I know not everyone can appreciate the journey we are on with this little book called The Shack. I can appreciate the concerns people have that we might sell out in the name of success or be changed by it in some horrible way. We honestly didn’t expect that everyone would understand and we are grateful for your prayers and your insights.

Today that book has climbed to #8 on the USA Today list and they are publishing a feature article in Thursday’s edition about this story and how it has found its way into the marketplace. I thought many of you would like to give it a read. The picture at left is one they’re using with the following caption: “Garage warehouse: William P. Young, left, author of The Shack, helps publishers Brad Cummings and Wayne Jacobsen pack books for shipping.”

I’ve never been involved in something that has grown the way this has. It is not my experience that Father often does things this way. Mostly he does his most amazing stuff in quiet, hidden ways that few people notice. But in this case, we feel as if there is something in his heart that he wants to share with the world. We look at this story as a gift and are mostly simply responding to the doors opening to it, rather than pushing it by our own strength. And we’re shocked at the results.

Yesterday, Paul, Brad and I were at Fuller Theological Seminary sharing with students, staff and community about the collaboration behind this adventure and the story behind the story. We had an awesome response with some great comments about what this book has meant to them and some great questions to help them understand it at a deeper level. We don’t often get the chance to hang out together like that. We also met with a major studio today who wants to help us bring this story to a feature length film. Their enthusiasm was a bit overwhelming.

We do appreciate your prayers. We feel as if we hold a gift in our hands and each day we are simply looking to do what we see the Father doing with it, and speak to a world what we hear him saying. It is beyond anything we could have asked or ever imagined!

Three years ago when I was working on rewrites of The Shack with Paul and Brad, I wasn’t even sure we’d be able to find a publisher for that book, much less an audience for it. And, as many of you know, we couldn’t find a publisher who would take the risk. This has been my frustration with so-called ‘Christian publishing’ for so long. It was why I left it in 2000 to publish my own works, so I wouldn’t fall victim to the control and lack of imagination that I have experienced in that environment.

The industry seems to pander to a religious mentality deeply ingrained in Christianity-as-religion that is based on performance not grace, rules and rituals instead of vibrant relationship, exalting the trappings of institutions and leadership instead of the reality of the ever-present Christ, and turning the joy of community into an obligation to sit through a meeting, rather than the irresistible opportunity to share the life of Jesus with other followers.

And I’ve found I’m not alone. The run-away popularity of The Shack has opened a lot of doors for Paul, Brad and me to be in conversations with some of the key publishing people around the nation. We are hearing from authors, editors and executives who have struggled under the same constraints and are celebrating the fact that The Shack has helped to identify a massive spiritual hunger that lies outside the lines of our tightly-package Christian machinery.

This came from an email exchange with an author based in the Chicago area:

You have an eloquent way of putting words to thoughts I’ve had after writing five books and several articles for Christian (and secular) publishers. I couldn’t agree with you more that, ‘It is tough for Christian publishers to do a good job on books that challenge the status quo, and almost impossible for secular publishers to deal in positive terms with the reality of Jesus.’ This – ironically – makes authentic, cutting-edge, Christ-loving, truly grace-driven writing into some kind of anathema.

And this, from the Mick Silva, the editor of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House and one of the leading Christian publishers:

Briefly, my dream is to bridge the gap between safely packaged (often sanitized) Christian messages, and honest, warts-and-all God-encounters. I’m sure you’re aware that too. Too often God is given short shrift in Christian publishing. And that supposedly simply reflects American Christianity—many trappings, little substance.

That’s what I’ve had to accept—until the success of The Shack. Now I can ask: what if CBA (Christian) publishing doesn’t necessarily just reflect the problems in the church, but also perpetuates some of them? I used to believe that changing people’s hearts was the only way to show that the commonly held publishing assumptions about the “what’s-in-it-for-me?” audience have been off. But now The Shack may be proving there’s an audience hungry for something different—or at least intrigued enough to buy it.

