Paul Young, author of ‘The Shack,’ coming to Ashland Theological Seminary

Paul Young, author of the bestselling book, “The Shack,” is coming to central Ohio as part of an event sponsored by Ashland Theological Seminary. The community-wide lecture will be held on April 14 at 7 p.m. in Myers Convocation Center on the Ashland University campus.

Tickets for the event are $20 per person, and are available online at http://seminary.ashland.edu/, at Aroma’s Coffee Coliseum in Ashland and the Bookery in Mansfield. For those in the Akron and Canton areas, tickets also are available at Berean Christian Stores in Copley and Canton.

With 10 million copies now in print, “The Shack” continues on the New York Times Bestseller List for the 84th consecutive week, including 52 weeks at No. 1. It has been on the USA Today Top 150 List for more than 100 weeks and was ranked by USA Today as the sixth best-selling book of 2008. “The Shack” was ranked by Bookscan as the seventh best-selling book of 2008 and the third best-selling book of 2009.

“The Shack” also continues to make waves in foreign markets. It has been translated into 34 languages. In Brazil, more than one million copies have now been sold and in Germany, the book currently sits at No. 3. The Shack has also become a bestseller in Canada, the U.K., South Africa and South Korea. Articles about “The Shack” have appeared in “Newsweek,” “Time,” “People” and the New York Times.

The book, “The Shack,” is about Mackenzie Allen Philips’ youngest daughter, Missy, who was abducted during a family vacation. Evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in the midst of his great sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.

Against his better judgment, he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.

In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant, “The Shack” wrestles with the timeless question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?” The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him.

Young considers himself a “very simple guy” with one wife, six children, two daughters-in-law and two grandchildren on the way. He works as a general manager, janitor and inside sales person for a friend who owns a small manufacturers rep company in Milwaukie, Ore. He lives in a small rented house in Gresham, Ore., that his wife, Kim, has made into a marvelous home.

Young was born a Canadian and raised among a stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was New Guinea. He said he suffered great loss as a child and young adult, and now enjoys the “wastefulness of grace” with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

The journey for Young has been both incredible and unbearable, a desperate grasping after grace and wholeness. Young has experienced the pain of trying to adjust to different cultures, life losses that were almost too staggering to bear, living with an underlying volume of shame so deep and loud that it constantly threatened any sense of sanity, dreams obliterated by personal failure, and hope so tenuous that only death seemed to offer a solution. More powerfully, he has experienced the potency of love and forgiveness, the arduous road of reconciliation, the surprises of grace and community, of transformational healing and the unexpected emergence of joy.

Ashland Theological Seminary is a graduate division of Ashland University. With campuses in Ashland, Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus, Ashland Theological Seminary integrates theological education with Christ-centered transformation as it equips men and women for ministry in the church and the world.