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Philip Yancey is a columnist and editor at large of Christianity Today and cochair of the editorial board for Books and Culture. His books include Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church (2001), Reaching for the Invisible God (2000), The Bible Jesus Read (1999), What's So Amazing About Grace? (1998), The Jesus I Never Knew (1995), Where is God When It Hurts (1990), and many other books.

His latest book is Rumors of Another World: What on Earth Are We Missing? (Zondervan).

Unlike many of your previous books, this one is written for people on the "borderlands of belief." Who are those people?

Borderlands are marginal area between two clearly defined areas, like the areas some countries are still fighting over. And I find people—actually, I'm in this category—who because of wounds from the past are fleeing the church or are recovering from the church, but still believe that was something that was touched deeply in their soul.

Then there are other people who don't know what to do with the church. It seems like a totally alien experience to them. They go and see these people raise their hands, and they stand up and sit down, and they don't know when to stand up or sit down and it seems like this strange language. It's another planet.

So the people I direct this book to are in the borderlands, some of them going away from the church, some of them going very warily toward the church, and both are the kind of people you meet who say, "I'm spiritual but not religious."

What was the trigger for Rumors of Another World?

C.S. Lewis wrote a book called Mere Christianity. And I suppose this is my Even More Mere Christianity. I think the church has missed the boat in trying to figure out how to put together the invisible world with the visible world. We all live in this visible world that we can touch and smell and see and hear. And yet, as Christians, we believe that there's also an invisible world going on that's more important and more long-lasting than this world. So how do we live in the middle of this visible world by the rules of the invisible? That's what I'm struggling with.

And I think the church very often flees this world. It's scary.

So you take something like sex, Oh, it's dangerous. You can get in trouble so we'll just, present God as anti-sex. And the church has that reputation of being anti-sex. Well my goodness, God created sex. God invented it. And I think he did it with a sense of humor, best I can tell. And rather than fleeing the visible world, because we don't understand it or because it's dangerous to us, I would rather understand each of those things as rumors and track them to our source.

And so thoughtful people, as they kind of get this sense of rumors or inklings, and they begin to suspect that there is a God.

They do. And then every once in awhile something happens that calls into question our whole culture. September 11, 2001, was one of those events. You may remember the week after September 11, all commercials went off television, all comedians went off television, all sporting events were cancelled. That was something: Here we're an entertainment culture, a media culture, a commercial culture, but at a moment of national crisis, it exposed how hollow those things are. We were better off without them for that week of intensity.

Evil is a kind of rumor. When something like that happens, when people decide to plow into a building and kill 3,000 people, people say, "That shouldn't be. There's something wrong with that. This is not the way the world is supposed to be."

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47