What are the warning signs that a church leader will become a tyrant? How do we prevent church hurt from becoming our identity? What are ideologies and how do they become the overall focus of some ministries?
Mike Cosper is the co-host of Christianity Today’s The Bulletin podcast, the producer and host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and now the author of The Church in Dark Times.
Discussion Questions:
- How does Mike define “Ideology”? What does it mean to have a strong ideology? Do you have any? How does this differ from having a simple belief?
- Why do you think so many people today struggle with anxiety? How can ideologies protect us from our anxiety? Why might that be a poor crutch?
- Mike recommends worship as a way to fend off anxiety. Why could that help?
- Is it wrong for churches and organizations to have a missions statement or goals?
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE :
Note: AI-generated this transcript and it has not been proofread.
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This is a special bonus episode of the Truce Podcast. It won’t sound like a normal episode with all my usual editing, music, and sound effects, but I think it’s appropriate for this moment in history. Patrons of the show can actually see this conversation by visiting patreon. com slash truce podcast, just in case you’d rather watch and listen instead of just listening.
This is Mike Cosper, The Church in Dark Times.
I probably don’t need to tell you this, but here in the United States, we’re coming up on the 2024 U. S. presidential election. It’s a time where a lot of us are dealing with anxiety. What’s going to happen to the economy, to the rule of law, or what will be the legacy of the Capital C Church after all this is over?
Some of us deal with that stress by hiding behind a hard and vast ideology. A magic bullet answer through which we can view basically everything. If we just did this then the economy would be great, or if so and so were our leader then they’d take care of all our [00:01:00] problems. That desire to hide behind ideologies creates new issues of its own.
My guest today on this bonus episode is going to walk us through a discussion of ideologies. What they are, why they feel good at the time, and how they can ultimately cause new problems. You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better.
I’m Chris Staron, and this is Truce. Today on the podcast, I have a very special guest who I’ve been trying to get a hold of for a long time, and he is finally speaking to me. This is awesome. It’s Mike Cosper. Some of you know him as the producer and host of the rise and fall of Mars Hill, but he’s also coming out with a new book, the church in dark times.
And I think it fits well with this sort of just barely pre election moment we’re in, and maybe it will give us some context in this moment. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Cosper: Hey, I’m really [00:02:00] glad to be here. I followed your work for a while and it’s, it’s an honor to be here.
Chris Staron: That is a gigantic thrill. The audience can’t see, but I am super blushing.
So, so you’ve written this book, the church in dark times. It’s coming out November 19th. Uh, why write a book that’s about ideology and why do it now?
Mike Cosper: The question that I got as, as often as any, maybe more than any during the Production of the rise and fall of Mars Hill, there, there were a few different versions of the question and it essentially boiled down to how do people who, who have good common sense, who are good Christian leaders, how do they get drawn into a church where.
At the heart of it, there’s, there’s issues that if you have a little distance from it, they’re very, they’re very easy to see. They’re very obvious to see. And there was a moment in the production process. Um, uh, there was a conversation that I had actually with somebody where they were describing this moment where governance changed in the [00:03:00] church.
And it, it rang a bell for me because I had been in a church that had been through some, you know, difficult seasons of its own, but I had also heard stories of another church. Megachurch, and I won’t name names for the sake of this conversation, but I’d also heard the story of another megachurch, influential pastor, bully domineering type pastor, who there came a point in the life of the church where he wanted to move them from Congregational polity where everybody in the church sort of votes on everything to elder rule where the elders decide kind of everything that matters.
And, and it was a power move. It was a, it was unquestionably a power move because it, the elders were kind of his guys anyway. And he exerted a lot of authority over them. Many of them were on staff and reported directly to them. There’s a lot of reasons why a move like that, the way it was done was, was, was poor, but one of the things that I remember in, in the midst of all of this, It was said about Mars.
It was said at my church. It was said by this guy [00:04:00] was the mission is so important that we can’t slow down to move everybody with us. We can’t do it these other ways because people’s lives and souls are on the line. And in fact, this Shall not be named megachurch guy. He said, uh, we’re, we’re going to vote to never vote again.
That was the line. Anyways, as, as I was revisiting the story when I was producing Mars, that line stuck out to me, like I remember I had a memory of it and it stuck out to me. And what it reminded me of was how in dictatorships. So, so part of my background in college, I spent a lot of my college years studying social and political theory and in dictatorships, there’s always this breakthrough moment where the great leader at some point has to declare a state of emergency and kind of suspend the normal rules of governance for the country because we’re, we’re in an emergency situation.
