By Lloyd Mackey

THE SHACK is a runaway bestseller, with a unique connection to a Victoria pastor.

Author William Paul Young and rector Harold Munn have a very special reason to be helping Munn’s congregants understand The Shack – which Young released in 2008, to great popular acclaim.

Munn was born in 1947, in Victoria’s Royal Jubilee Hospital. Young’s mother, Bernice, was a nurse-in-training at the hospital, and was present at Munn’s birth.

He only weighed one pound, and was expected to die momentarily. This was his mother’s sixth pregnancy; the rest had ended in miscarriages.

Continue article >>

For whatever reason, the baby did not die – and Bernice was left to care for little Harold, awaiting the inevitable.

But the inevitable did not come. Harold gained strength, left the hospital in two years, grew to manhood and became an Anglican clergyman, like his father – who had been a rector in Victoria and, later, a bishop in northern B. C. Harold Munn has been rector of the historic Church of St. John the Divine, at Quadra, near Pandora, for the past 12 years.

After completing nurse’s training, Bernice married Henry Young.

The couple went to Irian Jaya, in southeast Asia, where Paul was born. The Youngs were Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries.

Years later, after Young had written The Shack, the now-Anglican minister that the then-student nurse had cradled and kept warm in 1947 had a most interesting and moving follow-up encounter.

August 2010