Filling the Grace Gap
In a few days my new book will be published: Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News? I wrote it after reading surveys that document a dramatic shift in our culture, what I call the “grace gap.” Ordinary Americans, especially those who have no religious commitment, view Christians much less favorably now than they did even twenty years ago. Outsiders to the faith see Christians as judgmental, self-righteous, right-wing, and anti — anti-gay, anti-science, anti-sex — the usual stereotypes.
I’ll leave such analysis to the pollsters and sociologists. I’m more interested in how we in the church might be contributing to a crisis of grace. To me, much of the problem stems from the uncomfortable reality that American culture has moved away from having a solid Christian consensus at its core. A strong majority still believe in God, and a strong minority attend church on a semi-regular basis, but the culture has grown increasingly secular compared to the recent past.
How do we respond? Recently I heard the writer Amy Sherman describe three possible approaches: fortification, accommodation, and domination.
- Fortification: some Christians hunker down in a defensive posture, insulating themselves against the broader culture and creating a bubble around the subculture.
- Accommodation: some follow the script of the world, watering down the message so that it no longer offends.
- Domination: some fight to “get our country back!” by electing Christian politicians and working to pass laws that reflect the moral values they cherish.
Each of these approaches involves pitfalls, as Amy Sherman pointed out. Fortification? Jesus sent out his followers as “sheep among wolves,” not as sheep locked safely in the barn. Accommodation? Jesus never watered down the gospel message and its implications for how we should live. Domination? One of the main reasons for a decline of faith in Europe traces back to the days when church and state worked together to dominate culture; though a coercive approach may work for a while, inevitably it produces a backlash.
As our culture grows more polarized, I look for models of how to bring grace back to a society in dire need of it. American Christians have been “spoiled,” in a way, with our religious heritage. Historically, we’re the outlier. More often the church around the world confronts a state of affairs closer to what the early Christians faced in Rome—or what Christians in China and the Middle East face today. With our strong infrastructure of missions, education, and service organizations, I hope we in the U.S. church can demonstrate to the rest of the world a new model, of pioneer settlements showing the world a different way to live, a bright contrast to the violent, competitive, self-indulgent culture around us.
For a model I look back to the early Christians, who were seeking to live out their faith in a culture far more hostile and arguably more immoral than our own. We think NFL football is violent; Romans watched gladiatorial murder for sport. Abortion is bad enough; in the cruelest form of birth control, the Romans abandoned their full-term infants to wild animals. Sexual immorality? Roman brothels were legal and common, and sophisticated Romans often practiced pederasty with young slaves.
So how did the early Christians respond? As a tiny minority, they showed a watching world a different way to be human. When Romans abandoned their unwanted babies, Christians organized platoons of wet nurses to keep them alive for adoption by church families. Risking their own lives, they stayed behind to nurse plague victims whose families had fled. (Medical missionaries are doing the same thing today, in African countries affected by the Ebola virus.) They lived out a new standard of sexual purity. After a while, Romans were impressed by the differences: the Christians’ beliefs and practices truly seemed like Good News.
I’m writing this from South Korea, a country with a strong minority (30 percent) of Christians who have shown me creative examples of how to dispense grace in a secular culture. Just yesterday I toured a beautiful new school built by a church to educate refugee children from North Korea. And today I met a remarkable pastor named Lee Jong-rak.
Pastor Lee cares for a son born with crippling cerebral palsy, and it disturbed him greatly to learn that hundreds of babies born with disabilities—deafness, blindness, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome—are abandoned on the streets of Seoul every year. Unmarried women who get pregnant face a strong stigma in a shame-based culture, and many of them abandon their perfectly healthy babies as well.
In response to this social problem, Pastor Lee constructed an ingenious “baby box” in the wall of his home. From the outside it resembles an after-hours bank deposit box, though decorated with children’s artwork. A parent who wishes to remain anonymous can open the baby box and deposit the unwanted infant in a warm, blanketed compartment fitted with a motion sensor and an alarm. Thus alerted, Pastor Lee or a volunteer comes to collect the baby and bring it into their bustling orphanage.