The normal mechanisms of democracy, they don’t quite work when you’re at [00:05:00] war and when there’s a, you know, a giant problem. So we’re going to suspend those things and we promise we’ll restore order again. Once the, once the crisis has moved along and I realized it’s kind of the same thing, like what has happened in many of our mega churches is you, you frame the mission in such a way where we say souls are on the line, we got to reach the city.
It’s so important. It’s so urgent that we can’t slow down. To keep people healthy and moving forward with us, or to keep the congregation fully informed or to develop leaders in the ways that we used to, or that we promised we would, or any of that, we needed to sort of suspend all those rules and really focus on the most important thing, which is the mission, which is often this loosely defined way of actually talking about getting, making the church bigger and bigger and bigger.
Chris Staron: Well, it seems like some of these missions start out as a really positive impulse, right?
Mike Cosper: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it’s not to say that there aren’t real crises at times that, that, you know, the totalitarian governments, uh, [00:06:00] are responding to the point being that when, when I made that connection, it brought me back to the social theorist, her name’s Hannah Arendt that has been a massive influence on my thinking kind of throughout my life, especially about politics, but I’d never really associated her work with the life inside the church.
And the minute I did. It was like, it was like somebody flipped the lights on in a dark room. Like, how do these things happen? Well, a rent’s whole work was looking at how did her, her, even her inner circle of friends in Germany hurt the intellectuals that she was friends with lovers with all the rest.
How did they, between 1929 and 1939, all become Nazis. That perennial question of how do good people do horrible, evil. terrible things. Once I saw the connection, I couldn’t unsee it. And, and I think it’s implications for the church, for politics, for all these different things are, are enormous.
Chris Staron: Oh, absolutely.
I, yeah, we, we kind of have a leadership culture in the church. It’s, it’s one of our [00:07:00] big focuses, but that also kind of makes us susceptible to Goals and just like we, this is a good goal. Reaching a lot of people is a good goal, but then we get caught up in it. And we’re willing to trash some of our standards along the way, which is no good.
And in fact, what were some of those ideologies that you saw in Mars Hill? The things that may have sounded like really positive, but then got twisted.
Mike Cosper: Yeah. So, so the, the word ideology just for listeners, like it can get confusing sometimes cause it gets thrown around. So I always try to say to people, Hey, when I’m, when I’m talking about ideology this way, think of it as like, it’s always got a capital I, and it’s referring to something that’s very specific, which I think was Miroslav Volf, who once said defined it, defined it.
This way. And I, it’s my favorite definition. Ideology is, is the little idea that will change the world. It’s the little idea that explains everything as another way to put it. And so when we think about the church and the mission of the church, I mean, especially since the emergence of neo [00:08:00] evangelicalism and the church growth movement and all that, like the church is very focused on world changing and rightly.
So there are good reasons to do it. So just to sort of give a couple parallels. So in. Nazi Germany, the, the little idea that was going to change the world was the whole idea of Aryan supremacy, which had this flip side of Jewish inferiority and Jews as essentially leeches and vermin on society. They were the problem.
If you could solve the Jewish problem, you could heal the, you could essentially set up the, the German people to take their rightful place in the world. Stalin had a similar idea, except the problem was the. Bourgeoisie, the, it was the middle class. They were the ones that were keeping down the proletarian, the Marxist, you know, utopia was on the other side of clearing the decks.
And by the way, it just so happened that most of the bourgeoisie and the capitalists that needed to be, uh, liquidated were all also Jews for, for him as well. Um, how convenient, I guess. Yeah, exactly. In the church, it, it looks very different. The church is not a totalitarian state. These are not [00:09:00] totalitarian dictators.
However, you have a set of mechanics around ideas that work in a similar way, which is a guy like a Mark Driscoll comes forward and he says, the problem in the church is young men. The problem is that the church doesn’t reach young men. If you reach young men, everything else comes together. And so. The reason that’s an ideology is because it creates a logic, this little circular logic that the entire church bends itself around.
We have to do ministry in a way that’s attractive to young men. That shapes the way we do music. It shapes the way we talk about sex. It shapes the way we talk about women. It shapes the ethos of the church and the ethos of the culture. It also provides you a framework in which you can now dismiss any critique that comes your way.
