must take heed, is the thing. We must take heed lest we think we ever age out of foolishness or faithlessness. We don’t. Look at Solomon. Time doesn’t heal. Time tells. It tests. And tries. Time can make us lazy. After all, who’s watching anymore? It can make us meaner. Angrier. Harder headed. More bitter. More prideful. More selfish. It can make us freak out. Fear that our lives will end without us ever feeling “alive” again, how ever we might define alive. We have an opportunity here to examine our own lives…”
I often hear accountability cited as the antidote to this sort of struggle. But accountability, as it is framed in many modern churches, only goes so far. A believer tells someone they struggle with pornography; they hand over the keys to their computer to be “accountable”; we learn later that they simply procured a different device to commit the sin. Or they fudge their reporting to their accountability buddy. Or, or, or…
Where I think accountability works best is within deep community, in an integrated way, when believers know each other well and have built the relationships to observe each other’s lives and speak deep truth into them. Yes, certainly, we invite people who want to be held accountable to speak out and ask for support; but we also learn people, integrate them in such a way that their lives and selves are not partitioned out, create relationships where in the quiet dark someone can feel safe enough to share the darkness in themselves believing there will be remedy.
About four or five months ago, I guided and led a series of successful projects at work. I had put a lot of effort in, along with a small group of my colleagues. I received reward for that in several forms and—I’ll admit—I basked in what I felt was appropriate praise. It felt nice to be appreciated for my efforts. Later, with a colleague who is a fellow believer and who knows me, I made a comment about leading the project well and being pleased with how I’d done.
After some thought and prayer, a few days later, she called me. My remark troubled her, she said, along with a few other comments I’d made. “You’re a person who always gives credit to everyone around you, but lately you’ve been saying a lot of I did this or I did that. And you used to say God did this or God really guided us or I was able to pull through this with everyone’s help. If I’m over-reading your words I am so sorry and don’t think anything of it—but you told me once to tell you if I thought you were headed into danger, and I don’t know, but that feels like danger for me.”
And if she wasn’t 100% exactly right.
A pridefulness had taken root in me: a sense of self-righteous ownership about who I was and what I could do and what I was entitled to. It was only just starting to show, and she caught it before it could take root. I was offended by what she said for about five minutes before I realized how right it was. I thanked her. I asked her to continue to catch me out on that kind of behavior. I repented. I changed a few things.
Community matters so much, especially in this regard. It’s what worries me so much about our more modern and fragmented churches, where you can basically attend for years with people knowing little more than your family’s name and where you like to eat on Sundays. Not that it’s a cure-all: willful sin will sin. The world’s best community isn’t going to stop someone bent on disobeying God to prioritize the self in some way. But for those who genuinely have their hearts in the right place, who might particularly be at risk precisely because of how loved or godly or Christ-driven they might be, this can make a mighty difference.
I don’t know if Yancey was part of such a community. Perhaps he simply got very good at hiding his sin from everyone. But even if he did, in his penitential current state, a community of believers can help him through the aftermath of a public sin that has devastated so much.
Too much is at stake for us to believe it can’t happen to us.
Samaritan's Song 