In the last five years Pastor Lee has saved 561 babies who otherwise would have died. More than a hundred of the newborns still had umbilical cords attached. Along the way, Pastor Lee and his wife adopted 19 of the babies, including several with profound disabilities.
Pastor Lee’s approach of creative grace mirrors what happened in the first century, when early believers in the Roman Empire took Jesus’ agenda to heart. The Christians organized relief projects for the poor and ransomed their friends from barbarian captors. Some voluntarily freed their own slaves. As I mentioned, they adopted unwanted babies and nursed the sick, including their unbelieving neighbors.
“Amazing Grace” moved from the U.S. to help care for rescued babies,
including this blind girl abandoned by her mother.
In the waning days of the empire, the watching world sat up and paid attention. People flocked to the churches, which stood out as caring communities. A fourth-century Roman emperor known as Julian the Apostate complained bitterly about Christians of his time: “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also… Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor, the hated Galileans devote themselves to works of charity.” His campaign against the Christians failed, and the gospel continued to spread while Roman power ebbed.
Some Christians view with alarm a modern culture that is growing increasingly secular, and perhaps even hostile. Actually, we’re simply returning to the kind of situation that confronted the early disciples of Jesus. Like them, we’ll need to find ever more creative, and effective, ways of dispensing God’s grace.
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27 responses to “Filling the Grace Gap”
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About Philip Yancey
For Yancey, reading offered a window to a different world. So, he devoured books that opened his mind, challenged his upbringing, and went against what he had been taught. A sense of betrayal engulfed him.
Mr Yancy, To start, I would like to say thank you for your books and articles over the years, they have blessed me greatly. Facing the suffering of the world and trying to make sense of it is a difficult task. Trying to align a all powerful, all loving God to this suffering, well that forces one to seriously think outside one’s world view. I have always been a little disturbed by Psalm 103, (ie I forgive all your iniquities, and heal all your diseases). One is proven before the throne of Jesus, and one you would hope is proven in this life time, although we give God the benefit of the doubt by always saying when one passes, “well at least now they are not suffering.” When reading the gospels, I liked the fact that most of the time, it mentions that Jesus healed them all. Because “all” probably included those who sinned that day, did not feel worthy, and had some doubt that their aliments would not improve. That often would be me. But then there was the time in his own home town that Jesus said he could only heal a few. The preconceived notion of who we think Jesus is. Now this concerns me, for without a revelation of who Jesus really is, I am pretty sure I have it wrong. In your journeys, have you come across the sense,” now that is Jesus.” Then from it, see the power of God flow. I will look forward to your thoughts. Thanks again, Rob
My best attempt is in ‘The Jesus I Never Knew.’ You can never figure him out or put him in a box. What I found, though, is that Jesus responded to any shred of faith with healing–with the one exception in his home town where there was no faith, as you mentioned. That does not carry the promise that all people everywhere will be healed but it is a strong clue that God’s desire for us is health and wholeness, and anything other than that is a grief to God as much as to us. –Philip
Mr. Yancy, I thought I should qualify my comments on Psalm 103. First, of course I am thankful that God forgives our iniquities, and heal our diseases. However, as they are written together, one could conclude that if I am not healed from my disease, then am I forgiven? Let me give you an example, A couple years back, I was a part of a care team to care for a gentleman with pancreatic cancer in his home. In the first few months, this man claimed he did not see christian faith as important to him. I did not push the issue. However, as he got sicker, he would ask more questions, and eventually he would not let me leave until I prayed for him. As it turned out, his last few weeks of care required hospitalization. Upon visiting him. he declared as I walked in the hospital room “I am still on the fence.” So I asked him, Haven’t you claimed you have sinned, He said “ya of course.” Haven’t you said you believe Jesus died for those sins, and you excepted by faith to have Jesus forgive you. He said yes I have. I replied ” buddy you are in” and you should of seen the smile on his face. After talking, he said that as his answers for healing did not get answered, he was unsure he was forgiven. All i had for him is, it’s a step of faith, but to tell the truth, I too would of loved to see the healed. Rob
[…] Yancey then tells the story of one of these outliers today, in South Korea, with a baby dropbox. He wrote this on his webpage, here. […]
Dear Mr Yancey,
Firstly thank you for the privilege to read & write to you.
