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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Library Journal's Best Nonfiction of 2024 "At some point in every Christian's life, God intervenes to show us that what we thought to be our home isn't―and sometimes, only a lifetime later does one see that this was actually good news. […] If you've ever felt the pain of losing home―and if you want to learn how to long for something better―this is the book for you." — Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today Mike Cosper writes, "In the years since leaving local church ministry, I've devoted an enormous amount of time and resources to examining the church's often troubled witness, its ongoing crisis of leadership, and the epidemic of narcissism, abuse, and cover-up that has continued to emerge year after year. This book is about my journey both before and undergirding that work—the shattering of dreams and the grace that restored a broken faith in the aftermath. It's a story about grace leading me home when I thought all was lost. "Taken together, my encounters with Peter, Elijah, and Jesus connected to indelible images from my time in Israel and formed a new spiritual landscape in my mind, one with enough gravity to draw my feet back to solid ground. My hope is that as I tell this story you might find echoes of your own. I pray if you're in the wilderness, you might find that though the territory is a mystery, you are far from alone. Most of all, I pray that you rediscover that Jesus is chasing you like a lover . . . right through heaven's gates."
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For “all who have sailed on rivers of heartache,”
my fellow travelers and sojourners,
the prone to wander and those that kept the light in the window.
And most of all for Sarah, Dorothy, and Maggie.
Just a few more miles to go . . .
Contents
Introduction
When Gravity Fails
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY—FALL 2016
“I’m not sure we can stick with you on this,” Greg said.
We were sitting in a large executive suite on the upper levels of an old, turn-of-the-century building. A wide antique window behind him framed the setting sun, which cut a low band of gold across an otherwise iron-gray sky. I didn’t know Greg well. We’d been introduced earlier that year when I began putting together plans for a new media-focused nonprofit to serve Christians in the marketplace. I’d pitched him the idea and asked him to consider being involved in a couple of ways as we launched. He’d taken it a step further, expressing interest in helping to build certain elements of the ministry with me.
By the time of this meeting we had planned not only to work together on the nonprofit but also to collaborate on equipping resources for Christian leaders inside several companies. Suddenly, he hit the brakes.
“Help me understand,” I said.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, wringing his hands, and looking at the floor. “I just think you’ve got this election thing wrong,” he said.
“What do you mean,” I asked. “The Trump thing?” There was a long silence.
Only a few days earlier the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape had leaked, in which then-presidential candidate Donald Trump described how fame allowed him to get away with anything, including grabbing women “by the p____.” In a newsletter I’d written what I thought was a fairly common-sense analysis from a Christian perspective—that he had failed every character test by which other presidents and politicians had been measured. No one put it better than Albert Mohler, at least at the time, when he said that were he to endorse Donald Trump, consistency would demand that he write a letter of apology to Bill Clinton as well for vocally opposing the former president’s sexual misconduct. (Notably, Mohler did endorse Trump in 2020. As of this writing, no such “consistent” apology has come.)
My point in writing the newsletter wasn’t (as William F. Buckley once famously phrased it) to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” I didn’t presume to stand in front of a steam train on principle. Rather, I thought I was reiterating common-sense ideas in an election cycle in which wild voices from the fringe were being amplified in new and horrible ways. Honestly, I thought I was in the majority on Trump’s character. I was, however, not in the majority.
“Look,” I said, “I understand that for some folks this is a binary decision. I happen to disagree, but I understand.”
“That’s not it,” Greg said. “It’s more . . . important than that.” Weird emphasis. “I just think it’s time for us all to get behind him—Trump. Because, well . . .”
Now Greg sat up. He looked me right in the eye. “Finally, someone is going to stand up for the White man.”
To that point in my life I’d been a pastor working at the intersection of faith and culture. Leading a ministry for artists and church musicians, writing about movies, music, and TV, and teaching about politics, public witness, and faithfulness in the marketplace. No doubt, there were places I parted ways with the Christian conservatives in the generations before me, but these were mostly differences in degree, not in principle, that left plenty of common ground to collaborate on. This meeting, this break, read as something else. Something tectonic. It hit like a thunderclap.
