Warning: This article contains references to sexual abuse and violence.

Returning to The Shack 20 years on I chat with author Paul Young about the upcoming release Return to The Shack and why it was time to write this highly anticipated sequel.

Paul, thank you for taking the time to talk to us here at Eden. Please can you give us a brief introduction and a little bit of your backstory.

Canadian born first of four children. My parents wanted to be missionaries and my dad particularly wanted to be a pioneer missionary. Came out of the west coast woods as a logger, hunter, trapper. I was 8 months old when we left Canada to go to the highlands of New Guinea, which was as pioneer as you can get. So that's where I grew up. Sent to boarding school at 6. I came back to Canada around 10. My dad was an itinerant preacher and I'd been at 13 schools before I graduated high school.

Trying to fit into culture carried all the trauma and the tragedy of some of the things that have happened at boarding school and some of it was sexual abuse both in the tribal culture and inside the boarding school, a very angry father he just never had a chip for being a dad but I didn't understand why, he just terrified me growing up. There were wonderful, beautiful things about growing up in a third culture and in that particular world. We were in such a super part of the world. But they had never seen a white person before and I thought I was one until I went to boarding school. I thought I was a tribal person. So I became a performance-oriented perfectionist like many firstborns do.

I carried all my damage and all my addictions in deep hiding. Everything in my life had communicated that I was worthless and then I carried that and including my theology sadly having a sin nature and totally depraved.

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My community of faith was western evangelical fundamentalist, hellfire damnation and legalistic and all that. And I got some great things from that tradition. And I still consider them my people. So I always say, be careful how you talk about my people. They may be the ones that won't read my book and are mad about it, but they're also some of the most beautiful people who live way past their theology.

So carried it into life & blew up my marriage when Matthew, our sixth child was born. 6 months after he was born, Kim caught me in a three-month affair with one of her best friends. It took Kim and I eleven years to heal. The 12th year and I'm talking about hard work, I found a therapist out of the yellow pages and ended up with a man who became my friend as well as my therapist but was absolutely the perfect person on the planet for me to ask if he could help me.

First time I'd ever asked if someone could help me. I'd kept so hidden. The shame was so deep. And the 12th year, the year I turned 50. I was like “I'm one of the healthiest people I know!” I mean I have no addictions. I'm the same person in every situation which is rather miraculous. I didn't know such a thing was possible because I always lived from the outside, picked up all the cues and all that to become whatever that person wanted and picked up the little scraps of approval and kindness even though I didn't believe it was authentic. I just thought I fooled people.

But now joy had become a constant companion. I mostly live in the present moment. I can still get triggered into future tripping, creating imaginations and trying to control things that don't exist.

Kim had been asking me for about four years saying, someday would you write something for the kids as a gift? She was thinking four to six pages. She didn't tell me that. And so on in the 12th year, I wrote a story for them, mostly on the train to one of my three jobs. And that was The Shack. Made 15 copies at the local print shop on their photocopier. They had a sale so I could get 15. And I only needed eight. Six kids. They each got a copy. Kim and I kept one. And all the extras I gave to my friends and went back to work. 

Never crossed my mind to be a published author. I'd never taken a writing class.

But I read good writers growing up. classics and Steinbeck and all the people that you find in the library but it was on the mission field that they would send us books so I got to read great books and that's how I learned to write. The Shack went nuts and crazy and that whole thing is just a little bit and…And it's still very surreal to me. I feel like a third party watching.

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People talk to me all the time. Anytime I travel, people will just break down and weep about how the book has found a way inside their own great sadness and really transformed their view of God and helped shift in the direction of God being good period and so many things.

But if you look up in the cheap seats, that's me waving like, "Hey," "Thank you, Holy Spirit. We will have more, please." And so very mixed bag, my history. It took a long time for the majority of my healing.

But thankfully, by the time that I wrote The Shack, the things that really matter were in place, identity and worth and value and significance and security and meaning and all those kinds of things, community and love. And so I didn't get any of those from The Shack. I don't need The Shack or a book or a movie to give me a sense of worth and identity. I had that even though we had really nothing. We're living in a little rental place. but we were surrounded by joy and I was working three jobs and Kim got a job at the high school bakery two blocks away.

I was content for the first time in my life at 50 years old.