I believe, like many of us, Eugene Peterson has seen this shift coming. The big Christian houses may not be ready to cut ties with their big accounts to chase this awakening audience—and the secular market is certainly not ready for that. But a small company like Windblown can be much more strategic. And that’s exciting to me, not least of all because God has been tapping me on the shoulder to consider my next step.

Honestly, I’ve been surprised to find so many people among the rank and file of Christian publishing who have longed for something that better reflects the breath of God to our culture. They, too, feel stymied by the corporate culture that markets to a demanding demographic instead of taking the risk to put something real and creative into the marketplace.

Brad and I have called this space ‘the Missing Middle’. We are convinced that there was a large group of Christian readers who are looking beyond the plastic answers and petty power structures of the Christian marketplace, and nonChristian readers who are ready to interact with stories and literature about the God of the Bible if they are engaging and relevant to the human struggle.

And now we’re finding that some publishers have been looking for that kind of material as well. Due to the success of The Shack, we are being invited to participate in some of the dialog that goes on in the top echelons of publishing across the U.S. Yes, we know they are wanting to share in the popularity of The Shack, but the invitations and the conversations have been wider than that. First of all, they have the capability to distribute far more books in far more places than we can. But more than that, they are inviting Windblown Media to a place at the table of putting books out there that encourage an out-of-the-box view of relationship with God, Christian community and engagement with the world that demonstrates that love and reality.

This is an excerpt of an email exchange from a C.E.O of one of the top-tier international book publishers:

Now that we’ve read So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore and He Loves Me, we are even more enthused about utilizing our skills to spread the messages of these books, plus the Shack. In fact, ever since we acquired (our Christian imprint), we have been in discussions with them about finding books which would appeal to those Christians who feel dissatisfied by the traditional Church, who are challenging the tenets of received dogma, who are no longer happy with the religion they acquired as children (emphasis mine). So it was with great pleasure that we discover these books at Windblown Media and see the strength of the message and stories in them!

I was quite impressed with the ways in which Wayne and his co-author, Dave Coleman, were able to put into words many thoughts I’d had myself about the ways in which today’s churches had become mostly rituals and rules, mostly about judgment and not about love or forgiveness. So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore is an empowering book, which can really enable the reader to discover not only his or her own relationship with God, but also where and how he or she wants to express that relationship and, yes, worship.

I realize this is a market-driven industry and we’re a message-passionate team. We wouldn’t even be having these discussions if The Shack hadn’t been such a run-away best seller that has caught the industry by surprise. And I realize our opportunity to publish into that space will only last as long as we find an audience there willing to buy it. But Brad and I have felt for a long time that we wanted to speak into that space—not just through books, but movies as well. Now, we’re being invited to do so at a shockingly high level. Whether it will work out or not, is more in Father’s hands than ours. We realize he has been behind all of this.

We haven’t made a decision yet as to which company we will work with, but that decision is immanent and involves finding contractual language we can all agree upon. No matter which way we go, however, this will decisively impact my life and vocation for the foreseeable future. In many ways the last 12 years has been almost retirement for me. I’ve been in the background working on the books I love, traveling and meeting with people who are living this journey and dabbling in other opportunities such as BridgeBuilders and other people’s books as God has opened doors. I couldn’t have been more blessed at the simple life I was allowed to live. But it seems Father is inviting me into a different season that will put different demands on my life.

And add to all of this the fact that we are ramping up now to make the movie version of The Shack in which I will be significantly involved and you’ll see that my life is changing. We have been in meetings over the past few months with so many people in believers who are in the film industry, that we see Father assembling a pretty incredible team to help make that adaptation.

As fun as all of this might be, however, this increasingly invites me out of carefree schedule I’ve treasured for these past few years and into a workload and responsibility that will change some of those realities. I won’t be free to travel as often, at least in the short term. I won’t have as much space to do the articles and blogs as I have in the past, or even to have the extensive email dialogs I have had with people. But I am a firm believer that fruitfulness comes by our being responsive to different seasons in our lives and realizing that God calls us to different things at times, and we must have the freedom to respond.

