Finding Hope Beyond Failed Leaders and Church Hurt
Inside This Episode
As the host of “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” podcast, Christianity Today’s Mike Cosper explored how narcissism and spiritual abuse can wreak havoc in a church. In this interview with Maybe God guest host Justin Brierley, Mike shares his own experiences with harm and healing in church life through his latest book, Land of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found.
Read Mike Cosper’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Land-My-Sojourn-Landscape-Faith/dp/0830847340
Head to YouTube to watch Maybe God’s full-length interviews!
Transcript
Justin Brierley: Hello and welcome to the Maybe God podcast. I'm Justin Brierley, guest hosting this week's edition of the show.
My guest today is Mike Cosper, creator of the hugely popular podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and author of a new book, Land of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found.
Now, the evangelical church, especially in the USA, has experienced a number of convulsions in recent years: Scandals, falls from grace, politicization, tribalism. It's left a lot of people disillusioned, even deconstructing their faith.
Now, Mike has experienced some of that himself and has been charting it certainly. But this is a hopeful story in this book, as we'll hear. I'm looking forward to drawing out some of the lessons that Mike has learned along the way.
So Mike, welcome along to the show.
Mike Cosper: Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be here.
Justin Brierley: It's great to talk to you. Before we touch on the book, I was one of those people downloading The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill religiously, not long after it came out. Why was it so popular? Why did it strike such an amazing chord across the world?
Mike Cosper: You know, I think there was a couple of things. One was, it had been long enough that many people had kind of forgotten the story. I think there were a number of people who had kind of forgotten who Mark was and what a fascinating figure he was, how it's riveting to listen to Mark, even if you disagree with him. He's always entertaining.
So I think there was an element of it where it was long enough that it felt new. It felt refreshed. But then I also think it just... you know, even for people who were close to it at the time, there was always a sense of what really happened there and why did that happen?
And then the larger question, I think, being, how does that tie into all the other scandals, all the other problems that evangelicals have been dealing with in the last five, six years here? In some ways, Mark's downfall was kind of a harbinger of a lot of things that have continued ever since.
Justin Brierley: And for those who are watching and listening, who maybe don't know what Mars Hill is, who Mark is, that's been referenced, it's Mark Driscoll and really the story that was told very well in that documentary series was really about how this charismatic church leader came to public attention, the church grew in Seattle, but also some of what led to the toxicity and implosion, really, ultimately, of his ministry in that church. Obviously, he continues to minister in a different place now. This is, in a sense, an ongoing thing.
In a way, the series wasn't simply about Mark Driscoll. It was about the church at large. And in a way, that's very much what you are looking at in this new book as well. Fascinatingly, from the title to the cover to the chapters as well, one interesting thing about this book, Land of My Sojourn, is that it really focuses on places, especially in the land of Israel, stories from the Old and New Testament, where prophets and Jesus and His followers are doing things. Why did you choose that as the central metaphor, this landscape, if you like, in a story that's ultimately about your own journey with the evangelical church?
Mike Cosper: Yeah, it's funny. I tell this a little bit in the book, but I didn't set out to write this book. I was literally under contract to write a book about the Sermon on the Mount as kind of a template for public witness. But I had been through this experience with my own church, my own ministry kind of falling apart, being pushed out, and was reckoning with that as I was trying to write this other project. And I just kept starting over. I was just perpetually stuck.
One of the things that happened over those years, I made a couple of different trips to the Holy Land with a couple of different groups, and there was this one day, I'll never forget it, there was this day I was talking with two friends, and we started talking... for some reason, we started talking about the transfiguration. I remember one of them kind of mocking Peter, and saying, you know, Peter being the rash one... the kinds of things preachers love to say about Peter. Oh, he's the loudmouth, he's this unrestrained guy.
And for whatever reason, on one of those trips to the Holy Land, we went to this place called Mount Precipice. It's just outside of Nazareth. When you look out off of Mount Precipice, Mount Tabor is to your left. And it's this weird, otherworldly-looking rock that just kind of sits... you know, grass-covered rock that sits out on the plain.
My visit to there at the time was so vividly put me inside that story. And I so connected with the sense that I'm sure Peter experienced in that, which was, man, something incredible is happening here. We're in this historic place, we're in this beautiful place.
You think about all the things he's seen Jesus say and do over the years. And you think about him for however old he was, his entire lifetime before he meets Jesus. He grows up hearing the stories of Moses and Elijah. And so he's standing on Mount Tabor, Jesus transfigures, Moses and Elijah appear, and his response is, should we build tents, should we build tabernacles, should we stay here? And I so got that feeling. I remember being in that conversation and going, No, I totally get what he's saying. He's going, how do I make this last? I want to stay here. I want to keep this going forever.