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I tell you what The Shack did for us. It gave us a constant invitation to step onto the holy ground of other people's stories. I think every human being is a story.

I think every human being is a burning bush. And if you remember Moses, it was like he needed to take his shoes off. And that I tell people since the beginning of all this that I feel like I should be constantly taking my shoes off and just walking the world barefoot, because I'm constantly invited into the holy ground of where God is burning away everything that does not exist as real or true. In order to expose that which is actually true. And it's all redemptive. It's all restorative. But fire still burns. and that journey is not painless.

We've attached ourselves to so many things that are false, but they're real to us and we're afraid to let them go. I had a friend, a missionary kid, send me a note and she said I'm terrified to take the risk that God is as good as you say and you're wrong. She's one of my people and it's sad that we have such a low view of God that we have to question whether God is good or not. But I get it.

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I mean, I had to radically change my understanding of the nature and character of God and begin to take seriously the incarnation, the presence of Jesus in the world and everything that means, the death, burial, resurrection, life. so I get it. I wrote back and told her, I said, "You know what? I wrote God as good as I could and I know I only scratched the surface.

And so there's your bird's eye view. We have 6 kids. We have our 18 and 19th grandchildren on the way. We live in the Pacific Northwest, we're just north of Portland, Oregon.

So, here we are 20 years on, returning to Mack's story. Was there a specific catalyst moment, or did the shadow of writing a sequel to such a massive story make you hesitate?

So when people would ask me starting a couple years after The Shack, are you going to write a sequel? And I'm like, I don't think so…because how would you write a sequel for that book?

It's just like, no, and I really did not think so until about a couple years ago, but it all started about a decade ago when a friend said, There's a man on death row.

He said there's a guy in Riverbend the Maximum Security Institution prison, Nashville, Tennessee. He said The Shack has absolutely upturned his world. And The Shack is all over the place in the prison systems and rehab centres and in survival with survivors of sex trafficking and all that kind of stuff.

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He said, "If I buy a copy of the book, would you sign it so I can take it to him?" And I said, "No." I said, "You buy a copy, I'll sign it, but I'm taking it in, so you got to get me in." And he did. And so I met a death row inmate, and we instantly became friends.

I didn’t do it as part of a ministry. I've got enough in my history to know that I am no better. and so burning bush, right? And he tells me the cave scene with Sophia knocked him on his butt. So he and I became friends and there was another man there with us, Ron Cawthorne. And he just couldn't believe I was here, a book that had absolutely opened up and solidified an element of his spiritual journey and refocused it on Jesus. And he said, "I felt so convicted. It felt like my clothes were burning off and I was literally crawling on the floor of my cell seeing if I could find a way out. He was on death row at that time 30+ years.

So from there I have built a relationship with about a dozen 15 of the guys on death row and so here I am a decade down the road and a couple years ago this is what happened to me. I get this idea, it can be very strange in Crossroads or in Eve very very crazy ideas and I start thinking about it like I got a serial killer in The Shack and I wonder what would happen if he ended up on death row with my friends. What would that be like?

And what if Mack has to actually face the man who did such harm? It's one thing to forgive someone as a name on a piece of paper or a story or whatever, but what happens when you actually have to face him? What does forgiveness look like? What does justice look like, and what happened to Mack?

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So, I set the sequel about 10 years after Missy was abducted and murdered. and so it's like, "All right, Mack had this incredible experience with God. Did it fix everything?

Did his relationship with Nan just all worked out? I mean and what I did is I took this story as a way to embody what had happened in The Shack to say okay let's go into real life, into real relationships, into real continuous working out our salvation in our fear and trembling kind of thing. So all of these things started rumbling around inside of me and I started collecting my sticky notes and little notes in my iPhone and last winter, at the end of last year, it just felt like, okay, let me gather all this up and see what happens.

I had the first draft done by beginning of May, it was like The Shack in many respects. It just flowed.

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The big difference between The Shack and Return to The Shack is that this is how I put it and I really like it. The Shack is a solo and Return to the Shack is a choir. The Shack is so focused on one person, McKenzie, and everybody else sort of has a bit part. But in Return to the Shack the characters are so much fleshed out and they take on their own lives.

