The Shack Facts (Part 1)

If you have never heard of The Shack book or The Shack movie, you might be living in a cave—or a shack (tongue in cheek).

When the book was first released in 2007, it stirred up quite a controversy in Christian circles.

And, not surprisingly, when the movie based on the book premiered in March 2017, it stirred up embers from the previous decade’s book debate.

At the recommendation of a good friend, I read the book soon after it was published.

Then, ten years later, I watched the movie premiere on the big screen and read the book again.

Now, I don’t claim to be a theologian or a scholar, but I do enjoy researching and learning—and then passing on what I’ve learned.

When I taught high school math, I tried to approach every lesson from the point of view of my students, to put myself in their seat, and not to assume anything.

So, my purpose in the first post of this three-part series is to simply share the facts about The Shack book and its author, William P. (Paul) Young, for those who know nothing or very little about either (spoiler alert).

Paul Young is known as the author of The Shack because he wrote the original manuscript, but the final product was a collaboration of efforts.

Even though Young’s name is the only one that appears on the cover, the book’s title page reads: “A novel by William P. Young – In collaboration with Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings.”

After spending some time researching this collaboration, I read an article by Wayne Jacobsen, where he describes himself as having “co-written” the book. (Whether you are a collaborator or co-author likely depends on who you ask.)

The fact that Jacobsen and Cummings were heavily involved in the finished product will be especially important to keep in mind in the next two posts of this three-part series.

But since the story began with Young, the spotlight of this post will remain on him.

William P. (Paul) Young was born in Canada and was the oldest of four children.

His parents became missionaries through the CMA (Christian and Missionary Alliance) in the New Guinea Highlands when Young was only a year old.

Young describes his relationship with his dad as very difficult.

If you watch any of the YouTube videos where he shares his personal story, you will hear him compassionately refer to his dad as not having the “chip” for being a father—because it was smashed by his own dad—long before Paul showed up on planet earth.

Young clearly understands that “hurting people hurt people.”

Before Young was five years old, he was sexually abused inside the tribal culture in which he lived.

At the age of six, he was sent to a Christian boarding school where he experienced sexual abuse by some of the older boys at the school.

Young describes his broken relationship with his dad, the sexual abuse he experienced, and the lack of a sense of belonging (missionary kids move a lot), as the “three great sadnesses” he grew up with.

This is important to keep in mind because Young uses the phrase, “The Great Sadness,” throughout The Shack book.

“The Great Sadness” represents the overwhelming loss and grief experienced by a middle-class American father that no one should ever have to endure.

The story (the book is a work of fiction) takes place in the Pacific Northwest and centers around a family of seven: Mack and Nan Phillips and their five children.

The two oldest are grown and gone and the three youngest, Kate, Josh, and Missy are still at home.

As a last hurrah of summer, Mack takes his three younger children camping over the Labor Day weekend.

They had a wonderful time fishing, canoeing, roasting marshmallows and singing around the campfire, and getting to know their neighboring campers.

That is, until the last day.

The day when everything changed.

The day when “The Great Sadness” began for Mack and his family.

In what seemed like a split second, six-year-old Missy was abducted from the campsite.

And the massive search for her ends in a dilapidated shack where there is evidence suggesting that she was brutally murdered (and probably sexually abused).

But her body wasn’t found.

The rest of the story revolves around Mack and his personal journey to healing through revisiting the shack after receiving a mysterious invitation from “Papa” (the name that his wife, Nan, uses to refer to Father God).

It read: “Mackenzie, It’s been awhile. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together. – Papa.”

Four years after the unspeakable tragedy occurs, Mack returns to the shack, where he encounters the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—all in fleshly form.

Papa is portrayed by a middle-aged African-American woman; Jesus by a young Jewish man; and the Holy Spirit as a beautiful young Asian woman.

It took Mack a while to try to wrap his mind around the unconventional representations of Father God and Holy Spirit.

He didn’t have any problems accepting the representation of Jesus since Jesus was a young Jewish man.

According to Young, The Shack is a metaphor for “the house we build inside ourselves out of our own pain”—often with the help of other broken people.

He wrote the story at his wife’s urging to get his outside-the-box thinking about God down on paper (with no intentions of having it published).

In 2005, after having fifteen copies of the manuscript printed at Office Depot, he gave each one of his six kids a copy for Christmas.

The rest he distributed to a handful of close friends—two of whom were Jacobsen and Cummings—who urged him to get it published.

In 2007, after the manuscript had been turned down by twenty-six traditional publishers, Young, Jacobsen, and Cummings collaborated together and self-published The Shack through Jacobsen’s and Cummings’ publishing company, Windblown Media.

Astonishingly—through primarily word-of-mouth marketing—the book sold 1 million copies by June 2008, landing it on USA TODAY’s Best Selling Books list.

It was the No. 1 paperback trade fiction seller on the New York Times Best Sellers’ List from June 2008 to early 2010.

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association presented The Shack with the “Diamond Award” for sales of over 10 million copies in 2009.

To date, the book has sold more than 20 million copies.

Numbers don’t lie.

No one can deny the impact The Shack book has had on many lives.

If this post is your first introduction to The Shack book, you might be wondering why it stirred up embers of controversy in some Christian circles.

To learn more, you will need to read my next two posts in this series:

“What I Loved about The Shack (Part 2)”

“My Personal Reflections on The Shack (Part 3)”

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If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to check out all of my books and my video series based on my first devotional.