Anyway, so I was supposed to write this other book. I was stuck on this idea. I was stuck in my own version, you know, my own script, my own story. And I sat down one morning and was just like, you know what, I just got to get this out of my system. And I wrote what ended up being the first chapter of the book, which is this sort of weaves together the landscape of Mount Tabor, the landscape of that story, Peter's story. And then this sort of foundational story for our own church, which has the same kind of feeling. It's like when ministry is good, when church is good, you feel that way. You want it to last forever. So it really flowed organically from there.
And I think there was something about the geographic space, like being in these places where these stories took place that somehow or another talking about that and thinking about that helped me root myself in those stories as well as in my own time and place, you know, here in Louisville, Kentucky.
Justin Brierley: I mean, you don't mention much in the book, The Rise and Fall of Mars podcast, but it becomes clear as you read the book why you were so well equipped to tell that story, because in a way, to some extent, it mirrored your own journey of experiencing church, a very arguably not dissimilar kind of church in its young days. Very creative, fast-growing, full of young people interested in kind of sharing the gospel in creative new ways, especially around sort of edgy music and that kind of thing. It must have been an incredibly exciting time, even, you know, as obviously the story changed over time.
Tell us about those early days. I guess this was arguably have been part of what we might term now the emerging church in this sort of mid-2000s.
Mike Cosper: Yeah. Yeah. So we planted... our first Sunday was September 17th, 2000. It feels like it was yesterday in a lot of ways. Again, very similar to Mars Hill, swimming in the same water. You know, they were a few years ahead of us and we definitely learned a lot from Mark and what he was about.
But we were these like Gen X and you know, elder millennial types and had felt displaced in the churches that we'd grown up in, very much immersed in the seeker-sensitive world. I grew up playing guitar and worship bands and a seeker-friendly church. You know, I think the big debate was, well, is it secret sensitive or is it secret friendly or all that? I can remember all that stuff.
I can also remember the Sunday, you know, 12 years before that, where, you know, the special music was a Steven Curtis Chapman song and you had a whole coalition of people walk out. So that's how far back I go.
But anyway, for us there was this real sense of like church didn't feel like home. We had actually been through... in my church, in particular, there had been a leadership problem. In a church that several friends of mine went to as well, same kind of thing.
We wanted a church that spoke our heart language. We wanted a church that felt like us when we gathered. And so that was kind of the spirit in which Sojourn came into being. Really truly started out with, you know, a dozen people or so in an apartment praying on Wednesday nights, and slowly, but surely God brought this group of people together. It was an extraordinary community to be a part of.
By the time I left in 2015, we had grown, we were four locations, 3,500, 3,800 people, depending on the Sunday. And had seen just a lot of extraordinary stuff happen.
Justin Brierley: And you pour your life and your soul into it when you're doing that. It's your family, it's your identity. It's everything in a way. So tell us what happened along the way that led to you ultimately leaving under very difficult circumstances in 2015.
Mike Cosper: Yeah. You know, you try to sort of trace what happened and when did it start to go wrong and where were the problems? And it's hard to answer that because you know, in some ways you can see little hints of problems earlier on. But I would say, I think for me, I always go back to around 2010, which was about the time we started to get into the multi-site thing. And what I always found myself saying was that as the church grew, it felt like one of the things we got detached from was what made Sojourn a special place.
And really what made it a special place was that commitment to place, commitment to people and place. You know, as you get bigger and bigger... it's like branding in some ways that the wider an audience you have to get, the less specific you can be. The more you want to go wide, the more you want to go broad, the more the idiosyncrasies that make you really uniquely suited for a neighborhood and a community and everything else, all those sort of interesting edges have to get filed smooth.
For me and for a lot of people who had been around from the beginning, it definitely felt like a loss, even as the church was growing and even as we were encouraged by a lot of that. But that ambition to grow really began to kind of consume all things.
And then there were unhealthy patterns with certain leaders. You started to see the turnover of the staff where in a period of two or three years, our executive team had turned over. All but myself and the lead pastor had gone. You saw other things happening. You saw staff burning out, you saw things that felt like you were betraying your core values, core ideas about what it meant to be the church.
The more I raised concerns over those things, the more difficult things became for me. I started to look to the exits. I had a lot of mentors in my life who were saying, "It's time to go. This is not good for you, not good for your soul anymore. Again, part of the reason why Israel plays a role in the story, I actually came home from my first trip to the Holy Land in 2015, get a phone call, and said, "Come in tomorrow. We're going to have a conversation about reorg the whole staff." And I was like, "Wait a minute. I'm on the exec team. Feels like this is a little late for this phone call. Like what's happening here?" I should have seen it coming, I suppose.