So somebody comes, it comes at you and says, you know, comes at the pastor and they say, Hey, it seems like this is kind of a misogynistic culture. It’s like, Oh, well, you don’t understand young men or the importance of young men or what often happened inside Mars Hill. If you came [00:10:00] with a critique like that.
You were effeminate, you were a closeted homosexual. I mean, it was, it was pretty brutal the way that the way that criticism was treated, ideology gives you this perfect kind of logical circle through which you can sort of bend every idea in a certain direction and crush all of the criticism in a certain direction.
And the, the idea ultimately says, if we achieve. This, this goal, if we fully realize this little idea that can change the world, then we’re going to change the world. We’re going to reach the city. We’re going to reach the country. We’re going to reach the globe. The, the power of ideology for evangelicals, I think, is that when you marry that, When you marry these little ideas with the gospel, it’s a corruption of the gospel.
It creates this whole other fuel for, for the motivations, because it’s not just a matter of building a great organization or a big country or whatever. It’s no, no, we [00:11:00] actually are saving souls. We’re rescuing people from the pits of hell. And so you can understand then where when you have this little idea that can change the world and the gospel behind it saying this is life or death, this is, this is a cosmic battle between good and evil.
This is eternity in heaven or eternity in hell. Then when a problem emerges of a corrupt leader. Of abuse of any of these things, you find ways to chew that up inside the system rather than address it directly because, because the idea is so important because the world changing is so important because the mission is so important.
Chris Staron: You write ideology, universalizes the local church, making it success of cosmic importance. Uh, can you expand on that for me? Because, uh, it’s, it’s not just like, Oh, you know, our little church is going to. Try to have a food bank to help people, but it becomes in a lot of the ways we talk about things, we’re going to feed the world instead of, Oh no, our local [00:12:00] church is going to feed, or we’re going to start a youth group because we want to reach the local high school.
No, no, we’re going to reach the whole world. Can you expand on why that can be problematic and how that can kind of set us up for failure?
Mike Cosper: I think it’s tricky and I try to acknowledge this in the book. The gospel has Big ambition, you know, it’s an audacious, it’s an audacious set of goals. We’re sent out to the four corners of the earth.
And I think that that’s serious. I think that’s something we should take, we should take seriously. Part of what I think happens in contemporary evangelicalism is there becomes such a focus on the personalities and the autonomy of the. Of the local, of the individual church that we lose sight of the church as being part of a story that’s larger than itself.
And, and this is where, like, this is where the church growth movement, I think there’s some real incipient narcissism in the way we think about our, our churches, [00:13:00] because we’re Americans. We love entrepreneurs. We love leaders. We love big ideas. Like we get excited about all that kind of stuff. We want to be part of that world changing story.
And because of the way I think we’re conditioned by our culture a bit, there’s an itch that gets scratched by being part of a big ambitious church that says our food bank is going to feed all of Africa next year. That’s way less exciting than saying we’re going to be part of this little Methodist parish that contributes what it can, serves the poor in our neighborhood, marries and berries.
and tries to live out the gospel together in community. The universalizing thing is about the ambitions of the, of what the individual and what the church itself can accomplish and should accomplish. Should we accomplish that alone? Should we think that it’s a great thing that You know, one church has a plan to, to make sure that the gospel is preached to all four corners of the [00:14:00] earth in the next 25 years so that Jesus can come back, which is, frankly, there’s a number of mega churches around the world that have missionary ambitions like that.
Is it a good thing that churches are doing that alone? Not in concert with one another? Like, I, I don’t know. I, I, I, I worry about it. I worry about a church where they, They build their whole mission around a little idea that’s really the key to everything that the church should be about. I think we need a theology that has a deeper humility and a deeper sense of mystery and a deeper sense that the church is Part of an organic whole that we don’t even fully comprehend.
It’s almost like we’ve adopted that version of eternal life in the Christian life. When we think about fame and celebrity, it’s like, I want to be Billy Graham. I want people to be telling my stories in 150 years. And it’s like, okay, but is that better than sitting at a table [00:15:00] with, you know, at the supper of the lamb in a thousand years?
Like, I don’t think it is, but our culture has certainly, you know, Our culture has certainly celebrated one over the other in a significant way, including evangelical culture.
Chris Staron: Right. Well, I wonder, I mean, from a leadership perspective, that’s such a great idea to remember that death is coming for us all.
