November/December 2008 Issue

Cover
The Story Behind The Shack
By Ted Wilcox

What is this bestselling novel that so many people are talking about anyway?

When William P. Young sat down to write a God-themed story for his six children, he didn’t have the faintest clue what was about to follow. “Not even a hint of a suggestion,” he says.

The private manuscript, written at the request of his wife to help explain his tortured spiritual journey, was eventually turned into a controversial bestselling novel. First released in May 2007, The Shack has now topped the New York Times bestseller list more than four months in a row, with 3.8 million copies in print. A major motion picture is in the works.

Among Evangelicals, the story of tragedy and redemption has sparked both celebration and condemnation. Theologian Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, says The Shack “has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his.” By contrast Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, calls parts of the book “undiluted heresy.”

The book’s storyline involves Mack, an Oregon family man, whose six-year-old daughter is murdered by a serial rapist. Four years later Mack receives a mysterious invitation from “Papa,” his wife’s favourite name for God, to revisit the remote crime scene, a shack in the mountains. There, Mack meets all three members of the Godhead. God the Father appears as a large African-American woman, Jesus as an ordinary-looking Jewish man and the Spirit as an artistic Asian woman. Conversations about life, tragedy and the ways of God follow. Mack returns a changed man.

Young regards the way the book came into being, then flourished, as “a God thing.” After first distributing 15 copies to friends and family members, he began receiving requests for more. “Before long I was getting emails from people I didn’t know,” he said.

Puzzled, Young sent a copy to author friend Wayne Jacobsen, who encouraged him to rework the story for publication. Enlisting the help of Jacobsen and another friend, Young revamped the book – but could find no publisher. With minimal resources, the three friends decided to publish it themselves. To their surprise, sales took off.

During a recent visit to Calgary, Young recounted his own story of tragedy and redemption. Born in Grande Prairie, Alta., to missionary parents, he spent the next 10 years living among cannibals and attending boarding school in what was then New Guinea. In both situations he experienced sexual abuse. This led to adultery and thoughts of suicide in his adult years.

As he tells it, healing came only after intense therapy. The result was a new understanding of God. Instead of a distant, judgmental God, Young says he came to experience God as intimate and loving.

Evangelical reaction in Canada to The Shack has been mixed. In his lengthy review, author and blogger Tim Challies of Oakville, Ont., wrote that The Shack’s “subversive undertones seek to dismantle many aspects of the faith. Error abounds.”

Theologian John Stackhouse Jr. of Regent College in Vancouver, however, found more to like than dislike. The book’s theological flaws were “not crucial to the good work done by The Shack,” he wrote. “I hope that in a subsequent edition Brother Young will either rework or omit these problematic spots.”

According to Young, positive responses from readers around the world make it all worthwhile. He tells of a man who rode his motorcycle across the United States seeking reconciliation with his father, bringing with him “a great gift.” It turned out to be a dog-eared copy of The Shack.

“When you get one [response] like that,” says Young, criticism doesn’t mean so much. “And I get thousands.”

Ted Wilcox is a freelance writer in Calgary.