Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church

by Philip Yancey

When someone comes to Philip Yancey with a horror story of what happened to them in the church, he responds with something like: “Oh, that’s nothing. Wait until you hear my story!” And yet someone with that kind of experience has become one of the most well-known Christian writers of our generation. This book tells the story of how he kept his faith.

Soul Survivor tells his journey of faith, but it’s not quite what I expected—and I imagine that I’m not alone in that feeling. Rather than the story of his personal journey, it is a series of essays on people who had an impact on his life: Martin Luther King, G.K. Chesterton, Paul Brand, Robert Coles, Leo Tolstoy & Feodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, C. Everett Koop, John Donne, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Shusaku Endo and Henri Nouwen—an interesting assortment of people, to say the least. If you have a more recent version of this volume, you’ll have a little more of a hint from how the book is now subtitled: “How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church.”

After a brief introduction that told of his own church experience, he proceeds into the stories of these people. Each chapter is a mini-biography that includes a wealth of interesting historical information as well as theological information—what this particular person taught him. Soul Survivor is not as heavily theological as most of Yancey’s writing, but each chapter will provide you one or two things to think about for a few days. And, if you’re interested in history or biographies, you’ll enjoy this book for that aspect of it.

I wouldn’t recommend this book as highly as I would some of Yancey’s other writings, but it is a very interesting read and one that you should read at some point.

The Editors do not advocate everything taught by the authors of the books we review. Like us, these authors are fallible humans and those who choose to read these books should measure them by the bible, the one true standard.