'Shack' Author Calls Book 'God Thing'

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'The Shack' Author Insists Bestseller 'is a God Thing'

By Eric Young

Despite what critics have said about his highly popular and hotly debated best-seller, The Shack, author William Paul Young remains convinced that his book “is a God thing.”

“I absolutely am convinced that this is a God-thing that God is the One stirring this all up, challenging us to rethink and entertain growing deeper in a relationship with Him rather than pursuing our independence,” Young said during a live chat with book lovers last week.

Though Young had not originally intended the novel to be for public consumption, since its debut on the market last year, The Shack has reaped in a surprising amount of success, generating a large amount of buzz – both positive and negative – within Christian circles.

“This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his,” stated Eugene Peterson, Professor Emeritus Of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, in a published endorsement for the book. “It’s that good!”

Young’s No. 1 New York Times best-selling book tells the fictional redemptive story of Mackenzie Allen Phillips, whose daughter is tragically abducted and murdered during a family vacation.

Four years after the tragedy, Phillips receives a note, supposedly from “God,” inviting him back to the abandoned shack where evidence of his daughter’s murder had been found. When Phillips accepts the offer and returns to the shack, he enters into a kind of spiritual therapy session with “God,” who appears in the form of a jolly African-American woman and calls herself “Papa;” Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit.

“This is a story of one believer’s brokenness and how God reached into that pain and pulled him out and as such is a compelling story of God’s redemption,” explained author and former pastor Wayne Jacobson, who was part of a team that worked with Young on the manuscript for over a year and also is part of Windblown Media, the company he and Young formed to print and distribute The Shack.

“The pain and healing come straight from a life that was broken by guilt and shame at an incredibly deep level,” Jacobson wrote in his personal blog, “and he (Young) compresses into a weekend the lessons that helped him walk out of that pain and find life in Jesus again.”

Young says he had suffered sexual abuse in New Guinea as the child of Canadian missionaries and spent a decade in therapy trying to earn back his wife’s and family’s trust after an extramarital affair 15 years ago.

In 2005, Young started writing what would eventually be The Shack to show how he had healed by forging a new relationship with God.

“It wasn’t an intended thing,” Young said during an interview earlier this year on The Drew Marshall Show. “It wasn’t saying ‘Well, this is the new formula for touching the hearts of the people,’ but people are – they’re just starving for authenticity. They’re just starving for someone to stand up and say, ‘You know what? God loves the worst of us – the losers, the screw ups.”

“I’m an example of what grace looks like,” he added.

Young says he receives up to a couple hundreds of e-mail each day in which people communicate to him the “transformational” impact of the story.

“I know of three 'avowed atheists' who have embarked on a relationship with God because of this story,” Young said during last Wednesday’s weekly “Authors at Abunga” chat at Abunga.com. “This is a God thing and I am just thankful to be a part of this.”