Next month, the author of The Shack will be joining a public online chatroom to discuss his No. 1 New York Times best-selling book, which has received strong praise from some Christian circles and strong criticism from others.

Both fans and critics of William P. Young’s surprise best-seller will get the opportunity to submit questions to the author as part of Abunga.com’s bi-weekly “Authors at Abunga” chat, which connects avid book readers with their favorite authors.

Though Young had not originally intended the novel to be for public consumption, since its debut on the market last year, The Shack has reaped in a surprising amount of success, generating a large amount of buzz – both positive and negative – within Christian circles.

The Shack tells the fictional redemptive story of Mackenzie Allen Phillips, whose daughter is tragically abducted and murdered during a family vacation.

Four years after the tragedy, Phillips receives a note, supposedly from “God,” inviting him back to the abandoned shack where evidence of his daughter’s murder had been found. When Phillips accepts the offer and returns to the shack, he enters into a kind of spiritual therapy session with “God,” who appears in the form of a jolly African-American woman and calls herself “Papa;” Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit.

“This is a story of one believer’s brokenness and how God reached into that pain and pulled him out and as such is a compelling story of God’s redemption,” explained author and former pastor Wayne Jacobson, who was part of a team that worked with Young on the manuscript for over a year and also is part of Windblown Media, the company formed to print and distribute this book.

“The pain and healing come straight from a life that was broken by guilt and shame at an incredibly deep level,” Jacobson wrote in his personal blog, “and he (Young) compresses into a weekend the lessons that helped him walk out of that pain and find life in Jesus again.”

Young says he had suffered sexual abuse in New Guinea as the child of Canadian missionaries and spent a decade in therapy trying to earn back his wife’s and family’s trust after an extramarital affair 15 years ago.

In 2005, Young started writing what would eventually be The Shack to show how he had healed by forging a new relationship with God.

Source – Christianpost