Even with all of my misgivings, I am convinced that God is asking me to step into some space that will bring some radical changes into my life. I will be able to get back to some of the books I’ve wanted to write and to help others, who have something valuable to say to the body of Christ, find the place to say it.

I wish there was more I could say at this point, but there is so much that is still up in the air. Don’t worry about The God Journey. We have every intent of keeping that going as well as expanding it in some interesting ways in days to come. But I covet your prayers and your wisdom as God might speak to you about all of this. I will need some resource people alongside to help in the tasks that I’ve been able to do myself over the years and I have no idea who those people might be. One very specific request here is that God will provide an administrative assistant that is gifted in administration, editing and writing. I have no idea how to even begin to find such a person where we live.

But I know God is an amazing provider. And that he has things already lined up that I couldn’t figure out if I spent all day racking my brain. So, I’ll just move on like every other day—doing what he has put before me, knowing that my view of these things will get better in days ahead.

Stay tuned. There will be more details to follow.

Greetings from the spring explosion that is New England. Every time I travel here, I wonder why I don’t live here. I absolutely love all the seasons here, except the humid, heavy, hot days of summer, but they usually don’t last long. Sara tells me it’s because we have children and grandchildren in California. But I love it here. I love the wooded countryside, the streams and lakes around every corner and the beauty of spring mornings and autumn days.

Every morning I’ve been here, I’ve been able to take a long walk in the woods while Jesus and I get to sort some things out. One morning three of us slipped some kayaks in the lake and wound our way upstream enjoying the turtles sunning on the logs, the beaver slinking on the bank and the herons and hawks overhead. What a beautiful quiet morning!

Last weekend I spent three days in Connecticut with a bunch of Lutherans who are as alive in Christ as any I’ve met. We had a fabulous time, sorting through the life of Jesus and how to live beyond the rules and rituals to embrace the fullness of his life. They are asking some intriguing questions and seem to be on an incredible journey. I love finding hearts like that in more traditional settings. God is inviting all kinds of people into an engagement with his transforming love. What a great time!

Then I headed north into Fitchburg for a Sunday night BridgeBuilders presentation to a group of home schoolers at a regional debate and speech tournament. That’s a pretty broad swath to cut in the body of Christ in one day—from a Lutheran high-church liturgy to a home schooling convention. I almost got spiritual whiplash. This usually is not the core audience for my BridgeBuilders passions, since these groups often have a more adversarial posture with the world than I think effectively communicates the gospel. But I was warmly received and the adults and children listened intently when I talked. I even had some good interactions with many there, so they didn’t seem to fit the same mold I’ve experienced elsewhere.

Then I settled in Central Massachusetts for the week. I have many dear friends here and have enjoyed catching up with many of them this week as well as meeting some of their friends and relatives. For the next three days I will be meeting with believers who are gathering in Whitinsville, MA from a eight different states here in the Northeast. This was supposed to be a small gathering of family and friends to talk through some of the Transitions material, but it has grown over the last two weeks. We even had to rent wedding tent and set it up on a farm to accommodate the crowd who are headed this way.

It should be a pretty amazing weekend. A lot of those coming are wonderful friends of mine and many of their friends. I can’t wait to see how this plays out. But I do hope people are drawn to greater reality in him, and make connections with each other that will nurture the work of God in the world!

All the while I’ve been following a number of developments on the publishing front and the movie possibilities that I will report in a future blog… But for now there are more people to see and more fellowship to have. Blessings!

I have recently met a woman who cares for orphans in the Sudan. I published her letter to me a few weeks ago that touched many of you.

She is in the States at the moment and I got an email from her today. I can’t imagine a better follow-up than what I posted about community a few weeks ago. But this is community reaching out to the hurting and marginalized in our culture.
This was just an aside to a longer email:

I will be speaking Friday and Sunday evenings in Connecticut and doing street outreach in the Bronx on Saturday. I can’t be THAT close to New York City without finding a bad area to go love on.