But then from the sort of parishioner standpoint, I think a lot of times we tie our faith to somebody else. Or to some movement and we forget that they’re going to die. Like I used to volunteer with teenagers, uh, with a campus life group. And one of the kids said, you know, I, I’m a believer because my grandmother’s a believer in my, and I don’t know what, what I’m going to do when she dies.
It’s like, well, she’s, she’s a grandma. She’s, she’s gonna die.
Mike Cosper: Right.
Chris Staron: Like your faith can’t be broken. Based on as long as God keeps my grandmother alive, then I’m going to be a Christian because we all know she’s going to die. We get tied up in that where it’s like, as long as the Truce podcast stays on the air, I’m going to be a believer, as long as Rise and [00:16:00] Fall of Mars Hill is doing the thing.
Our hope is in a person or in a ministry. We forget those things are going to go away someday. And our faith can’t be tied to them. I’ll have more with Mike Cosper after these messages. While you listen to these ads, why not leave a comment on your favorite podcasting app? It really helps people find the show, okay?
Here we go.
Welcome back to the Truce Podcast. Let’s get back to my conversation with Mike Cosper. I don’t want to sound crass when I say this, so forgive me if it sounds crass, but you’ve become sort of the, uh, the, the figurehead of a movement about church hurt. And, uh, one of my interesting questions that’s been battered around in my head a lot is, how do we stop Church hurt and some of the, this movement, the, uh, of trying to reconcile with that from becoming an ideology and self or, or sprouting capitalized ideologies.
Mike Cosper: Oh man, that is such a big question. And it’s such an important [00:17:00] question. It really is. It’s such an important question. I mean, Well, because we, we as
Chris Staron: people tend to define ourselves by something and some of us will be like, I was hurt by this person, this place, this thing. And I’m going to, it’s going to define my life.
And, and that’s just kind of just a part of who we are and how we operate.
Mike Cosper: Yeah.
Chris Staron: But that can then spur its own counter movements, its own counter reformation or maybe, you know, um, so I guess sort of just, it’s fun to think about like what What are some of those temptations to create ideologies and what would those ideologies look like?
And then how can we combat that?
Mike Cosper: Yeah, you know it was it was only a few weeks into Releasing episodes of this thing that the blowback started and the blowback started There was, you know, there was some blowback from, you know, celebrity Christian world. I mean, I think Craig Grishel preached a couple sermons against what we were doing and, you know, there were a few things like [00:18:00] that where people were bold enough to kind of come at us.
And that was fine and to be expected. And then of course, Driscoll, you know, trolled us on social media, which was also to be expected. The, the blowback that was the harshest came from, came from the left. And it came from two elements of the left. One was just kind of a progressive left that, that thought what you’re doing is scapegoating.
Mark, in order to justify your abusive and horrible and terrible evangelical theology, which I think was kind of a silly, a silly critique. But then the other critique that came at us was from kind of certain corners of the church hurt world. And it was from people who, you know, who genuinely thought that the way we had approached the story.
We weren’t centering victims enough. We were focused too much on people who were, you know, we were including voices that were perpetrators as well as people who were [00:19:00] victims. And, you know, people can make their own judgment about why we did what we did. I don’t, I don’t feel the need to defend it, um, too much here, except to say that was the element that the.
Surprised me because I, I thought, I thought a lot of what we were about. I thought we were making clear kind of from the beginning, I want to understand how this happened and in order to understand how it happened, you actually have to center on the people who were in the room, the people who were making the decisions.
And some of those people are, are, you know, I think some of those people were villains at the time and are still villains. Still kind of villainous. And I didn’t, I didn’t comment on that. Right. Like I didn’t put these people out there and say, here’s what you should think about this person. I just put their voices in the mix.
Sure. And so, and, and cause I trust the listener. The listeners got the maturity to. To kind of go, huh, well, he’s saying [00:20:00] these things now, but he was part of this thing then, you know, whatever, like, and, and I, I just, I trusted the listener to make a lot of those calls for themselves. But I think from, from the church hurt side, I mean, it was like, there were certain, there were certain things that you just heard over and over and over again.
One of them being, you should only be, you should only be hearing victims, right? You should only be centering. The victims. And that was an interesting one for me because I, I actually, I remember talking to my producer about it at one point, I’m like, well, which, which victims count and which ones don’t anyway, point being to your actual question that you asked point point being, I do, I think that’s an example of one of these, one of these things where in a reactionary way, we can create a different kind of ethic that becomes as.