But it was a very personal event for Mackenzie. How many of us have had some kind of encounter with God, whether it was in the woods or on a mountaintop or in the backyard or in a church pew or listening to a concert or something and you can have an experience an encounter but you can't transfer it to anybody and I have where you can't even explain it and the depth of what it means and all of those kinds of things. And in my life, it didn't fix everything. It's taken years of putting one foot in front of the other, doing the next right thing and allowing people to be in my world which was something I couldn't trust for a good half my life.

The Shack stirred massive theological conversation. Looking back over two decades, how has your own understanding of God transformed since you first released it, and where do you think the broader Church has—or hasn't—grown alongside you?

People who want to be detractors will always find something to be angry about. and that's never bothered me. When people get offended, I need to listen to them and see if what they're saying is true, both about the theological side, but about whatever they want to be upset about. But I also know that a lot of people's offense. What do they say? righteous indignation is a form of confession, And so there are a lot of folk who get upset and I know that the Holy Spirit has climbed into something and pushed some buttons in order to expose something in them that still needs to be touched and healed. Sometimes they're upset about something I never even wrote. But it's something that is touching something.

The unexposed is the unhealed, and the promise of the Holy Spirit is to expose us, not as a threat but as a promise. So yeah it has the potential to do that in an ongoing way but it seems like all my books have done that. I remember when Lies We Believe About God came out and some of the detractors were like finally he's not hiding behind fiction. But I've never taken it personally.

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It goes back to knowing who I am. I know I walk with a limp. I know I don't have any secrets. Anybody can ask me anything, my identity is not in a book. It's not in a theology. I don't have to defend anything. I don't write with a particular outcome in mind at all.

So the question that you asked to be more specific is about how things have evolved in terms of my theology.

Most of that whatever has evolved has just deepened my commitment that you can find ground in terms of The Shack. I'm always learning new depths or especially new ways on how to communicate something. And I think that's kind of evident in Return to the Shack. There are some things that I was able to communicate in that with greater clarity than I was able to say but The Shack will always be The Shack. It's a thing! 

You don't have to read The Shack to get Return. I mean, it helps because it gives you context. I have friends who've read Return to The Shack and they're like, Paul, I hate to say this, but I think I like this more. And I go like, that's because you read The Shack, that's part of your context. Return to the Shack is more mature. I'm more mature, I hope. 20 years more mature even though the book is set 10 years later so a lot of things have deepened commitment to the goodness of God period has deepened the centrality of the gospel which is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the person of Jesus the incarnation the life of Jesus the things that Jesus taught and the ways he lived his life.

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The centrality of the revelation of God that's in the cross, I don't think I even begin to grasp what happened there but everything that I write is cantered on Jesus and you can't even interpret the Bible without putting on the lens of Jesus.

And if God is good and in my opinion has never harmed a human being, let alone killed them. Because you cannot put a sword in the hand of Jesus. You just can't. And Jesus and the father are one. You've seen fully human. He is the quintessential human being. And when you watch the cross, you are seeing the very nature of God revealed. So again the depth of things is far greater. on all kinds of things like the authority of women and the necessity of expressing their spiritual journey. Now men tend to have for all kinds of reasons locked themselves into approaching God through their minds. But women approach God through their inner world, through their wombs, and we need that because it offers a level and depth of relationship that we have to learn as men.

I've really grown I think in terms of the distinction between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world and also the annihilation of the sacred secular divide. And also my adamant antipathy about sin nature and…original sin, stuff like that, nothing really deep, but just little things.

Forgiveness in Return to the Shack isn't neat or sentimental—it’s costly. When Mack meets J, the boundary between justice, revenge, and grace gets blurry. How do you write about forgiving the 'unforgivable' without minimising raw human trauma?

I wrote about it out of my own context, my own journey, particularly not just with the ones who have abused me historically but particularly with my father and I think I learned an awful lot with regard to my dad. He wasn't a sexual abuser at all, but he was definitely abusive and we started rough. It's been four years now since he passed, but we finished well. And a lot of that was because I learned things about forgiveness that I had not grasped for years.

I had forgiven him but there were things about the manner in which I forgave that were incomplete. Forgiveness is really a process and that's how I approached Mackenzie. We're talking about the potential forgiving of someone who has done what society and culture thinks is abhorrently evil.

So the question is, is there anyone who is unforgivable irredeemable and that becomes a real centrepiece. I approach it on many levels from many different angles in terms of the book through different voices and it was a ripper. Golly, I read through some of that and in similar ways to The Shack because The Shack just ripped me to pieces. So does Return, in different ways, but it asks some very fundamental questions in light of very very fundamental and horrendous evil.