And then I came in the next morning and they laid out a new org chart for the org. If you've ever seen an org chart, you know, it's kind of one of these spider web-looking documents where all the staff are connected to each other. And I looked the thing over and I realized my name isn't on it. It was a very unsubtle way of showing me the door.
That began this sort of wilderness journey for me of having to figure out... I mean, up until then, I'd been on the staff 15 years. I really believe this was my life. I would retire from here.
Justin Brierley: You say in the book, despite recognizing some of the difficulties and the challenges, and you know, that, that there were some unhelpful dynamics and patterns going on, you said, you always kind of had this hope that you were only one good conversation away from sorting it out, that it could all come together again. So where was that coming from and why ultimately was that never going to be the case?
Mike Cosper: I mean, honestly, I think that's part of what makes toxic and unhealthy systems in the church so powerful and so difficult to break is because they rely on this presumption of a certain kind of goodness on the part of the other staff members. A certain level of character. Like whatever else is going on wrong, whatever kind of conflict and chaos there is, at my core, I still believe we're all believers here. We want the same things. We were fundamentally committed to the same values.
And so that's where you always feel like, man, if we just had the circumstances right where we could kind of confront the sin, you know, work through the conflict, then we'd find ourselves at a place where we'd say, Okay, we got through that and now it's better, and we can get back to what mattered.
It took a long time to arrive at a place where I was able to acknowledge to myself, like, no, actually, we're fundamentally not committed to the same thing. I'm not saying these leaders weren't believers, but there was not a common fundamental commitment to one another that I had thought had been there the whole time.
Justin Brierley: It came to a rather, at that point, sad and somewhat messy end for you. You say you kind of entered this kind of wilderness period. I guess at this point, having started this and being part of the core team in these very exciting years, a certain amount of disillusion sets in at that point. I mean, again, this is something I picked up again from The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, but you talked about sometimes the fact that the growth of a church can sometimes outstrip the maturity of its leaders. I mean, you were very young when you started, I'm sure you were around young. I mean, is that a problem sometimes when something becomes successful and it almost... that becomes part of the problem that people aren't ready for in that sense, successful churches of that nature?
Mike Cosper: Yeah, most definitely. I think one of the elements of it as well is that there is... This might sound controversial, I think, to some people. So I'd be interested in your take on this as well, because you've observed a lot of this over the years I know from your own work.
There is such thing as a formula that grows a church. The problem is that it takes a lot of talent, right? Like the magical element is like there's a certain kind of talent that's necessary to grow a church, talent from certain kinds of charismatic leaders and musical talent and production talent and whatever. But when those things come together, you can pretty much guarantee a growth curve and you can often guarantee a pretty intense growth curve.
And so I think there is this thing... I remember being at a church conference one time and hearing somebody from the platform say, you know, every time a church grows, it's a miracle. And I just had this check in the back of my head where I was like, No, we know the levers to pull. I had led two capital campaigns by then and we had planted churches and planted different sites. And we always kind of knew like this is kind of the formula you have to put together. And if you have the formula, people are going to come and it's going to grow and they're going to come from other churches. And you have to figure out how to manage these things and all of that.
So I think that's one of those things where when I think about how we talk about this stuff all the time, I'm like, man, the church has to be honest about, you know... no, we actually do know how to do this. There's a reason there are books and conferences on growing your church. It does fundamentally come back to a certain kind of talent. But talent isn't character, right? Talent isn't virtue. Charisma isn't virtue. Those things matter, but if they're not putting check in some way, you're just asking for trouble.
Justin Brierley: I guess my next question is, is there anything wrong in principle with there being kind of levers mechanisms for growing? Should we sort of say, no, that's a terrible way of treating the church as a kind of... you know, I don't know some kind of a CEO of a company and you've got your strategic growth plan and everything else? Or is that fine as long as the character of the person at the top is essential.
Mike Cosper: Man, that's a great question. I don't think there's an easy answer to that question. I mean, what do you think the answer to that question is?
Justin Brierley: What do I think? I'm the one interviewing you-
Mike Cosper: I know but it's a provocative question. It's interesting.
Justin Brierley: I've always said that I think there are healthy, large churches and unhealthy large churches. There are healthy small churches and unhealthy small churches. So I'm not against the idea of large churches and growing churches. Obviously, they share characteristics to some extent of what... but you can still get unhealthy and healthy versions of those. And a lot of that is actually about the dynamics going on and the motivations, I suppose, a lot of the time at the top.
Mike Cosper: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think the thing I would add to it as well is there's character and then there's the way we define our ends. So if we think about the different levers you can pull, you know, the quality of the music, the skill of the preacher, etc., etc., if we think of all of those things as means, then what are the ends that we're after? And if the ends are just as many people in seats as possible, as much money in the bank as possible, if it's the ABCs, as they used to say, attendance, building, and cash, right? If that's the ends, then you've created a machine that really can chew people up and you can get really consumed by those growth curves on all three of those elements.