Absolute an iron as, you know, as the ethics of a, of an unhealthy organization. I mean, [00:21:00] is that an ideology is that destructive? It certainly can be. And I don’t, you know, I, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it become as, as fierce and, and, and horrible as it, as it has been inside some of these abusive churches, I, I say all that to say, I totally get the temptation because I think to me, In the absence, like when you’ve been part of a community like that, you’ve had such a powerful sense of purpose.
You’ve had such an intimate sense of belonging with other people. In the absence of it, you want to recreate that. Vibe. You want to create that, recreate that energy. And, and certainly an ideological movement that says, well, here’s the idea that will actually, you know, save the world and in particular, it’s going to save the world from those people you don’t like anymore, who are part of that other movement.
So why don’t you give yourself to that? Absolutely as well. I think that can be very, very damaging. [00:22:00]
Chris Staron: Yeah, that’s good insight. It’s, it’s, I mean, it’s obviously a giant question of where do these things go, but I’m, I’m, I’m always fascinated by sort of counter movements. You’d see the books on behind me. I’ve got a bunch on Napoleon because it’s a favorite subject of mine and he’s all counter movement.
He was the fulfillment of the French revolution. So when I see, you know, people who are hurt by a terrible situation, I’m always like, how can we avoid it. Yeah. We’re creating a new problem here to overcompensate because we love to build up a wall to protect ourselves from whatever just happened. But then it sometimes can prevent us from doing actual ministry or being open to whatever the Holy Spirit has us to do.
Um, so anyway. Right before this episode drops, uh, my listeners will have just heard an episode about Francis Schaeffer. And one of the things that Francis Schaeffer pushed against was the enlightenment and, uh, the changes that it made in the way that we thought about leadership in the church and, and these big questions.
So it was fascinating to me to see it come [00:23:00] up. It really fit well with the theme of the season that it would come up in your book. And here we are talking about it. First of all, what, what is the enlightenment and which is a giant question, another giant, I’m going to give you a softball here soon, I promise.
But, uh, what, what do you mean by the enlightenment? What is it that makes some. Evangelicals see this as sort of the beginning of an uneasy time.
Mike Cosper: Yeah. Oh, so yeah. Oof. The enlightenment. Where do you start? Okay. We’ll
Chris Staron: switch to a softball. Do you like to fish? Uh. I do like to fish.
Mike Cosper: Uh, I prefer saltwater fishing to freshwater fishing and, uh, I prefer fishing the flats or tarpon fishing to deep water fishing.
So. Are you a
Chris Staron: bobber man? Do you like fly fishing? What is it? Um, okay. So anyway, back to the enlightenment.
Mike Cosper: No. Yeah. So, I mean, so the enlightenment, um, uh, well, we talk, I talk about this a bit in the book because, because the enlightenment really, the way I’ve often talked about it since working on this [00:24:00] project is that you’re really talking about two great big ideas that remade the world.
One is the dignity and rights of man, which I don’t deal with as much in this book. And that’s the part of the Enlightenment that I think, you know, I think isn’t defended as much as it should be these days. What I get into, though, are some of the overreach of the Enlightenment that came as a part of the scientific revolution and a part of the industrial revolution.
What it resulted in was, was, well, Arendt, who’s this, this thinker that I’m engaging with throughout the book, there’s a point in her book, The Human Condition, where she says something to this effect. This isn’t an exact quote, but she, she essentially says, you know, the telescope gave us the illusion that we have mastery over the stars and the microscope gave us the illusion that we have mastery over the atom.
And that basically the role of the human being in a post enlightenment world [00:25:00] was to Was to, to, to sort of scientifically unpack and categorize everything that we could encounter to define it, to manage it, to perfect it, you know, and, and to perfect it for the sake of human flourishing or, or whatever, whatever purpose it, it might be.
And there’s a, there’s a ton of illusions in that. I mean, our part of what a rents project was that I think is so extraordinarily helpful is to say. The idea of progress is always an illusion. It’s like industrialization was great and mass transportation was great right up until the point where somebody said, Hey, let’s use the tools of industrialization and factory farms and mass transportation and make death camps and be able to, you know, be able to achieve evil at a, at a level and a scale that had never been imaginable before in human history.
