Philip Yancey - Church: Why Bother?: My Personal Pilgrimage

Resources by Philip Yancey

The Jesus I Never Knew

Whats So Amazing About Grace?

The Bible Jesus Read

Reaching for the Invisible God

Where Is God When It Hurts?

Disappointment with God

The Student Bible, General Edition (with Tim Stafford)

Meet the Bible (with Brenda Quinn)

Church: Why Bother?

Finding God in Unexpected Places

I Was Just Wondering

Soul Survivor

Rumors of Another World

Prayer

A Skeptics Guide to Faith

Grace Notes

Vanishing Grace

Books by Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

In His Image

The Gift of Pain

In the Likeness of God

ZONDERVAN BOOKS

Church: Why Bother?

Copyright 1998 by Philip D. Yancey

This title is also available in a Zondervan audio edition.

Visit www.zondervan.fm.

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

This edition: ISBN 978-0-310-34440-7 (softcover)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yancey, Philip.

Church, why bother? : my personal pilgrimage / Philip Yancey.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-310-202004 (hardcover)

Epub Edition March 2020 9780310871774

1. Church. 2. Yancey, Philip. 3. Church attendance. I. Title.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920. www.alivecommunications.com

First printing July 2015 / Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

A favorite story in our home as our children were growing up was of John Muir at the top of the Douglas fir in the storm. Whenever we were assaulted by thunder and lightning, rain sluicing out of the sky, and the five of us, parents and three children, huddled together on the porch enjoying the dangerous fireworks from our safe ringside seat, one of the kids would say, Tell us the John Muir story, Daddy! And Id tell it again.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, John Muir was our most intrepid and worshipful explorer of the western extremities of our North American continent. For decades he tramped up and down through our God-created wonders, from the California Sierras to the Alaskan glaciers, observing, reporting, praising, and experiencing entering into whatever he found with childlike delight and mature reverence.

At one period during this time (the year was 1874) Muir visited a friend who had a cabin, snug in a valley of one of the tributaries of the Yuba River in the Sierra Mountains a place from which to venture into the wilderness and then return for a comforting cup of tea.

One December day a storm moved in from the Pacific a fierce storm that bent the junipers and pines, the madronas and fir trees as if they were so many blades of grass. It was for just such times this cabin had been built: cozy protection from the harsh elements. We easily imagine Muir and his host safe and secure in his tightly caulked cabin, a fire blazing against the cruel assault of the elements, wrapped in sheepskins, Muir meditatively rendering the wildness into his elegant prose. But our imaginations, not trained to cope with Muir, betray us. For Muir, instead of retreating to the coziness of the cabin, pulling the door tight, and throwing another stick of wood on the fire, strode out of the cabin into the storm, climbed a high ridge, picked a giant Douglas fir as the best perch for experiencing the kaleidoscope of color and sound, scent and motion, scrambled his way to the top, and rode out the storm, lashed by the wind, holding on for dear life, relishing Weather: taking it all in its rich sensuality, its primal energy.

Throughout its many retellings, the story of John Muir, storm-whipped at the top of the Douglas fir in the Yuba River valley, gradually took shape as a kind of icon of Christian spirituality for our family. The icon has been in place ever since as a standing rebuke against becoming a mere spectator to life, preferring creature comforts to Creator confrontations.

For spirituality has to do with life, lived life. For Christians, spirituality is derived (always and exclusively) from Spirit, Gods Holy Spirit. And spirit, in the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, is the word wind, or breeze, or breath an invisibility that has visible effects.

This is the Wind/Spirit that created all the life we both see and cant see (Genesis 1:2); that created the life of Jesus (Luke 1:35 and 3:22); that created a church of worshiping men and women (Acts 2:2 4); that creates each Christian (Romans 8:11). There is no accounting for life, any life, except by means of this Wind/Spirit:

Thou sendest forth thy spirit [breath/wind],

they are created:

and thou renewest the face of the earth.

(Psalm 104:30 KJV)

There is clearly far more to Spirit-created living than can be detected by blood pressure and pulse rate. All the vital signs of botany, biology, and physiology combined hardly begin to account for life; if it doesnt also extend into matters far more complex than our circulatory and respiratory systems namely, matters of joy and love, faith and hope, truth and beauty, meaning and value there is simply not enough there to qualify as life for the common run of human beings on this planet earth. Most of us may not be able to define spirituality in a satisfactory way, but few of us fail to recognize its presence or absence. And to feel ourselves enhanced by its presence and diminished by its absence. Life, life, and more life its our deepest hunger and thirst.

But that doesnt always translate into Spirit, Spirit, and more Spirit in the conduct of our lives. Spirit, Holy Spirit, in Christian terminology, is Gods life in our lives, God living in us and thereby making us participants in the extravagant prodigality of life, visible and invisible, that is Spirit-created.

We humans, somewhere along the way, seem to have picked up the bad habit of trying to get life on our terms, without all the bother of God, the Spirit of Life. We keep trying to be our own gods; and we keep making a sorry mess of it. Worse, the word has gotten around in recent years that spirituality itself might be a way of getting a more intense life without having to deal with God spirituality as a kind of intuitive bypass around the inconvenience of repentance and sacrifice and putting ourselves at risk by following Jesus in the way of the cross, the very way Jesus plainly told was the only way to the abundant life that he had come to bless us with.

The generic name for this way of going about things trying to put together a life of meaning and security out of God-sanctioned stories and routines, salted with weekends of diversion and occasional erotic interludes, without dealing firsthand, believingly and obediently, with God is religion. It is not, of course, a life without God, but the God who is there tends to be mostly background and resource a Quality or Being that provides the ideas and energy that I take charge of and arrange and use as I see fit. We all of us do it, more or less.