But if we're defining the ends in different ways, if the ends are defined by real evangelism, not just how many people came, but are people actually getting converted? Are they being discipled? Are we seeing real-life transformation? And then are we measuring community?
I mean, something I have said for the last number of years is when people say, well, what are we supposed to measure if we don't measure attendance? I've said this many times. I would love to see a mega church, like a 10,000-member plus church spend a year where they don't count attendance on Sundays, but they do account attendance at funerals and they count hospital visits. See what that does to the health of your church. Because that's measuring ends. Are you showing up for people in times of real grief and real suffering?
Like keep growing your church, keep doing your Sunday service, keep doing all the things you do to normally grow. But try to get figured out what that baseline number is and try to grow that over the course of a year and see what that does to the community. That's that difference between sort of means and ends. It's a different set of goals that I think is worth thinking about.
Justin Brierley: I mean, is there a problem that obviously so many of these ministries have been built on the back of very talented individuals, charismatic pastors, people like, as you say, Mark Driscoll, who, whatever you think of his theology or his leadership was just a very talented speaker and continues to be. And likewise... You know, because I did way back in the day... I mean, this is going back to 2009, believe it or not. I did a kind of radio documentary on another Mars Hill, Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church in - where is it? Michigan. And at the time he was leading that.
At the time in 2009, it was the fastest-growing church in America. It was interesting to contrast, you know, him and say, Mark Driscoll, because they were very different theologically, obviously. Mark Driscoll, very conservative, Rob Bell, increasingly leaning kind of more progressive, and so on.
But there was also a lot of characteristics that I noticed were just common between them. You know, both brilliant preachers, both very sort of, you know, that they were able to kind of command a room in a certain way and everything else. Again, Rob Bell's ministry sort of ended under difficult circumstances where he kind of was in conflict, I think in the end with a lot of his congregation and so on and that sort of thing.
Now, I guess, I guess my question on the back of all this is, is there a problem in that sense with the celebrity-driven model of church? Is that ultimately what this comes down to that we tend to put these people on pedestals and it's too much pressure, frankly, on one individual?
Mike Cosper: Yeah, I think there certainly is. I want to say it carefully because I think there's a risk in saying the problem is celebrity, so if we get rid of celebrities, we'll have solved the problem, right? Because it's not quite like that. I mean, part of the problem with celebrities is that, you know, Westerners, Americans, especially, we just happen to like celebrities. And great, you get rid of your celebrity pastor, your congregation is going to go wherever the next celebrity pastor is. They're going to be gone.
So I think there's this element of it that's like... again, I'm not saying if you can't beat them, join them. But I do think there's something to... it's like the Billy Graham thing. You know, we still love Billy Graham. If you're an evangelical, you still probably love Billy Graham. Billy Graham was probably going to be famous in America one way or another, no matter what he was doing.
Billy Graham: The whole universe stands in awe at the love that God showers on this little planet called the Earth. We are the only planet in so far as I know that are in rebellion against God. And yet, in spite of our rebellion, in spite of our disobedience, in spite of our sins, God loves us.
Mike Cosper: He had that kind of charisma. He had that kind of magnetism. He had the TV good looks. He was made for it. What Graham had that is missing in so many of these other cases, one is, and this is very clear when you read the biographies, he had a very, very sensitive conscience that he was very careful about over the years.
He also had the wisdom to submit himself to a kind of a governing board that could really hold him accountable and could create some rules for accountability for him that would keep him out of trouble. I mean, say what you will about the Billy Graham rule. If you actually obey the Billy Graham rule, you've eliminated one major temptation from that's going to be a downfall in your ministry.
There's submission to that sort of thing. Like that's the nature of submission in general is submission to accountability requires lots of inconveniences for you and probably for the people around you. I mean, look at monastic life. That is all submission all the time. It is very inconvenient.
I think there's stuff like that, that we can look at and say, "I don't think you're going to get rid of celebrity, but you certainly can put constraints around it and you can create a healthier culture around it than what we see oftentimes.
Justin Brierley: I mean, the last time we spoke properly, Mike, was when I was presenting the Unbelievable? show and we were doing kind of a retrospective on the very sad case of RZIM, Ravi Zacharias. That's kind of be my area of apologetics for many years. Obviously, everyone was struck by how huge this was when it came out posthumously, that he had been kind of abusive, sexually abusive, and spiritually abusive in various ways.
And that led to essentially the implosion of what was at the time, the world's largest apologetics ministry. But that's just one, sadly among many stories over the last five or six years that have come to light. There are probably many more names we could mention.