The 2016 election cycle had been weird. The gloves had come off when the Republicans were still debating each other. Mockery and derision set the tone. Trump seemed to only gain momentum the more crass he became. And some pockets of the internet were combining their support of the man with other, unsettling sentiments. But that was the internet. The internet couldn’t be real. Now it was across the table. Someone who was a collaborator ten minutes ago now was a stranger to me. It was disorienting.
In the aftermath I began to wonder if this could be the norm. Had the animating concerns that fell under the banners of “conservatism,” “traditional values,” “religious liberty,” or even “evangelicalism” been a veneer, a lure to co-opt people in the church into the service of ugly, identitarian politics?
To put it a little differently, what had I been giving my life to for the past fifteen years?
I remember seeing Space Camp in the theaters in 1986. It’s an 80’s classic starring Kate Capshaw, Lea Thompson, Tom Skerritt, and Joaquin Phoenix. In it a ragtag group of misfits are grouped for a week of space camp. Due to Promethean mistakes and good old-fashioned hijinks, their team is accidentally launched into space aboard an underequipped space shuttle. High adventure ensues. Lots of learning. Lots of hugging.
One scene has stuck with me for almost forty years. Andie, the kids’ camp counselor, heads out on a spacewalk to collect oxygen tanks to resupply the shuttle. When she can’t quite reach them, Max—the youngest and smallest of the group—is sent out to help. While tugging on a tank, Max loses his grip and goes hurtling into space, untethered to anything at all. That image—tumbling into the vacuum of space, no gravity to bring you back, just an eternal drift into blackness—scared the bejeezus out of six-year-old me. It still does.
Finally, someone is going to stand up for the White man.
With these words a switch flipped. Gravity vanished. I could only watch, stunned, as the ground drifted away beneath me. The year 2016 felt like that 1980s nightmare came to life. It was, for lack of a better word, an apocalypse. A revealing. I found myself in a dark landscape without a tether. Friendships, partnerships, my sense of place in my church and city, the broader evangelical community—none of it held together anymore. This meeting was the beginning of the season that would leave me feeling completely adrift.
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, someone asks Mike—a hard-drinking and self-pitying Scottish war veteran—how he went broke. “‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’”
I’ve discovered that spiritual disillusionment happens that way too. You crash into this sense that faith as you knew it doesn’t make sense anymore, but when you look backward, you see signs and evidence you didn’t take seriously at the time.
Looking back, the first glint of disillusionment I see happened in 2012, not long after the murder of Trayvon Martin. I preached a sermon from Ephesians 2, where Paul describes how Jesus breaks down the walls of hostility that separate men and women of different races. I took that sermon as an opportunity to speak to the broader racial tensions that were emerging in our country but also as an opportunity to help our church see the unifying beauty of Christ as we moved into a more diverse neighborhood and began to pursue a more multicultural approach to ministry. Similar to the newsletter in 2016, I didn’t think I was saying anything controversial. Rather, I thought I was helping the church find language for taking the next steps with these issues.
In the sermon I took no political stances. I simply preached about compassion and empathy for our Black brothers and sisters, especially those in the neighborhood around our church. I tried to relay their stories—as they had told them to me—of how everyday experiences for Black Americans differed from our majority-White congregation’s. I talked about how fear of being called a racist made many White Christians hypersensitive to discussions of race and invited the community to make space for listening to the experiences and perceptions of Black and Latino members of our church. Maybe, I suggested, some of our assumptions are wrong—especially when they’ve been formed without any input from minority voices. Maybe there was some room for repentance.
This was years before critical race theory would become a political boogeyman, before Black Lives Matter would become a controversial organization, before woke would be co-opted by the political right and used as a pejorative. Nonetheless, saying that Black and White Americans had very different everyday experiences, suggesting that racism was still an issue in America, and reading a few short quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass (along with lots of Scripture) created no small amount of controversy. After preaching, I was harangued in the parking lot and the church received angry calls and emails for several weeks. Some members called for an apology or my removal from the staff.
