Vanishing Grace: Bringing Good News to a Deeply Divided World by Philip Yancey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been awhile since I've read a Yancey book. Yancey is one of my favorite Christian writers. He is perceptive, stimulating, engaging, challenging, thought-provoking, and always presents a deep, biblical perspective on whatever topic he writes on. Vanishing Grace was no different. It's like an updated, 2.0 version of his earlier classic work--What's So Amazing About Grace? Which has always been one of my favorites. In this book, Yancey seeks to get at the question of why the Gospel--which is good news--is so often perceived by unbelievers as bad news, or as something judgmental and negative (very "anti" everything). This is a good question and Yancey has some solid, thought-provoking answers, and also recommendations.

Here's a quote on the reason Yancey wrote the book, which I find very useful in thinking about his thesis and search for answers: "I decided to write this book after I saw the results of surveys by the George Barna group.* A few telling statistics jumped off the page. In 1996, 85 percent of Americans who had no religious commitment still viewed Christianity favorably. Thirteen years later, in 2009, only 16 percent of young “outsiders” had a favorable impression of Christianity, and just 3 percent had a good impression of evangelicals. I wanted to explore what caused that dramatic plunge in such a relatively short time. Why do Christians stir up hostile feelings—and what, if anything, should we do about it? Many similar conversations have taught me that religion represents a huge threat to those who see themselves as a minority of agnostics in a land of belief. Nonbelievers tend to regard evangelicals as a legion of morals police determined to impose their notion of right behavior on others. To them, Christians are anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-women—probably anti-sex, for that matter—and most of them homeschool their children to avoid defilement. Christians sometimes help with social problems, say by running soup kitchens and homeless shelters, but otherwise they differ little from Muslim fanatics who want to enforce sharia law on their societies."


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