Yancey, The Church, Why Bother?

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Philip Yancey, The Church, Why Bother? Zondervan, 2001.

Companion volume: Yancey, Soul Survivor

Referenced in: Strengthening and Renewing the Ministry Call

LifeandLeadership.com Summary

Philip Yancey journals his personal pilgrimage from skepticism and disillusionment about the church back to enthusiastic participation. He is painfully honest about the church’s imperfections, but is equally vindicating regarding her strengths as a place where people find God, minister to the hurting, reach out to unbelievers, and embrace each other as family and community. The opening paragraph from J.F. Powers underscores the paradox of congregational life: “This is a big old ship, Bill. She creaks, she rocks, she rolls, and at times she makes you want to throw up. But she gets where she’s going. Always has, always will, until the end of time. With or without you.” Yancey develops four perspectives that helped restore his belief in the church:

Looking Up – “I used to approach church with the spirit of a discriminating consumer. I viewed the worship service as a performance. Give me something I like. Entertain me.” (24) A focus on God, whether in worship or mission, delivers one from a consumer relationship with the church that evaluates it as a mall of religious goods and services (music, sermon, etc.) that should satisfy the tastes and preferences of its customers. “What matters most takes place within the hearts of the congregation, not among the actors on stage.” (24)
Looking Around – A focus on the church’s radical diversity keeps fresh God’s vision for a human community united in Christ. “We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.” (38)
Looking Outward – A focus on the external mission of the church and its effect through the ages reflects the famous quote from evangelist Luis Palau: “The church is like manure. Pile it together and it stinks up the neighborhood; spread it out and it enriches the world.” (33)
Looking Inward – A focus on the amazing grace of God expresses a hope so radical it would truly change the world. Here Yancey says, “I left the church because in it I found no grace, I came back because I found grace nowhere else.”

One quote summarizes Yancey’s essential message:

Yes, the church fails in its mission and makes serious blunders precisely because the church comprises human beings who will always fall short of the glory of God. That is the risk God took. Anyone who enters the church expecting perfection does not understand the nature of that risk or the nature of humanity. Just as every romantic eventually learns that marriage is the beginning, not the end, of the struggle to make love work, every Christian must learn that church is also only a beginning. (99)

From the Publisher

Philip Yancey asks the question that haunts many believers: Why should I bother with the church? From growing up in rural Georgia in a fundamentalist church to his experience at LaSalle Street Church in inner city Chicago, Philip reflects on the church, his own perceptions of it, and the various metaphors the Bible uses to describe it. Yancey’s own early church experience set his faith back by many years. In Church: Why Bother? he offers us a glimpse of his pilgrimage back to faith and to the church as a place of real community and spiritual vitality. This honest and insightful book will help you explore your questions about the place of the church in the life of faith and how to find spiritual connection and community.

About the Author

Philip Yancey serves as editor at Large for Christianity Today magazine. His books The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace? were national best-sellers appearing on both the Publisher’s Weekly and ECPA lists. Both books also won the Gold Medallion Book of the Year Award. Yancey has written eight Gold Medallion Award-winning books, including Where Is God When it Hurts? Disappointment with God, and The Gift of Pain. He co-edited The Student Bible, which also won a Gold Medallion Award. He and his wife live in Colorado.

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