That’s where the critiques of the Enlightenment, as though it was an unalloyed good, are critiques worth [00:26:00] hearing and critiques worth making. In, in the months since writing this book, I’ve, I’ve done some reporting on, you know, some of the stuff that’s going on in college campuses. There’s been a lot of energy, a lot of reporting about like the, uh, the post October 7th protests and things that have happened at the campuses.
But one of the phenomenon that I discovered in, um, In that is this kind of new right that’s emerging on campus, some of it among like the, the Catholic integralist crowd. Um, and it’s this big anti enlightenment push that, that comes from kind of a new Christian nationalist, uh, Catholic integralist crew.
And what you hear in those circles is an anti enlightenment spirit. That’s not, Hey, the problem is the hubris of the scientific revolution. It’s, you know, universal literacy was a mistake. Like half these people really should be out there picking potatoes. I’m all in to have like a critical conversation about the enlightenment, but.
But I have [00:27:00] my limits. Of course. I just feel like I have to mention that now. Because I think based on what I’ve seen, I think that’s coming, and I think it’s getting, I think that’s going to get worse. I mean, you’ve seen a little of it on Twitter and these far right Christian nationalist trolls, but I think it’s, I think there’s more of it and worse of it.
Coming from, from, from the intellectual heights.
Chris Staron: One of the things I wrestled with in reporting on Francis Schaeffer was his pushback against it, because there were so many good things that came about because of the Enlightenment, and then it makes me think, wait a second, do you miss the The dark ages.
Is that what you’re advocating for?
Mike Cosper: Well, part of what’s part of what’s funny about all of this is that people think an aristocratic society where there was a, an educated elite and they were empowered to make decisions and, you know, they ruled over other people. That’s a really fanciful thing to imagine.
So long as you imagine that you were born into the aristocracy, right? But that’s like one in a hundred. Yeah. You know, at, at best 90, [00:28:00] 91, you’re out there picking potatoes and, and you die at 35 because you got a, you know, an, uh, a cut on your toe that got infected and killed you. So yeah, it’s, it’s easy to romanticize the middle ages.
It’s easy to romanticize these kinds of pre enlightenment, pre liberal society worlds, so long as you’re. Imagining yourself in the, in the positions of power. But I always come back through that great, great line from midnight in Paris, where Owen Wilson says, you know, he’s gone back in time into the belly poke and this, this girl that he’s kind of fallen in love with is wanting to stay there and, and he’s like, Talking to her about how like, nostalgia doesn’t really work.
You don’t really want to stay here. And then he just goes, I mean, these people don’t have antibiotics, you know? Yeah. The enlightenment was a good thing. And we, you know, so we have our limits for how much we, we critique this stuff, but yeah.
Chris Staron: Where it’s coming to vogue and where it fits into your [00:29:00] book, uh, to kind of bring it back around.
Some people point to the enlightenment as this, uh, time when it introduces a lot more anxiety into the world, uh, where we, we’re now at a place where you can choose who you marry, depending on which culture you’re in, you know, what job you’re going to have again, depending on what culture you’re in. The number of choices we have as modern humans can be overwhelming and that it can cause anxiety.
Mike Cosper: And I
Chris Staron: think where you take it in the book is that, uh, we sometimes adopt capitalized ideologies as a way to deal with. Right. That, that number of choices. Am I getting that right?
Mike Cosper: Yeah. Yeah. So part of what I talk about is I say, look, if you were born 500 years ago, where you live, what you do for a living, who you marry, what religion you’re a part of, those aren’t decisions that you make pre reformation.
You really lived in a time where even the thought of not doing one of these things that you were born into wouldn’t have made sense to you at all. One at a time, these innovations of the modern [00:30:00] age. Strip those things away. So, Hey, now you can live wherever you want and love whoever you want and do whatever you want for a living and so on and so forth, worship, whatever God.
And as each of those innovations comes along, we tend to sort of greet all of those as, as goods without recognizing. It creates a certain amount of anxiety because it’s now a decision you have to make and decisions are stressful. Part of life in the modern age is that you live with the anxiety of, of asking yourself, did I make the right decisions?
Not only do you have the anxiety of deciding all of these things, you also lack the roots and the connectedness and the story and the meaning that comes with the institutions that informed Your identity in a previous era, ideology comes along and it says, I got a story for you and it’s forward pointing and it’s big and it’s much bigger than you.
