He's a religion writer who is clear about his goals. "What I want to do, as a Christian author," Philip Yancey told me in a recent interview, "is to express the good news-ness of the gospel.

"So very often, the church conveys bad news. News of judgment, or anger, or division. And when it does that—when it sounds like bad news—that's not the gospel that Jesus brought. He brought a gospel of good news. And I'm just trying to polish and display that good news for as many people as possible."

Few religion writers have observed and recorded the changing face of church in the world today more eloquently than Yancey. He is the author of 16 books that have sold over 5,000,000 copies, and he is an editor-at-large at Christianity Today, for whom he writes a column every other issue.

We met during Vision New England's Congress 2002 in Boston in January, at which he was a featured speaker.

Yancey feels that today's church is going through different phases, which he parallels with marriage. "There's the honeymoon phase," he observes, "and to me that's the most exciting. When I go to places like the Philippines or Brazil or parts of Africa, the enthusiasm and the spirit and vitality of the church are amazing—even in circumstances that are far more difficult than most of us are familiar with. They are facing poverty and disease and many other challenges, and yet the church is vibrant there. Even in prisons I've visited. I've found some of the most exciting communities of believers I've ever met in those awful places.

"Then you to go to Europe, for example, where the churches are still there as buildings, but they're primarily museums. You don't see true worshipers. And even in England, with its great Christian heritage, maybe six percent of the population will be in church on a Sunday. Farther afield, in Australia, the figure may be ten percent.

"In the United States, the situation is different. It's more like the 25th anniversary stage. The honeymoon's over. We've developed our own problems within the church, and yet we are still being kind of faithful. But we have those downtimes—the real difficult periods. And yet a lot of strength—a lot of good, practical theology—is coming out of the church here."

Yancey says that he is enormously encouraged by what he observes currently in the church in the United States compared to the church he grew up in. "I see a lot less of the rigid legalism and judgmentalism and exclusivism that I experienced. There's less emphasis on denominationalism or division. We are increasingly oriented around the things that we hold in common."

He sees less division between what people believe and how they put those beliefs into practice. He says that there used to be a fear of the social gospel. Now there's much less polarity. Most churches are now accepting health in all of its aspects—spiritual and physical and emotional—and are addressing, with different emphases, all three of those. "To me, that's a sign of maturity that didn't exist, say, 50 years ago."

It became easier for Yancey to think and write about these issues ten years ago, when he and his wife, Janet, moved from downtown Chicago to Colorado. His own faith had settled down enough to free him to become more introspective. Up until that point, he had seen himself simply as a journalist, "leeching life from other people.

"Of course, Chicago was great for that. There were always sirens and car alarms going off. Every time I walked out my door, somebody was being mugged or having a noisy personal crisis. Wonderful to write about, but not so good for the introspection."

So they moved to Colorado primarily to reflect a change that Yancey wanted to accomplish in his writing. And the books that resulted—The Jesus I Never Knew, What's So Amazing About Grace? and now, Soul Survivor—clearly show a more personal flavor.

For Yancey, every book involves self-discovery. He doesn't really know what he's going to say until he sits down in front of his computer. And he questions himself continually: "What do I think about Jesus? Why do I find so little grace in the church, when that seems to be the most important thing that we are to convey to the world? Or, as an early book title poses, Where Is God When It Hurts? Those are some of the topics that I've picked up since moving out to Colorado."

Yancey has also reshaped and expanded some of his strongest magazine articles in book form, weaving them together with a subtle autobiographical flavor. Several chapters in Soul Survivor profile people he was grateful to learn from—and to be challenged by. And late last year he reworked some of the material in Where Is God When It Hurts? for a paperback version that was specially issued after 9/11, in the hope that it would bring comfort to "grieving and questioning people" in the United States and many other parts of the world.

Another source of ideas for Yancey's books is his wife, Janet, whom he describes as a "strong extrovert"—completely unlike him. She ran a ministry for senior citizens in the poorest part of Chicago, dealing with homeless and welfare people; then became deeply involved in hospice work; and is now chaplain in a nursing home in Colorado.

"Most of these jobs have been tough and emotionally draining for her. She'd see and hear everything—especially in Chicago. And she'd come home and tell these incredible stories. And I'd say, 'Man, if I could do that, just think of the great material I'd have to write about.' And then I would think, 'Yeah, but I wouldn't be nearly as good as Janet is at helping to heal them.' But at least I'm able to borrow some of her stories and work them into my articles and books."

Yancey learned years ago that you never get anything written if you just sit around waiting for inspiration. He tries to be at his desk from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day. He normally spends about five days working on a full-length article for, say, Christianity Today—40 percent researching, 20 percent writing, and 40 percent revising.

"Books can take up to 18 months," he explains. "I may spend six months in libraries or at my computer just shuffling around. Going through books in my own library, preparing, outlining, getting ready, figuring out what I'm going to say.

"Then there's that tense, stressful period where I have to actually put the words down on paper. After that, the cleanup part is very relaxing to me, because I figure I probably can't make the piece any worse, but surely I can improve it. I can just sit back and reshape it. Change words. Take chunks out that aren't working. I usually end up cutting about 25 percent of a completed book."