You would think someone here from the Sudan, doing some speaking, might need a Saturday to relax and recharge her spiritual batteries. Perhaps this is how she does that! But this is the kind of heart God builds in us to reach the world the way he wants us to reach the world—not as an obligation but as an infectious, can’t-help-myself, compassion for people.

I get this question a lot, so I thought I’d post the exchange here, so i won’t have to rewrite it so many times:

First of all, thank you for the encouragement you have been to us in the last year. We left the institutional church a little over a year ago and honestly do not think we can ever go back. Your blog, book – So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore, Transitions and The Shack have been both freeing and refreshing to us.

Secondly, not asking you to critique or anything but how does your belief system differ from the organic church movement? We read Pagan Christianity and it really opened our eyes. We don’t want to start a house church because we think that can be just moving the institution to the home. If you are willing to give it, we would like your opinion on the whole apostolic house church movement.

To answer your question, In my view the organic church movement, is not very organic. How can it be when they give you all the models to follow? And I’m never thrilled with movements. They always seem to have too much of a touch of man’s plans and human efforts behind it. People create the illusion of a movement for many reasons. Some might be sincere, thinking they are providing a valuable resource for God’s people, though that is rarely the result. More often they end up only trying to validate people that they are part of ‘something special’, or to sell them their books and seminars. God just doesn’t work that way. He moves freely in the earth inviting people to him.

The apostolic house church movement is also too man-driven and program-centered for my tastes. Body life rises out of brothers and sisters who simply want to learn to share Father’s life together as friends and to have his heart in reaching out to others in the simplicity of living their lives. People doing that will find the life of the church springing up around them. It can’t be imposed by implementing any system or model, which only teaches people to play church instead of really living as it.

Thus, discipleship (learning to walk with Jesus) precedes any depth of real community together. So learn to follow him. Encourage others to do so. Follow what God puts on your heart to do together in joy and freedom and you’ll find yourselves being the church. Set up a weekly meeting with a mini-ritual and soon you’ll feel like its just a routine you’re going through. Because it is. But let God connect you with people who want to share a journey, and your life together can take on a myriad of expressions in different seasons as best serves his purposes in the community in which you live.

God wants to give us real frienships with others and teach you to share his life together. We’ll get to experience that simply if we don’t try to put something else together on our own first. Then we’ll just end up with another substitute, not the real deal.

He can do this in you. Ask him to show you and just follow what he puts on your heart each day as you learn to live in the reality of his love…

Many of you know how I tire of most ‘Christian’ approaches to dealing with culture issues in our world. Despite their rhetoric, their anger and manipulative strategies always come off as hating both the sinner and their sin. And instead of demonstrating the compassion of Jesus for the most marginalized and brokem in our culture, we end up only increasing the anger and misunderstandings on which our conflicted culture seems to thrive.

This especially focuses on public school issues where I occasionally serve as a mediator for cultural and religious conflicts as part of BridgeBuilders. Each April the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network sponsors a Day of Silence each year to encourage students to use silence as a way to identify with the bullying and discrimination that is directed toward students perceived to be gay or transgendered, and to help be a voice to make schools safer for them.

In recent years Christian groups have responded with a Day of Truth to counteract ‘the gay agenda’ in the Day of Silence. These students are told to make it clear at school that homosexuality is an abomination to God. But there is a new alternative being suggested for this year, and I think it offers a much better way for students to be part of a solution, rather than prolonging the conflict. It’s called The Golden Rule Initiative.

While admitting that many conservative students are conflicted about this day. They do not affirm homosexual behavior but they also loathe disrespect, harassment or violence toward any one, including those students who are or may appear to be gay, lesbian or transgendered. The proponent of this approach, Dr. Warren Throckmorton, Associate Professor of Psychology at Grove City College. He suggests participating in a pledge of safety for all students based on the Golden Rule:

We believe the teaching of Christ in the Golden Rule should guide our actions and attitudes regarding all. We also believe that we should work to make school a safe place for all students.