I think some people had kind of got used to the kind of televangelist scandal, you know, the Jim Bakker type thing. And they were like, You could kind of roll your eyes. But when it happened to people within the evangelical world where had incredible amounts of respect and people really had built a lot of their faith journey around, I think it struck really, really particularly hard at that point. I remember just being, yeah, really winded by all of the revelations that came out around Ravi Zacharias.
There was a friend of mine, a Canadian pastor who has sadly been caught up in a scandal in the last few years. Again, he was the last person I expected that to happen to. Here in the UK, just in the last year, and you may not be so familiar with this, Mike, but a very significant church leader, Mike Pilavachi has now been... lots of things coming out about ways he's acted towards interns and young men in his ministry.
Again, you could hardly think of a more influential person who has probably had more of an arguably positive impact on more people's faith in the UK than Mike Pilavachi. So these are not your kind of, Oh, we can just roll our eyes at this televangelist. These are significant people.
So I guess without particularly commenting on any of those specific cases, I guess the question is how on earth do you navigate this when these are people that people have absolutely invested their life and their kind of their faith kind of have flowed out to those ministries in so many ways.
Mike Cosper: Man, it's a great question. I mean, I think this is where you have to sort of pull back a bit and say, what do we make of the institutions that back these people up and have ultimately failed to hold them accountable, have failed to protect the people in their midst? What's the postmortem on the institutions themselves? And what do we learn from that? And then what does transparency look like on the other side of it?
I gotta be honest, like I'm not encouraged by what I see in terms of the self-reflection around all of this. RZIM is a perfect example of that. The institution really protected Ravi. He was the exception to every rule. You know, as the story came out more and more, you just saw ways that he was the exception to every rule because they were so dependent upon him.
When I was reporting the Mars Hill story, I mean, I remember listening to conversations, various conversations, some that were on the record, some that were off the record, some that were recordings of these meetings between elders from all the way back in 2013, 2014. And just listening to these things and thinking about how often there was this sense of deference to Mark, because the sense was, if we don't let... sort of sort of like this. Like, let's not forget that we wouldn't have any of this if Mark weren't here.
And there's a sense in which that's true, but there's also a sense in which like... The smart question to follow that up with is, well, wait a minute. If that's true, then what are we actually protecting here? Like if this is the, if this is the house that Mark built and it's supposed to be the church, have we created something that's not quite the church anymore? Like what is this institution now that we're so carefully preserving?
I say that to say that I think, you know... and again, I don't mean to beat this drum with Billy Graham, but again, Billy Graham did build this institution around him that was intended to prevent certain, very common, very basic human flaws that he was aware of and that he took very seriously and in ways that I don't think a lot of our institutions do.
You've seen this surge of non-denominational church over the years. And you've also seen this push from the church growth movement to kind of strip the denominations of their authority so that the churches can move faster. So the charismatic leaders can move up the chain more quickly and have more power. I think this is a great moment to go, "Hey, what did that get us?" You know?
Again, the last thing I'd say is it just comes back to that question of ends. How are we measuring our success? If success is simply about numbers, if success is simply about the growth of the movement and the sense of excitement and energy that comes from charisma and everything else, then I think we've really got to stop and kind of call that into question as well, and say, well, what are we doing? Like, how are we preparing people for their encounters with death? How are we preparing the institutions for our own deaths? What's going to be here in 30, 40, 50 years when we're all returned to ashes? I don't think that question is being asked hardly at all.
Justin Brierley: Yeah. I think at the center of that there's this sense that we're all still prone to certain forms of idolatry, even when we're, you know, saying we're doing and acting everything in the name of Christ, we can still build these mini idols in our midst, the leader who cannot be questioned, the church that, you know, which we will do everything within our power to defend.
I think the other idol that has come into sharp focus in recent years is politics. That's obviously something that you touch on in the book. And then we're entering another very... I'm sure what will be a very eventful election year. Again, I guess the question is having seen, I suppose, politics sort of has, especially in the US I'd say more probably so than in the UK has been tied so much to, to church and so on. As we see that only seeming to increase and ramp up with the increase, arguably in Christian nationalism and those kinds of that kind of rhetoric, how could the church transcend that? What do we do to engage that when I think it is so difficult actually in our culture for church leaders to speak into that, because it's such a volatile issue, such a divisive issue?
I can understand why many church leaders would kind of maybe give that a pass or even have kind of fallen into a certain sort of pattern of joining in a certain type of political or cultural war, because that's how you engage people. What do we do about all of that, Mike?
Mike Cosper: This is the million-dollar question, right? When Barna put out their state of the pastor survey last year, the 2022 numbers, it was the first time you really saw this surge of pastors who were looking at their jobs and saying, "If I knew I had another job lined up, or if I knew I could start a career somewhere else in life, I'd leave ministry." And it had been surging, you know, since COVID, but somewhat since before then. And then I believe the numbers just came out recently and they've surged again. They've continued to grow.