At the time I didn’t have categories for understanding those reactions. Later, when I wrote several blog posts about race, police shootings, and how White Christians could join their neighbors in compassion and lament, the response grew even more threatening and vitriolic.
In 2012 I tried to be open. I reminded myself that defensive reactions could easily be rooted in fear and shame. An anxious response to the accusation of racism might not be racism itself. Post-2016 all of this started to read differently for me. I still believe anxiety and fear can play a role but only as part of a larger story about deceived and corrupted moral imaginations.
Finally, someone is going to stand up for the White man.
Those were far from the last comments I’d hear about Trump as a defender of White America. Along with increased overt racism, older and subtler ideas I’d heard from White Christians reemerged. Insinuations I’d heard for years about the poor theology of the Black church or the pagan roots of rap, hip-hop, R&B, and even the blues, about the origins of poverty or fatherlessness in Black communities—all of them emerged in a new, uglier light.
In the days and weeks after my meeting with Greg, other donors backed out of their commitments or lost interest in my nonprofit. I found myself without sufficient resources and the dream failed to launch. So began a long vocational journey that would stretch several years and pass through a landscape where Christian leaders I’d respected for decades continued to realign with the new political reality, writing op-eds about how border walls were biblical, how every election was binary, and how we had to have patience for a baby Christian like Donald Trump. Who were we to judge the fanatical online followers or their antisemitic memes? Weren’t the Clintons worse? Those who refused to support Trump lost jobs, lost speaking opportunities, and began long seasons in the desert.
The world at large became seemingly alien, but the disruptions didn’t stop with politics and race. Another apocalypse opened up in 2016. Very close to home. Tensions that had nothing to do with political rhetoric or race came to a head in my church, the church I helped plant and had pastored for fifteen years. Concerns about the leadership at our church emerged, met with doubts that the concerns were valid. People took sides. Relationships stretched thin. I happened to share the concerns about a lack of organizational health that had grown impossible to ignore. My wife, Sarah, and I found ourselves cut off from friendships that were decades old. Our wounds, long masked by the momentum of ministry, began to surface, and the physical and psychological toll of spending years in a toxic culture caught up with me. I crashed. Physically and spiritually exhausted, isolated and brokenhearted, I saw a community I loved—one I had poured my heart and soul into—on the verge of breaking apart.
Around that time my friend Mike Frazier invited me and my family to a retreat house his church owned just outside Savannah, Georgia. I owed my publisher revisions and edits for the manuscript for Recapturing the Wonder, and my family needed the time away to decompress from all that had taken place, so a retreat sounded inviting.
In Savannah our kids played in the shade of a live oak tree in front of the house, turning the moss, sticks, and twigs into fairy houses. We would all watch in laughter as one neighbor would turn off the main road near the house and slow to a crawl and let his shaggy brown dog leap from the passenger door to chase the car at breakneck speed the rest of the way down the dirt road. And Sarah and I would sit in silence on the front porch of the little house. Drinking coffee and watching the kids, yes. And her with a book and me with a pile of papers that I would occasionally leaf through and mark up with a red pen. But really, we were shell-shocked, with hardly a word to say to one another.
Rereading Recapturing the Wonder felt surreal. I’d written most of the manuscript before leaving my job at the church and before the upheavals of 2016—before the apocalypse, the shattered community, the disorientation that had affected the weariness that we were now shouldering. That book is about the way modernity and secularism have reshaped our imaginations. How their relentless assertion that the only meaning in the world is what we can touch and measure contests all our spiritual experiences and leaves us cynical and disenchanted. Quarantined from spiritual reality. It suggests a variety of ways of resisting such a flattening of the world, rebuilding our spiritual imaginations through historic Christian practices like prayer, meditative Bible study, and fasting.
I still believe what I wrote in that book, and I still believe that there’s an urgent need for Christians to address the way our world hollows the experience of transcendence. But what had begun to open to me was another way that faith could be contested: from within. If the danger of modernity’s pressures on the Christian faith resulted in disenchantment, the new danger I was confronting was leading to disillusionment.