I’ve read most of your books and i love your honesty and i admire the work that you write & do. I was moved especially on your work with Dr Brand and awed by both your selflessness.
I am writing to day mainly to seek your views on :-
“I have grown to be indifferent and am all of a sudden feeling that God is too far or almost missing in my life or he has left me out of his plans”. The reason i say this is that i’ve hardly had anything that i loved or desired that i am beginning to question what is Love? Who is love? There’s so much void and emptiness and longing for a change FOR the better….. for years i’ve been toiling alone and seeing myself being all alone and the years catching up without communication with friends or kin has taken a toll on my faith. i know what i believe but i don’t know if the faith i hold can sustain me any longer. My whole life thus far i had been living with “keeping the silence & making the most of what i can given the many challenges despite me being physically abled. I want to do the things i love but maturity, age & have nots are all preventing me from leaving my dissatisfied position as well as the failure to see miracles in my life or prayer for that matter. I yearn for GOD, true GOD miracles and answers to my prayer/life.
I wish someday i get to travel/see the world – “THE BEAUTY & not the UGLIES”
Thank you for reading and maybe replying this mail shld you have the time.
Dear Avril,
You express your heart very tenderly, and sadly. What you describe, no written communication could solve. I sense the kind of loneliness that can only be met person to person. So often our feelings of closeness to God mirror or feelings of closeness (or lack thereof) to friends and kin; as you say, you’ve been without those. I deal with gaps in a relationship with God in books like Disappointment With God and especially Reaching for the Invisible God, but as I say words can only do so much. I hope you pray for, and gain, the courage to connect with those around you.
Philip
I was just talking to my 5-year old about this today! His Christian prceshool doesn’t allow them to dress up for Halloween and he was asking why they don’t celebrate Halloween but we do. So it got me thinking again while I was explaining to him without any loaded Christianese. I told him a long time ago the holiday got started because people weren’t following God, but that we can celebrate it in a way that honors God. I think it’s okay to celebrate it. I don’t think this is a deal-breaker. It is rooted in pagan history, true, but then again so is Easter. Isn’t Christ about redeeming all things? Do you let your children go to parks? Libraries? Because there is just as much freedom to honor God there as there is to disobey him. And certainly lots of those funders and planners for those things are very, very secular. Doesn’t mean we should avoid all things except church. There is freedom in Christ to find ways to honor him in secular things. They can’t know we are Christians by our love if we’re not interacting. This Halloween we are having a non-Christian friend over for lunch and a playdate and an excuse to dress the kids up (since they wont wear costumes to school). And we will let them pick a few houses to trick or treat at.
Pastor Lee is doing an amazing thing! He truly has found a creative and effective way to share God’s grace. Thanks Mr. Yancey for your writing. I can’t wait to read your new book.
Mr. Yancey,
I apologize that this comment is somewhat off-topic but I could find no other way of contacting you.
I just finished reading your book, What’s so Amazing About Grace, and I wanted to give you a huge Thank You! It’s been a wonderful experience reading and thinking about it. I have also purchased the Participant’s Guide and am nearly done working through the questions in my daily devotional. (So far I’ve got 26 pages of notes.) This is the fourth of your books that I’ve read. (The others were the Jesus I Never Knew, Disappointment with God, and Christians and Politics). I also plan to read the Bible Jesus Read.
As a famous author, I’m sure you have received thousands of compliments from mainstream Christian readers for your books. I don’t know, however, if you have gotten many letters of appreciation from devout Mormons like me.
I hope you don’t mind this off-topic comment. I just thought that since you went through all the trouble of writing such a marvelous book, I would be amiss if I didn’t at least make some effort to express my appreciation.
Thanks again.