Politics is a huge part of it. It's not the only thing, but it's a huge part of it. What I think is really true is it's not that if you're a pastor and you say something about political idolatry from the pulpit, it's not that 40% or 50% or 60% of your church is going to start a revolution and try to get you fired. But five or six people will. Absolutely. And that's enough to make life miserable, right? Like five people emailing every day, calling different elders, stirring up trouble with various people. That's enough to make life completely miserable.
And it can happen at both ends of the spectrum. I mean, certainly you see people who are sort of animated by the Christian nationalism thing or the Trump thing in ways that are really toxic, but you also see people who are so animated by fear and anxiety over what, you know, another four years of Trump might be that they're wondering why the pastor isn't preaching a Jeremiah against Trump every single Sunday.
And so pastors are in this really difficult spot. And when they say, "Well, I'm just going to preach the gospel, they quickly also find themselves going, Well, man, the gospel sure does confront cultural idols a lot, you know? So there's no win.
I mean, my posture on this, and obviously I'm not a pastor, I'm a journalist, so it's a different thing, but I've had to kind of resolve, like, I don't think the right thing to do is to stay quiet on this. I don't think you can do it. Because here's what I have found. I have found that by pressing into, yeah, you get a lot of flak and people say terrible things to you about it if you're critical of... you know, Particularly for me, when I'm critical of... Well, honestly, these days, if I'm critical of either administration for either thing, if I'm critical of Trump for the Christian nationalism thing or for dictator for a day or whatever craziness comes out of his mouth, you know, you get this avalanche of angry feedback.
But if I'm critical of the Biden administration for their posture towards abortion or for gender ideology or for any one of a number of other issues, foreign policy issues or whatever it might be, it's the exact same thing because the reaction... and I'm talking about from Christians. The reaction from Christians about it are, well, sure, that might be true, but think about how much worse it would be if we had to deal with Donald Trump or if it was this or whatever. So I mean, it's a constant negative feedback loop. But I don't think you can let your foot off the gas. I think bearing witness means you just keep pressing it.
Justin Brierley: Yeah. And that suggests to me that as we see that kind of the pressure cooker kind of that's on a lot of pastors and, you know, you see them thinking about quitting ministry and so on, it's easy to see why it's only getting worse in this kind of environment. Again, if you're going into this ministry at this point, you've got to kind of go in prepared. You've got to go in spiritually sort of prepared for the fact that this is... it's a bit like a war zone at the moment in some ways. I don't know.
I guess hopefully there are lessons that have been learned from some of the failures of some in the last several years. But at the same time, I can understand why you experienced as a pastor, a certain amount of disillusionment. I thought this was on track and then I was let down in this way and this happened and so on.
I suppose kind of having in the first half of this interview kind of spell that fairly negative picture in many ways of what's happened. I guess I want us to steer towards, okay, how do we see hope? How do we kind of move from disillusionment and disappointment to something that is more like faith? And how did that happen in your own journey, Mike, as you entered this kind of wilderness period, having experienced a lot of the things we've just been talking about yourself personally? What was that process that helped me to work through that journey?
Mike Cosper: For me, it really came back to community. It really came back to friendships. And it was interesting because... somebody pointed this out to me the other day. They said, If you follow the story of your book, at the beginning of it, friendships and relationships are there, right? It's a big part of it.
But so much of what kind of catches the eye of the reader is the trappings of the church itself, the planting of the church, the music, the aesthetics, the culture, you know, all of this kind of stuff. Then you fast forward to the end of the book and you talk about how all of that has kind of changed and evolved in ways that are awkward and frankly awkward based on kind of where you were before. But you also talk about how so many of the friendships that were there at the very beginning are still there now, right? Or have been rebuilt or reestablished or whatever.
And in a sense, like when you think about how in spiritual formation tradition, so much of what it talks about is how wisdom involves God stripping away all of the distracting things to kind of get to the core of what matters in our faith. And that we do cling to the wrong things at times as the things that we think are nurturing our faith are often distractions and all of that.
I certainly wasn't thinking in those terms when I wrote the book, right? But I totally see it in the book. Because at the end, it is the friendships that remained. I mean, it was the friendships that when one thing led to another and my wife and I really felt like we had arrived at a place where faith didn't make sense anymore, all we had was a couple of friends and awkward relationships because they were kind of on a different side of the conflict in some ways than we were to be able to just reach out and go, "Hey, can we just talk? Because we're really despairing right now."
That was the lifeline. I mean, they really came and became a lifeline for us. And then we realized, Oh, wait, they need a lifeline too. They need a place to be able to talk about what they're going through and hear someone be able to say to them, "No, you're not crazy. This has been really hard. You've been through a lot and we can still be friends through this in the season ahead."