Thus, we advocate students spread a message like this on the Day of Silence:

This is what I’m doing:

• I pledge to treat others the way I want to be treated.

• Will you join me in this pledge?

• “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31).

Because the Day of Silence participants will be passing out cards describing why they are silent and what the Day means to them, we advocate exchanging a card or paper in return. Write or type the Golden Rule pledge on pieces of paper or an index card and pass it out at your school if the Day of Silence is being observed.

Of course, I think it would be more powerful without the Scripture reference. Most Christians can’t imagine how offensive it is to people who don’t embrace the truths of the Bible, to have a Scripture reference thrown in their face. It makes it appear to them as if we’re only doing it to follow a rule and not out of love or respect for them.

They’ll be taken with the truth of the quote far easier if we don’t reference it. It would be far better to let them discover where it comes from at some future time.

But over all, I like this approach.

I am completely overwhelmed here with more emails, phone calls and business items than I can possibly manage at the moment. Pray for me, please. There are way too many opportunities and needs coming at me at the moment, and I just cannot keep up. There are some opportunities ahead that will decisively affect my life and restructure my time. As much as I don’t want to give up the simplicity of life as I live it now, I do sense the Lord is asking me to walk through a door that will help us get his message out in a way I’ve not been able to do before I’ll write more as things are clarified here. You can hear about some of it on today’s podcast.

For those interested, however, I’m going to appear as a guest on The Drew Marshall Show tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time, which is 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time). You can listen on line if you like, or there will be podcasts later. I like Drew. This should be a lot of fun. We’re going to be talking about So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore.

In closing, here is a superb illustration of how believers can function together as the church of Jesus Christ in the world.

And I didn’t even know what orphism is! Now I do!

I am reading through the minor prophets these days and found a mind-jarring passage in Zechariah 7. This is God talking, and I’m taking these quotes from THE MESSAGE:

When you held days of fasting every fifth and seventh month all these seventy years, were you doing it for me? And when you held feasts, was that for me? Hardly. You’re interested in religion; I’m interested in people.

It’s a poignant contrast, isn’t it? You get to be concerned about the religion or the people, but they don’t mix too well. Religion is all abut using God’s things for our own gain or amusement. God’s heart is about loving the loveless, healing the broken, comforting the distraught and standing up for the marginalized in our world.

How well does religion do that, even if that religion is Christianity? Look at the political involvement of the so-called Christian conservative that is so passionate for dead-on theology (pun intended) compared to their concern for people who are in need? How many congregational meetings did I sit through in my past that were mostly about the needs of the institution and how we could make things better for us? Were we really doing it for God, or for our religion?

That was God’s conclusion as well in Zechariah. So instead of trying to protect our religion, keep it safe, and try to use it to make our lives better, this is what God asks us to do:

Treat one another justly;
Love your neighbors.
Be compassionate with each other.
Don’t take advantage of widows, orphans, visitors and the poor.
Don’t blot and scheme against one another—that’s evil!

Don’t we find ourselves closer to God’s heart living each day taking an interest in the people around us, than we do trying to protect or develop our religion? I think so!

And this is the Old Testament! So cool!

I couldn’t help but share a few loose ends hanging around my desk this morning:

My listening audience is expanding. I got this from the mother of a fourteen-month old:

Our son loves listening to you read the Jake book. He just sticks his thumb in his mouth and stares out the car window. Too cute. I wish you could see it. He knows a grandpa voice when he hears it!

Hilarious!