You’re right: I don’t get so many letters from Mormons. Thank you for your openness and for your deep encouragement. –Philip
Steve Chabot, the Republican I voted to re-elect to Congress is the only exception to the rule. I don’t get images of anger or hatred in my head when I think of Steve Chabot, but I guess it helps to have known a person who met him and was helped by him.
The person was absolutely destitute and needed help funding an ESRF (End-stage renal failure) project he was trying to do, and Steve Chabot helped make it happen for him before the man died two years later.
He even recalled the man’s face and name the next day and said hi to him by his first name, which totally stunned the rest of the guy’s group of people who were with him to see what Steve Chabot had done for their group.
You’ll have to deeply forgive me if I don’t believe that a single politician claiming Christianity these days or anyone who decides to be “the mouthpiece for them,” (Fox News, Laura Ingraham, Anne Coulter) deeply values anything but a wanton hatred that is so far removed from anything I’ve ever seen in the Bible that they look like willful prevaricators even to mention they DO value anything or anyone beyond the “almighty dollar.” Which, according to a friend I have who works in high finance, “becomes less mighty with every passing day.”
I’m a Paramedic, and what I’ve seen in the last two weeks concerning Ebola and how it transmits from person to person is so reprehensible and flat-out disgusting that I’m almost ready to give up the entire Party and call myself a Democrat. Which would be a bad idea for me for several reasons but never mind.
How can you know even an inkling about how infectious diseases work and believe any of that nonsense THEY’RE saying: people who, incidentally, claim to have enough raw intelligence to get 4 years of education in journalism but can’t even figure out that Ebola doesn’t transmit “because we have a [a black] president?”
It’s so extreme now that it’s become downright agony to associate with any of them even to the tiniest degree.
And when I think of “grace,” I never think of any of the politicians in question or their mouthpieces. When I think of “hatred,” they all come to mind but not when I think of grace.
When I think of grace, a person comes to mind who died for the continuing hatred, even though he never once hated people that way himself, but paid the price for it anyway. And since nobody learned a cotton pickin’ thing from it (what happened on September 11, 2001, to him and all those other people) will probably happen again.
At any rate, his death was more for nothing than I ever thought possible. I used to think the thing that would be most difficult about his death was being forced to sign a “Death In Absentia” form instead of a true death certificate, or one that provides physical proof of his death. Death In Absentia means the coroner’s office can find no physical remains to make the death “conclusive as a death” as opposed to a disappearance. They’re really quite picky as to how they do this silly stuff. No physical evidence of a corpse and you have to go with Death In Absentia. Which ordinarily would also make you have to wait 7 years before being able to call it that, but someone in the government of New York State made an exception, so that after 10 days we were allowed to have a death certificate but only as In Absentia until they matched the DNA we gave to them with anything found at the site. Which for 75 families, including ours, has yielded nothing to this day, so it’s still death in absentia.
Now I think the worst thing about it is the continuing danger that it could happen again.
We just bought 50 copies of vanishing grace for our church
Thank you–you just paid for my Christmas! –Philip
Thank you so much Mr. Yancey for sharing your insights on the “grace gap”. I love how you shared ways churches and people are filling in that gap in real and concrete way. These are the stories I am interested in reading and implementing for the congregation I serve and my life as well.
I agree with your biblical stance that sin is sin. But I think the definition of grace is something that is not well understood. God’s grace enables the Christian to live a pleasing life to Him. Faith through Grace…God’s grace is for us to Holy as He is Holy. It is His power “embued” ( as an older English word so appropriately describes) in us that we can (and should) live according not to the flesh. You have so appropriately described some of those fleshly works as gossip, hate, lust, etc. No practicing murderer should ever be “ordained” to preach, no practicing audulterer, or fornicator, or thief, or molester should serve as leader in a church. The key word is “practicing”. I’m talking about actions, The Lord is talking about actions. If a person exhibits a bi-polar disorder but is under care of a professional, then it would be likely I would approve of their service in ministry. But if a person is unwilling to go God’s way, then I have every responsibility to ensure that the flock is properly cared for and not let sin deceive or disrupt the work of God. The woman at the well was told to not continue in her sin by Jesus. He did not condemn her when she met Jesus, but he directed her to not act upon her desires, to worship in spirit and truth. Loving a sinner or any sort is what we have been called to do, but accepting ungodly behavior of any sort is not something we should strive for as disciples of Christ. He was never shy at loving sinners, and never shy in loving what our PC culture would call harsh love…
Philip-
As always, I love everything you write.