So, yeah, I mean, the weird sort of story, I mean the, the last chapter of the book is titled, I'm still here. And it's both I'm still here in the sense that I'm still a Christian, I'm still alive. I've seen friends lose their lives in these deconstruction journeys or in these church failure journeys. But I'm also still at sojourn. I'm still connected to this church. And there's no one more surprised by that than me in, in many ways.
Justin Brierley: I mean that is one of the surprising things. And you reveal that, as I say, in the latter part of the book, that actually you are still part of that church. Now you kind of at one of the campuses that kind of was created and, you know, in time each became its own independent church and so on. But it's interesting you're now living and worshipping in a community that you acknowledge is not perfect and never will be because it's a church. But there's some way in which you've reconciled yourself to that, that actually this is just a messy group of people who are going to get it wrong.
I dunno, maybe some of that idealism of those early years you've just kind of managed to look at what church is in a bit of a different way now?
Mike Cosper: Yeah, I think that's right. There's a temptation to look back. I talk about this in the book too. Like there's a temptation to nostalgia. And the nostalgia piece makes you look back and think, I want to get back to the way things were before. Like, how do we get back to how it was? How do I rebuild what was gone? How do I go home again? In the kind of classic sense of the definition of nostalgia.
I think there's a real danger in that. But at the same time, I think the cynical response that is just as tempting and just as dangerous is a response that wants to look back and say, well, it was all fake, right? It was all narcissism. It was all charisma. It was all these sort of abusive, manipulative ploys to just, you know, whatever it was that you would think an unhealthy leader was about.
I don't think that's true either because I don't think that you can sum up the experience of a church in a single person or a single personality. You were talking about Ravi earlier. Like it's a perfect example. A lot of people came to see Jesus as beautiful and believable because of Ravi. Jesus is not now untrustworthy because it turned out that Ravi was untrustworthy. To be sure, that's not going to be easy for every single person to embrace, right? Because there are some people who are sitting there going, I don't know if that's true.
But ultimately I think more than not and I think ultimately people who try to test that will find that it is true. That even though Ravi was untrustworthy, everything he had to say about Jesus was true. So I think arriving there was... I guess I would put it this way. Arriving there was one of the biggest surprises of all of this was this sense that I can look back, I can look back at those mountaintop experiences and those moments where you didn't want it to end and not feel contempt and also not feel the impulse, which consumed me for years of trying to figure out how do I make that happen again?
Justin Brierley: Yeah. Trying to get back something that was maybe of its time and you can't replicate in some way. I guess what would be your advice to the person who is feeling disillusioned, has deconstructed, maybe had some bad church experiences that have wounded them? Is there a way back? What would be your kind of practical advice to someone who maybe want something but knows that they can't go back to what they once had because they know too much now, if you like?
Mike Cosper: Yeah, totally. I would say a couple of things. One is I think, you know, there is this whole desert tradition in the Christian faith and it's often a midlife transition. Sometimes it's a late-life transition. I think for people who are finding themselves in that place where they're going, I think I'm deconstructing, I'm really wounded. I'm really hurt.
I would say, man, take some time and just familiarize yourself with desert spirituality. That's what it's often referred to as. And take a look at the way the church has talked about these seasons of life where the joy of faith has been stripped away from, you know, whether it was a 12th-century monk or Thomas Merton writing about this stuff in the 1950s and 1960s, or Henri Nouwen writing about this stuff off and on throughout his life or... you know, there's plenty of evangelical writers who've approached this topic as well.
I mean, if there's one thing I really hope people who read my book walk away with it's that encounter with the desert, that encounter with disillusionment, it's actually a really normal part of the Christian life. For me, it was sort of starting with the Psalms and then ultimately finding my way into the story of Peter and really recognizing that what Peter goes through kind of from the beginning of Holy Week, from the triumphal entry to his reconciliation with Jesus on the shores of Galilee, that's a journey of deep spiritual disillusionment and loss.
I want Christians to understand that when you find yourself in that place, it's not because something has gone wrong. It's an apocalypse. It's an eye-opening encounter with reality and God is with you through that and wants to take you to someplace deeper.
One last thing. Part of what scares me about the deconstruction stuff that's happening is that I think for a whole lot of people they're going from one kind of ideological utopianism to another. The first one was a conservative evangelical utopianism. And the next one is a progressive one.
And it's like, well, if we can just all... you know, because you just find people on the other side of it saying that church really hurt me, so I'm going to embrace this radical other vision and it's much more progressive. And they're rejecting the theology of their youth because that was where all the problems were.
Man, it doesn't take scratching the surface of the progressive in the mainline church, or the more traditional churches, the Catholic and Orthodox churches defined, they got a lot of scandals too. Like this stuff happens everywhere. Darkness and evil happens everywhere where there's power in the church.