We spent our last night in Savannah with Frazier and his wife, Cheryl. We sat up late, Sarah and Cheryl talking in the kitchen and dishing out mountains of ice cream and marshmallows for our kids. Frazier and I sat in another room. As I processed the preceding months, he read the weariness on my face and in my posture. He asked question after question, surfacing sadness, weariness, and physical exhaustion that I didn’t even know were there.
Before leaving he asked about spiritual disciplines—what did prayer look like for me, how was I approaching the Scriptures? I confessed that Scripture was difficult for me. I’d seen it used so often lately as a bludgeon. I struggled to hear it now. Mostly, when I opened a Bible, it was to the Psalms.
“I want to suggest something for you,” he said and picked up a Bible off a side table. He turned to 1 Kings 18 and read the story of Elijah confronting the prophets of Baal. He continued to chapter 19, to Elijah lying under the broom tree in the desert, pleading for God to take his life.
When he was finished, he closed the Bible and set it back on the table. He explained nothing to me; he just sat silent there for a long, awkward moment. “You know,” he said, “I wonder what might happen if you just spent some time with that story. Especially chapter 19—with tired Elijah.”
I nodded. We got up to leave shortly after, and I walked out into a pitch-black Savannah night, back into zero gravity.
Not long after that trip to Savannah, I visited the Holy Land with a group of friends. That trip deepened the grip that landscape held on my imagination. The golden light of the Old City at night, the lush green of the Jezreel Valley, the gnarled bark of olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane. After I returned home and continued to navigate the turbulence of my faith, those images kept returning to my mind. They haunted me even as my faith grew thin and brittle.
So, when I finally took Frazier’s advice about Elijah, the desert the prophet crashed in was tangible to me in ways that kindled my spiritual imagination. I had been where Elijah had been.
In time Elijah led me to Mount Tabor, the mountain of the transfiguration, where the old prophet stood and talked with Jesus and Moses while Peter, James, and John watched in awe. This story was far from new to me, so it wasn’t a surprise to find those men there. It was a surprise to find someone else there: me.
Reading that story I found myself echoing Peter’s words and emotions, that brilliant moment making sense to me in ways I couldn’t have imagined before. I then followed Peter onward—to Jerusalem, Gethsemane, and another mountain: Golgotha. And eventually back to the place his story began, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. As I saw those echoes of my story, I discovered that the journey of my own inner life was nothing new, just as Peter’s was nothing new. His own life had echoed the ups and downs of Elijah’s, his companion on Mount Tabor. Attending to the lives of these men and these mountains made sense of my disillusionment and allowed me to welcome my apocalypse.
In the years since leaving local church ministry, I’ve devoted an enormous amount of time and resources to examining the church’s often troubled witness, its ongoing crisis of leadership, and the epidemic of narcissism, abuse, and cover-up that has continued to emerge year after year. That examination led me to produce The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, a podcast in which I attempted to document just one of many visible leadership collapses and the light it shines on a branch of the church that is image-conscious, charismatic, and contradictory.
This book is about the journey before and undergirding that work. The shattering of dreams and the grace that restored a broken faith in the aftermath. It’s a story about grace leading me home when I thought all was lost.
In arriving here in a somewhat postapocalyptic place, I can see that remaining in the church wasn’t a given. Like so many I know and love, I can easily imagine how my path into the void could have led somewhere other than here, back home. That strikes me as a tremendous mercy, and if there’s any reason why I want to tell these stories, it’s for a sense of gratitude for that grace.
Taken together, my encounters with Peter, Elijah, and Jesus connected to indelible images from my time in Israel and formed a new spiritual landscape in my mind, one with enough gravity to draw my feet back to solid ground. I still experience moments when I worry that I might sail off into space again. Like when you drive too quickly over a hill, there’s a flash of that floating feeling where your stomach and feet seem to drift upward. Thankfully, each time that’s happened, gravity and grace have brought my feet back to earth.