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You can see the struggle inside of it because I've always been McKenzie, And I've always been Missy. People don't see that. They don't realize that the shock is my inside world and what I brought to the table, what was done to me.

Both Mackenzie and Missy spell MAP, their initials, Mackenzie Allen Phillips and Melissa Anne Phillips. But they're different maps. Missy represents the child that was murdered in me, the sexual abuse was really the nail in the coffin. They say it's as close to death as leaving the person still breathing, but Mackenzie was me as an adult trying to figure out how to deal with my own damage, how to deal with my own harm, how to face all of that.

And so forgiveness becomes really front and center. Reconciliation is secondary but harder. Forgiveness is actually way simpler than rebuilding trust because you actually don't have to trust the person that you forgive. A lot of times they aren't even alive anymore or they don't care. So if you're waiting for someone to change so that you can forgive them, good luck with that. It will not work. But you don't have to trust someone who is not trustworthy. And that becomes a part of reconciliation which is an incredible journey and one that in terms of the book might get me into some trouble with my people as you can probably see.

You've talked about the power of theology through fiction and storytelling. Can you share a bit more about that and how that played into writing Return to the Shack.

I like theology personally. It's a playground of ideas and when it becomes doctrine and then dogma means that it's irrefutable in the mind of someone, then you're getting into territory that is dangerous. In the west we really ground our basic understandings of God inside of our theological reflection. A lot of things within that context become dangerous and you see it. You can have a conversation within a faith community and they are really struggling with letting go of dangerous things because they're afraid to. And if there's no fear in love, 1 John, then any fear associated with our theology is revealing that there's something about our theology that is wrong. I don't know about Europe generally, but in the US Canada area, it's really hard for believers to admit they're wrong, that they even might be wrong. So, you get a lot of clashes now. So, I like theology.

I like reading the experts and then translating what they're saying. and experts use expert language for a reason. It's a shortcut so that they can talk to each other without spending a whole lot of time defining things.

I like art more, and I love that Jesus just constantly told stories. That's an art form. And he constantly was pointing out nature and you don't find him having conversations of ideology, ever. And you don't find him telling you theological ideas. The early church called it the gospel not theology. They were referring to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is the gospel.

Yes, I like Paul the Apostle. Yes, I like the writer to the Hebrews. Yes, I like John's Apocalypse. I do. I used to hate it. It used to scare me because it was like God had gone back to regularly scheduled programming of killing everybody. But I like art because here's how I look at fiction versus non-fiction. There's an attempt in non-fiction to reduce your world so that you can see it the way that I do. It's actually trying to convince you about something. And that's okay. I did it in, although I used story almost all the way through, Lies We Believe about God. I was dealing with theology but I wrapped it inside of storytelling. They do remember the theology and it has caused some waves and ripples but the stories are what they felt invited into and so non-fiction is a way of reducing the frame of reference.

Fiction actually opens it up as long as it doesn't have an agenda or a hook in it. Because as soon as you take art and put an agenda in it, it's no longer art. It's propaganda. And a lot of Christian books and music and all that is propaganda. It's not art. It might have been at one time, but there's a big reason why you have your Dorothy Sayers and your Inklings, Lewis and George McDonald and Chesterton and all these folks that were able to write. They're able to write story, but they also are able to write non-fiction. A lot of non-fiction writers are terrified to take the risk of fiction because they want everything codified and a particular way of writing.

The space inside of art is larger than the space outside. And so you can see a book, right? But when you get into it, story allows the Holy Spirit to speak to you in ways that are beyond words and the way you can kill it is to put an agenda to make sure that somebody accepts Jesus as their Lord and Savior by the end of the book. People smell an agenda from miles away. and it's like, no, just let it be Trust the Spirit. because art really is about that. and we all know you can listen to a song and it doesn't matter who it's by, and it pierces you. It touches something.

The art itself and there is a real sense in which the writer, the performers are inspired, right? They're inbred by the Holy Spirit to begin with and they're allowed without having to join a party, a conservative or a progressive or whatever. They don't have to join a party in order to express inspiration. And we've all experienced it even in a commercial on TV which has been done in such a way that it penetrates to places of the heart that matter.