So, again, I don't want to be too prescriptive here, but I think thinking you'll fix this through a theological solution, rather than a reorientation of your heart to your ideals is risky.
Justin Brierley: There's a very powerful story you tell about your own journey of kind of coming to terms with loss in very different ways of the church that you were part of and your ministry there, but that at the same time, your, your father died very unexpectedly and quickly. And you talk about the fact that you were processing this over a period of weeks, and then suddenly in a barber's chair suddenly it all just came out. Tell us what happened and how you reflected on that in terms of the grief in a sense that maybe you'd been bottling up about a lot of stuff, I suppose, up to that point.
Mike Cosper: Yeah, I'm sitting in this barber's chair and... It's a long story. I'll spare some of the details. But I remember this great joke from the show Curb Your Enthusiasm as I'm sitting in the barber's chair and it involves Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. And my dad was a huge Seinfeld fan. Dad was just a comedy fan. We just grew up in the house with, you know, Mel Brooks and Lonnie Python and Jerry Seinfeld on TV at all times.
And I remember sitting there and I'm just chatting with this barber and I see it was a bottle of Barbicide. It reminds me of the scene from Curb. And it reminded me to text my... it made me think, "Oh, I should text Dad about this," you know? And it clicked for... not the first time. It wasn't the first time I had crossed my mind to text him. But it was one of the first times. And it clicks immediately like, "Oh, he's not there." you know?
But what did click for the first time was the sense of finality of that. Like not just he's not there to get the text, but he's not going to be there to get the text. So he's never going to be there to get the text again because he is gone. And apart from the hope of the resurrection, I will live the rest of my life without, without him. I had spent the four or five years prior to this seeing therapists and spiritual directors and various things trying to get through my own difficulties after leaving ministry and really struggling to do so. And being told over and over again by many of them, "Man, you got to learn to grieve. The real problem for you is you've got to learn to grieve." And I just remember telling one, like, "I have no clue what you're talking about. I just really don't know what you're talking about."
So anyway, with my father's death, what I realized was that grief really is about that finality. Grief is about embracing that finality and just recognizing, no, no, no, it is really saying goodbye to someone when they die.
In the case of this ministry experience for me, grief was really about saying goodbye to that and letting go of the story that I had been telling myself that if this or that lined up, I'd be able to sort of restart, get it back to the way it was.
I refer to it in the book as like it's the last gift he ever gave me was this gift of grief, because in a way it was the most liberating thing in the world to be able to say in the same way that I think of my father with great affection and thanksgiving, and he was not a perfect man, and there are plenty of things we could talk about on that front at another time, but being able to look back with that kind of affection and gratitude, but also being able to say, I have to let it go and move forward. It was just an incredibly healing experience.
Justin Brierley: Yeah. One, which probably took your barber by surprise when you were broke down in the chair, suddenly after remembering a Seinfeld joke. I mean, I do love the way you, as well, bring the story of Peter into play towards the end of the book. And what I really appreciated, it struck me for the first time you kind of joined together the two stories of Peter getting out of a boat towards Jesus.
The first one we encountered, of course, is when he tries to walk on water and it all goes wrong. And Jesus says, why did you not have more faith? The second time is when he sees Jesus on the shore, the resurrected Jesus and he just jumps in. He just can't help himself. He has to get to Jesus.
And you make the point that you've got essentially two different Peters, a Peter who has gone through the despair and desolation of abandoning his friend in his hour of need. I guess, yeah, it sounded like you were saying, I think I know I can kind of understand actually. And you don't kind of feel like reprimanding Peter for his lack of faith in that first boat encounter, because actually for you, it's, it's more a story about him learning to realize his limitations, his humanness in that sense.
Mike Cosper: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think, if anything, the process of writing this book, it really cured me from wanting to scold Bible characters for their folly. Because I'm like now, with all of them, including like with... you know, God talked about Elijah as well. Elijah has this moment where he collapses under the broom tree and says, you know, All right, I give up, just take my life. I'm like, Oh wait, it's like, I know exactly what that feels like, you know, that kind of exhaustion and spiritual despair.
And hopefully that's a doorway to wisdom is defining yourself in that place and saying like, yeah, the folly side of this, that's really familiar.
Justin Brierley: I know what that means. It's so good of you to spend some time, and like Peter jumping into the water to get back to Jesus. I think people who have kind of given up a bit or feel a bit disillusioned, they'll take a lot of heart from this book because you really do direct them back to the center of it all.
Land of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found is available now by Mike. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about your journey and, and about how, yeah, we can find some hope in the midst of often difficult times for the church in these days. I really appreciate you spending some time with me, Mike. Thank you for being my guest today.
Mike Cosper: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.