I hope that as I tell this story you might find echoes of your own. I pray if you’re in the wilderness, you might find that though the territory is a mystery, you are far from alone. Most of all I pray that you rediscover that Jesus is chasing you like a lover—right through heaven’s gates.
1
Mount Tabor
Light at the Summit or Glory at Mount Tabor
The Hebrew calendar follows the cycle of the moon, not the sun, adjusting to follow its syncopated twenty-nine-and-a-half-day rhythm throughout the year—twenty-nine days this month, thirty days that one, and so on. The years expand and contract too. Some years add as much as a whole month.
The modern Hebrew calendar is calculated mathematically to ebb and flow over several years. Before that the beginning of a new month came at the first actual visual appearance of the new moon. When spotted, someone would send word to Jerusalem where religious leaders would confirm and announce the beginning of a new month.
At the sound of a shofar, according to the Mishnah, “they used to bring long poles of cedar and reeds and olive wood and flax fluff which they tied to the poles with a string, and someone used to go up to the top of a mountain and set fire to them and wave them to and fro and up and down until he saw the next one doing the same thing on the top of the second mountain; and so on the top of the third mountain” (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 2:3).
You may have encountered something similar in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. To summon aid, beacons are lit in Gondor and then from mountaintop to mountaintop, calling the men of Rohan to war. The message moves, more or less, at the speed of light.
For Jews the beginning of the month is known and celebrated as Rosh Chodesh, and while it’s a minor holiday, it plays an important role—which is particular in the ancient Near East, where tracking the phases of the moon wasn’t a precise art. By officially recognizing the new month centrally, in Jerusalem, it kept Jews throughout the diaspora in sync on high holy days—Purim on the fourteenth of Adar, Passover beginning on the fifteenth of Nisan, and so on.
Rosh Chodesh is also associated with resilience and renewal. From Abraham onward the Jewish people experienced seasons of flourishing and suffering, but just as the moon waxes, wanes, and returns, their survival has too. Like Rosh Chodesh itself, the flames of the beacons were symbols of hope and renewal passed from generation to generation, mountaintop to mountaintop.
Southwest of the Sea of Galilee and east of Nazareth is a mountaintop that is believed to have once been the site of such a beacon. Today, this alien-looking half-sphere that rises above the Jezreel Valley houses not one but two monasteries. In the first century the mountain was called Itabyrium. We know it today as Mount Tabor. And we remember it not because of the long-forgotten beacon but because of another event that took place here—another eruption of light that signaled a new beginning for God’s people.
The first time I saw Mount Tabor I was just outside Nazareth on Mount Precipice, where an angry mob once tried to throw Jesus off the top of it. On the day I visited, the skies were a surreal, shimmering blue. Broad cumulus clouds hung in the distance, flattened atop warm air from the Jezreel Valley as though they were melting on glass. Mount Precipice isn’t particularly high, but the valley is so flat and sprawling that the view gave me a sense of vertigo. Gideon battled the Amalekites at Jezreel, and it’s been the site of wars ever since—as recently as the First World War.
When I stood on Mount Precipice, the Jezreel Valley stretched below, and Nazareth was to the right, stacked up the Galilean hills. Mount Tabor rose to my left, and I could immediately see why it would have made a perfect site for a beacon. It’s what’s known as an inselberg or an island mountain, the result of colliding fault lines driving a lone mound of rock up from the surface. Jeremiah saw its solitary, commanding presence as a metaphor for the coming of the Messiah, who would be “like Tabor among the mountains” (Jeremiah 46:18). Psalm 89 imagines Tabor as a singer, joining Mount Hermon to praise God. The choice of these two peaks isn’t arbitrary; Hermon and Tabor were contested spaces and scenes of desecration, “high places” where idolatry and evil infected the Holy Land and spread to the cities and valleys below them. The psalmist was reminding his listeners that God had staked his claim on these places, and they were meant for his worship.
It was about three years into Jesus’ ministry. While the other disciples were in the town below, serving the crowds that had gathered because of Jesus’ arrival, Peter, James, and John joined Jesus on a hike up Mount Tabor.