Drew Marshall, host of The Drew Marshall Show is a talk show host in Canada who is a real outside-the-box thinker. I game him a copy of The Shack a year ago and asked if he’d look at it. He finally got around to it and sent me the following endorsement this week:

“It took me a year to read this book simply because I had never heard of the author. Publishers send me 2-3 books every week wanting to have their authors as guests on my show. I really thought that this book was just another book. Trust me folks – IT’S NOT! Usually, because of my spiritual gift of pessimism, when bandwagons come along I usually just take a step back and let them go right on by. However, when it comes to The Shack, I’m not only on the stupid bandwagon, I keep asking the driver to stop and pick up all of my friends. Sad to admit but I can’t remember the last time a book, let alone a work of fiction, had this much of a healing impact on my life. As Brennan Manning says, “healing our image of God heals our image of ourselves.” Something is going on with The Shack and all I know is that it ain’t because of some multi-million dollar, well oiled publishing campaign.”

Paul, the author of The Shack will be on his show today. You can listen to it on-line or in the archives at their site. Also the Nashville newspaper did an article on Paul and The Shack this week.

And finally, some of you know that I spent two days this week in New York City with Brad as we were being courted by two of the most powerful publishing companies in the world. They would like to help us take The Shack to level of distribution that we could not begin to duplicate here, with a partnership agreement that allows us to control the content as well as share the entire process of how this book finds its way into our culture. Our logo will stay on the book and they also want to work with us to release some of Wayne’s titles at a wider level and to publish other books we feel have an important message to our culture. We were blessed that God would open such doors at the highest level of national dialog with no one wanting to change the message and content of people thinking outside the stale boxes of organized religion.

We sat in conference rooms with the top executives of these organizations as they shared with us how this book had touched their lives and how they wanted to help this find a broader audience than we had found. One executive told me in a personal conversation that if they had released this book a year ago by an unknown author with such a unique story, and would have sold 400,000 books in the first 10 months with all their sales and marketing forces behind it, they would have called it phenomenal. “What you people have done with THE SHACK, without any of that is well beyond phenomena.”

Of course we know that we’ve had an even more potent sales and marketing forces, A God who appears to have breathed on this book and the word of mouth of folks like you who kept passing this book along. Last week we showed up as #47 in USA Today’s Best-Selling book list. This week we jumped up to #33. We have almost 500,000 in print and still have not reached our first-year anniversary.

We have some huge decisions to face in the next few days that will affect not only the future of The Shack, but my books as well and how my time and schedule will be altered by new responsibilities. We need God to give us direction at every turn, take advantage of those doors that are his and to say no to those who are not. While the decision is incredibly important, it is not a choice between good and better. It is a choice between awesome and awesome. This is the opposite of voting in presidential elections where you have to choose the lessor of two evils. We couldn’t go wrong either way here. The level of respect and the open doors they have extended us for other things we want to do is shocking. We’re not blind as to what they want on their side of it, but we’re also amazed at how committed they were to the passion of this book and our other ideas to help people connect with the amazing love of the Father and think beyond the rigid lines of Christianity-as-religion in the 21st Century. Your prayers in all of this would be most appreciated.

When Brad and I decided to publish The Shack on our own, I had no idea how we’d find an audience for this story. But believing it was what God wanted us to do, we put it out and released it on May 1, 2007 primarily to the audience of this website and The God Journey. Without any paid advertising in magazines, newspapers or websites, we have watched this book find an audience simply through word of mouth—friends and friends of friends.

Those who most defend our religious institutions and denominations always ask the question, “How can we have an impact in the world if we don’t support these kinds of organizations?” While those can be a way we cooperate, I also see the incredible power of interconnected relationships that we may not even be aware of. Look how many people have found out about this book, simply because friends have recommended it to friends, who’ve recommended it to friends. God has limitless options to get his work done. Just when we think we’ve got him in the box that fits him best, he shows that no such box could ever contain him.

Today we reached a bit of a milestone. The Shack appeared for the first time on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Book List at number 47. We have continued to be amazed at the growing demand for this little story, and the attention it is now catching at the highest echelon’s of the publishing industry. Brad and I will be flying to New York City next week to meet with some of those people about the future of this book. Please pray for us if you think about it. We want Father’s wisdom in continuing to position this book in a way that brings glory to him. And to all of you who have helped pass this book along, we are grateful for your part in this unfolding story.

Now it’s time to get to work on the screen play!