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So looking at creation penetration, and all of a sudden somebody said to me or they were quoting somebody that they know, just a ordinary person, and they said, "I would rather be on the mountain thinking about God than sitting in a pew thinking about the mountain." Right?

In that little statement a whole reality opens up right and it's not a theological statement it's a human statement that's why I think The Shack had so much power in the world once I began to realize what was happening in terms of the facts of it the book is not a religious book doesn't have a hook doesn't have an agenda it's a human book. I have atheist friends who have given it to their religious Christians friends and going like you need to read this one.

The secular publishers turned it down because it had too much Jesus in it but the faith publishers turned it down because it was too edgy, whose life is not stuck between edgy and Jesus somewhere! So, yeah, I love art. I love it!

Do you have a favourite piece of art?

Good question.

My favourite is the one that I'm thinking about at any given moment. And so when you say art, I mean it's all over the place. I'm talking about how I've seen such incredible things in dance. I've seen it in the theatre. I've seen it in music. I've seen it in the art of silence. I've seen it in books.

I don't get much out of metal, as a music genre. I don't. But I have friends who do and I've been inside of metal concerts because I love the people who are performing it and they love me and it's not my favourite genre. I'll put it that way. And I even like country western music better than I like metal. But give me a good old rock and roll song or it's So yeah I don't know how to answer that. the one that's in front of me at the moment right that's much a part of it.

For readers who found personal healing in The Shack, what shift in perspective do you hope this sequel offers them as they navigate today's unresolved grief or trauma?

How would I put it? because I don't write with an agenda. I don't write with this. I'm not writing for a particular audience. That's how I function anyway. So as I think about forgiveness or I think about generally when I speak somewhere I don't want to just give people information so that they can continue their arguments. If possible I want to reduce the impediments that keep them from including loving themselves. and so my answer is not particularly about Return. It's about things in general.

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I want people to be free. I want them to come out from under their religious indoctrination that has harmed them so that they can embrace that which is actually lifegiving, whatever that means.

The wrestle is good, without some kind of friction you wouldn't be able to walk. It's a necessary part of coming to terms with the prisons we call home. vague But it's the best I got at the moment.

As a Christian bookseller I'm always keen to know - what is your favourite Christian book (other than the Bible!) and why?

I've got a few that are at the top sort of you're stuck with me so I do have more than one. On the Incarnation by Athanasius which is 320 AD or something like that Athanasius North African brother who basically rescued the Church at one point.

Creation in Christ, Unspoken Sermons by George McDonald. I think that's close to as pure a theology that I want active.

Which was the last book that you read?

The Wood Between the Worlds by Brian Zahnd. And it's a beautiful conversation. He's a pastor in Missouri. Brian is a very good pastorally, looking at inconsistencies both in the culture and our desire to identify with a culture that is not the kingdom of God, but that's the one that is most recent and I really loved it.

If you had to co-write your next book with a person from the Bible (other than Jesus), who would you choose and why?

Two names come to mind, three if you include Paul. I would love to know him because you have this really varied experience of people. He's this brilliant mind. He's very sensitive on how to break a culture down without harming anybody. And when he leaves the community of faith in different places in the book of Acts, they cry. They follow him and they weep. So, he's had an incredible pastoral presence. And we don't usually think of him in those terms.

And it would be like, I would dare to get to know him? I got a bazillion questions for him.

So the other two that come to mind, I'll give you the number two one and then the number one. Number two would be Priscilla.

She was the wife of Aquilla. And I would love to know from a woman's point of view the fallout of everything that was happening in the early church and what that meant.

I'd end with the Apostle, the writer of the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse partly because he's the one that lived the longest and he's got a better grasp. You read the Gospel of John and he has a cosmic grasp on what's going on and yet it's probably the most beautiful embedded life of Jesus in the middle of that brilliant way of looking. And he didn't write the apocalypse last. He wrote the gospel last. And it would be like man, talk about a sage to write something with.

I don't know. Again, all three of these, it's like, would I dare to do that? but yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that you could pull from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew scriptures and stuff, like your David or, Maybe Mary would be a good person,…

I'm sticking with Priscilla and then primarily John.

Don't miss the release of Return to the Shack - out 8th October! Also if you want to re-read The Shack, a beautifully presented collectors edition is now available.