I was just reading some of the Fb responses [blown away in disbelief] to your post today; and I offer my sincere condolences over the crap that is spewing in your direction…
I have trouble understanding why, with the clear lifestyle descriptions in Scripture, so many people today believe it is SO IMPORTANT for the World to comply with standards that are clearly for Believers. I guess one could say that “Constantine is alive and well and living in the US” today.
Thank you for continuing to speak Light, into the darkness.
Blessings, Marty
Thanks so much for sharing, Philip. This kind of thing has been on my mind a lot lately. I am scheduled to present a topic at my church shortly along this line which I have entitled “Building the Kingdom through Righteousness.” Could you give me some leads for sources that document some of the things you noted that the early Church was involved in? I was hoping to have some examples, but I don’t have a real good idea where to look for concrete examples.
Blessings on your ministry!
Hello Phillip! I really liked reading your post on Filling the Grace Gap. I have made it a point to share grace in even the smallest tasks in my daily life and in turn I have become a more thankful person. By doing this I have been able to see things that God has blessed me with, that were once unseen in my eyes. This has produced in me a fresh higher view of God for which I’m eternally grateful. Thank you for sharing your heart about grace and our society’s need for more of it from believers.
I spoke to Indu Lall from CICM via FaceTime and she went on and on about how they enjoyed having you and your wife to Damoh. The Lall family and the CICM team are precious to my family. I’m sure you’ll agree they are doing some incredible things there. They set the bar for filling the grace gap in multiple ways.
I hope to meet you someday. If you are ever in Indianapolis please know you are welcome here.
Jennifer McCarty
Way to go Pastor Lee and others like him!! Amazing grace indeed.
Very much looking forward to reading this book. I greatly appreciate how Mr. Yancey looks at the tough questions right in the eye.
Philip, like you, I struggled with this concept as well. In fact, my Undergraduate thesis touches on this subject. However, the main problem I see is many influential Christian leaders more concerned about gaining political momentum than the kingdom of God. I always look at the example of the Christians during the first three centuries. They were not concerned with having a “Christian” senator to represent them or what not. On the contrary, they focused in what was essential: to preach and live the Gospel of Jesus Christ by loving and forgiving those who persecuted them. They totally relied on God’s power to save them to the uttermost. The result is record, the Roman Empire crumbled and collapsed. Christians took the fallen pieces, but then they became worst leaders than the pagan Romans themselves. Could it be that our “new Rome” (term used by former President Bill Clinton in his last address to the state of the Union) will repeat the same mistakes in a similar chain of events, but in a larger scale? My prayer is that God helps us as Christians to re-direct our energies in the calling for which we were purchased with Jesus’ blood.
Very timely and very encouraging. This sounds a lot more like walking with Jesus, rather than shaking our fists “on His behalf.”
always enjoy reading ‘you’; waiting for your new book, have my order in.
Thank you for addressing a topic that has bothered me for a long time. As always, you have a way of synthesizing issues and raising important questions that helps me as I struggle with how to share God’s grace with a culture that is increasingly hostile to the church.
As always, I look forward to your insightful and challenging reflections, Mr. Yancey. I was reminded of a newspaper article about recent discussions within the Catholic church on welcoming LGBTQ people. One of the critics was quoted as saying, “This approach destroys grace in souls.” I immediately thought, ‘That doesn’t make sense. This approach is gracious!’ Seems the word gets used with different definitions and understandings. http://bit.ly/vatican10132014
Great post! “Jesus sent us as sheep among wolves, not locked into a barn.” Perfect!!
didn’t Jesus say: Love God and your fellow man
didn’t Jesus meet under a tree???????