Philip Yancey admits extramarital affair, will step away from ministry work to focus on marriage
Philip Yancey has admitted to having an extramarital affair with a married woman for eight years, with the bestselling Christian author announcing that he's stepping away from ministry.
In an emailed statement to Christianity Today, where he was editor-at-large, the 76-year-old Yancey stated that “I confess that for eight years I willfully engaged in a sinful affair with a married woman.”
“My conduct defied everything that I believe about marriage. It was also totally inconsistent with my faith and my writings and caused deep pain for her husband and both of our families,” he added in the statement published by the outlet on Tuesday.
“I have confessed my sin before God and my wife, and have committed myself to a professional counseling and accountability program. I have failed morally and spiritually, and I grieve over the devastation I have caused.”
Calling the affair “my great shame,” Yancey added that he was “now focused on rebuilding trust and restoring my marriage of 55 years.”
“Having disqualified myself from Christian ministry, I am therefore retiring from writing, speaking, and social media,” he continued. “Instead, I need to spend my remaining years living up to the words I have already written.”
“I pray for God’s grace and forgiveness — as well as yours — and for healing in the lives of those I’ve wounded.”
A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Yancey’s website described his upbringing as being “in a strict, fundamentalist church in the southern USA” that led him to conclude that God was “a scowling Supercop, searching for anyone who might be having a good time — in order to squash them.”
Yancey was the author of several notable Christian books, including Disappointment with God, Where is God When it Hurts?, The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? and Where the Light Fell.
A journalist by profession, Yancey wrote for Campus Life and later for Christianity Today, eventually becoming the editor-at-large for the Evangelical publication.
In a 2010 interview with The Christian Post, Yancey said his Christian books were different from others, in part because “I approach any topic as a journalist.”
“Whereas a lot of the Christian books you would see in a bookstore are written by authority figures of some sort, like maybe a pastor like a Rick Warren, or a personality like Chuck Colson or a theologian like a John Stott — people who do have a platform of authority and they are educating the rest of us,” he said at the time.
“I'm very much like my readers; most of them don't know anything about it either. I keep them in mind and say, 'How does this work?' … I interview the experts, then gradually, hopefully, I come away with some helpful picture.”
In 2016, Yancey garnered controversy when, while in Madrid, Spain, he told the European publication Evangelical Focus that he was "staggered" by the Evangelical support for Donald Trump.
"I am staggered that so many conservative or Evangelical Christians would see a man who is a bully, who made his money by casinos, who has had several wives and several affairs … That they would somehow paint him as a hero, as someone that we could stand behind," Yancey said.
Later, in response to backlash, Yancey clarified that he was not endorsing Trump’s 2016 election opponent, Hillary Clinton, and added that “I acknowledged that some issues are so important (for example, abortion) that a Christian may decide to vote for a badly flawed candidate because of those issues.”
In 2023, Yancey was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, yet continued to hold speaking engagements across the United States while battling the illness.