Yancey says that it's during his research stage that he really does his thinking. When he takes a topic, it's a giant puzzle. There are all sorts of rabbit trails he spends days on that don't end up in the book, but the very process of going down those trails teaches him what the real trail is.

"I write the first draft for myself. Then, after I've got something down and got a little distance from it, I remind myself that the experience of writing a book is very different from the experience of reading a book. I'm writing after spending months in libraries. I'm totally fascinated by everything related to this topic.

"But even slow readers wouldn't spend more than about eight hours reading my book. They're not captivated by my topic, as I am. Their experience of reading is going to be different from my experience of writing the book. So, in that editing phase I've got to disconnect my own investment as an author and come at it from a different perspective, with a reverence for the reader, who is really the one in charge."

Yancey readily affirms that, for him, prayer plays a key part in the creative process.

"Prayer for me—not just in relation to my writing but to my life in general—is a process of handing worries, anxieties, angers, over to God. Putting them in His hands, and freeing myself to be much more the kind of spokesman that I think He wants me to be.

"At the beginning of the day, the essential task is an orienting of my mind. It's setting aside the accumulation from the weekend, the car that needs repair—all those things going on in the perimeter of my mind—and truly focusing on the material that's in front of me."

When asked which of his books has brought the warmest response from readers, Yancey doesn't hesitate: "It would definitely be Amazing Grace, mainly because the letters I get tend to be personal stories.

"People will say, "I read your book and then realized, right here in my own family, that I hadn't spoken to this first cousin for 20 years because of some family feud we had.' Or 'I have a neighbor who's gay and I didn't let my kids play in his yard, and I realize how judgmental I've been toward him. And even though I don't approve of his behavior, I need to treat him as a person.'

"Some of these letters are just unbelievably intimate—sometimes spread over 16 to 18 handwritten pages. And there's nothing really more satisfying or humbling to me as a writer than to see that the things that I was dealing with aren't just limited to me. I can throw them out there as seeds, and they can actually take root and make changes."

Yancey recalls a letter he received from a woman during the civil war in Lebanon. She said that PLO soldiers had come in with machine guns and taken over her apartment.

"I still had to pay the rent, and the utilities, and the phone, and they were living there!" the woman wrote. "But after reading your book I realized I had such an ungracious attitude toward these people. And I needed to overcome that."

"Meanwhile," says Yancey, "I'm sitting here thinking, 'Boy! When I wrote the book, I was thinking more about the neighbor whose dog messes up my yard. Those kinds of everyday things.'

"It humbles me to hear these kinds of responses to things that I've struggled with—in a very different context," says Yancey. "They tell their stories and, to my amazement, tell me how they came to terms with their crisis and how they acted after being convinced that they had not been gracious.

"If they'd just called me up and said: 'Look, here's my situation. This is what I'm facing. It's really bad. What should I do?' I wouldn't have known what to say.

"But they pick up a book—which happens to be my book—sit there seemingly unthreatened, because a book is by nature less threatening, and come up with their own solutions, which they apply to the situation. And they end up helping me! In ways like that, some of my books become far more than I ever envisioned while writing them. It's very gratifying."

Yancey says that what's surprised him most about Amazing Grace is that he gets as many letters from high-school and college students as he does from grandparents, although they're very different.

"The young people are still forming their approach to life and its problems, and the power of grace strikes a chord with them, so they say, 'That's the spirit I want.' I love the vibrancy of young people. I suspect we all want to affect them early so that they learn to channel that natural passion in a gracious way.

"Grandparents, on the other hand, tend to say with gentle regret, 'Oh, what might have been if only I'd known this years before! I haven't lived a life of grace. I've been judgmental. I've been harsh toward my family. I've not been gracious toward my own children.' But even this admission, coupled with a realization that it's never too late to change, can be a thrill for them, too.

"These letter writers approach issues differently from me, but in my personal attitude and spirit, I need that correction. I need to be sure that I'm showing grace toward people who have been wounded in the past. These are often people who have lost their way and need, above all, to experience the healing grace that God offers.

"So, I keep asking myself, 'Will what I'm writing right now make a difference? Will it have an enriching effect on anybody?' As a writer, you don't always know. But you keep on in faith and in trust that it will happen again."

We returned finally to Yancey's remark in Soul Survivor about his having absorbed "some of the worst the church has to offer, yet still [landing] in the loving arms of God." Was this a fair reflection of his writing life?

"Yes, I think that's really the one theme I keep circling around one way or another. Today we hear a lot of stories about people who have been saved from a life of drugs and alcohol, and the like. But that's not my story. My story is being saved from toxic religion, and realizing that the constructions that humans make in the name of God can be very different from God Himself. They can actually disguise God and make Him more difficult to know.

"My whole journey has been a way of going through those constructions and finding out what the truth really is here. Who is the real Jesus?—the Jesus I never knew. What is so amazing about grace?—because I didn't experience it growing up. My recent books are variations on that theme."

Even more pensive than before, Yancey concludes: "All we have as writers is our own point of view, our perspective, the events of our lives. In my case, a very unhealthy church background, growing up in the fundamentalist South.

"My church was on the wrong side, as I now see it, of all the major social issues of the day—war, poverty, racism. And here am I trying to salvage from that distortion the truth of the gospels. This is my quest. This is my story. And I will always be spiraling around those same hallmark events in my life to try to make sense of them."