FIELDS OF GRACE

On May 11th, a small plane carrying five young adults, en route to a Christian youth rally held by Teen Mania Ministries, crashed in a Kansas field, skidding 200 yards before hitting a tree and bursting into flames. Only two survived the crash: 27 year old ex-marine Austin Anderson, who would die the next morning, and his friend Hannah Luce, the daughter of Teen Mania founder and mega-preacher Ron Luce.

To the outside world, she’d always been the dutiful daughter of Evangelical royalty – a theology degree from Oral Roberts, a staff position in her father’s ministry. By the time she was seven she was preaching to stadiums alongside her dad. But the facts hide a more complex story, culminating in the tragic events of May 11th. You’d have to know Hannah to know that she’d joined her father’s ministry to get closer to him, after years of questioning his beliefs. That only weeks earlier, Hannah, Austin, and her best friend Garrett (also killed in the crash) spent most evenings smoking under a bridge near school, debating theology and asking themselves the scariest question of all, for children of Evangelicals – did they really believe? The answer, Hannah says now, is unequivocally yes. She found God in Austin’s strength as he took care of her, even as his own body failed. In the miracle of a car that appeared out of nowhere, on a dirt road in the in Kansas, to rescue them. In the memories of her friend Garrett, whom she loved deeply and unconditionally. But it wasn’t and isn’t her father’s God, a fact that may shock many in the Christian community. Matt Lauer and NBC have committed to doing a one-hour special Hannah’s story. The media knows only the barest details: that a gorgeous 22-year-old survived the crash, that she remained lucid the entire time. What they don’t know is the story behind Hannah and her friends’ plans to change her father’s ministry from within. Written with the help of NYT Bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author Robin Gaby Fisher, My Soul to Keep will be a deeply moving story of spirituality and friendship, written with all the honesty and conviction of that other bad-girl of Christianity, Anne Lamott, but with the intrigue of a thrilling survival narrative like Alive – a story which only Hannah, the sole survivor and heir to her father’s legacy, can tell.