And it’s easy to get caught up in, you know, [00:31:00] what I think the church growth movement, particularly the, the, the failures and the collapses inside the church growth movement, what they have proven again and again, is that. That story, that purpose, because it lacks those institutional roots, because it lacks any real connection to a church outside of itself, it, it sort of destines the person to, to reach a place of loneliness and collapse in the long run.
Chris Staron: I think the, I’ve heard that from you in the Holy Post put out a video recently about something very similar. Where Francis Schaeffer, I think, was really perplexed me was that he made it almost sound like there was no anxiety before the Reformation. And it was like, uh, no, people died at 40. Infant mortality was very high back then, but So pining for that era just makes no sense.
There was a lot of anxiety before the Reformation and during the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. It was just different. So anyway, [00:32:00] good. Thank you for clarifying that for me. You do have Yeah, no, let me just say
Mike Cosper: one thing about that because I think, I think this is where Chesterton is a really helpful corrective to Schaefer because, because one of Chesterton’s big ideas when he would talk about what is conservatism, part of what he would always say is Like part of the most fundamental values of conservatism is recognizing that everything is a trade off and, and so when society evolves, yeah, you gain something, but you lose something the same thing’s true.
If you go backwards though, there’s, and I think where Schaefer’s thinking was limited on this is that he, he seemed to sort of look backward in a way that was like, well, he looked backward with nostalgic. He imagined something utopian. In, in the past, which is a failure to imagine, well, what were the trade offs?
What do we lose by bundling identity once again? And I would argue that one of the things that we lose is a whole heck of a lot of gospel opportunity. I mean, the [00:33:00] Reformation is an enlightenment project. It’s core to the enlightenment project. It’s core to all, all the problems of identity that come later.
I mean, this is Charles Taylor’s whole thing. If, if you want to understand why we have anxiety of identity, it starts with the Reformation, but that doesn’t mean the Reformation was bad. It just means that there are trade offs in a, in a culture that has, that has been through the Reformation. And so let’s be honest about what those trade offs are.
Chris Staron: Amen. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. So I do want to end on more, a more positive note here. We are coming up into the presidential election 2024 in the United States has a lot of, I’m sorry, did you
Mike Cosper: say you wanted to end on a positive note and you brought up the election because that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all month?
I love it. Let’s go.
Chris Staron: But there, there are things we can do is what I’m trying to say is there, there, there are things we can do in order to try to build a better. Church, big C church, a little bit at a [00:34:00] time, little things. And you outline some of them in the end of your book, some of the things that we can be doing to better the church and to kind of work through some of these ideologies and the desire to hide behind them, uh, in, in order to explain a complex world, what are, what are some of the ways that we can do that, that we can take some simple steps to, to try to improve?
Mike Cosper: Yeah. I mean, in, in the book, there’s, there’s a number of things I point to, I am talking a lot about worship. As, as kind of a key thing that the church needs to, needs to reconsider in a moment like this. If, if ideology is telling a story about here’s, here’s how the world changes. And it’s this little tiny thing that if we just get this right, we can get everybody in alignment and all this.
What worship says is worship says, hey, there’s a really, really big story. And you don’t, you don’t know where this is going. And in fact, you don’t really know where this has come from. I mean, there’s a reason why in the, in the great liturgies of the, of the, not just the Catholic church, but like almost [00:35:00] all liturgical traditions, there’s a reason why when they serve, The Eucharist, they say, therefore we proclaim the mystery of our faith.
Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. Evangelicals often think we know what that means. There’s no mystery there. And that’s nonsense. There’s total mystery there. That’s a profound and beautiful mystery. And, and it’s, it’s a mystery that we’re invited to be To be caught up in, and by the way, I don’t think you have to become Catholic to be caught up in the mystery of the, you know, the, the, the death and resurrection of Christ.
So the reason I think worship is so important and, and I know I sound like James K. A. Smith when I say this, and I have no shame about that whatsoever, but the reason I think it’s so important is because it gives us a story that, that will always be bigger than our ambitions, whether there are political ambitions, whether there are, The ambitions of our ministries or our churches or our local organizations, or we’ve seen so [00:36:00] much devastation from narcissistic world changing leaders that are starting companies like Theranos or Uber or whatever we work or whatever you you’ve seen the same pattern of we’re going to change the world ambition led by narcissistic personality.
That just absolutely crushes people in the long run. And I think the gospel has a great way of humbling that because it reminds you of your death. It reminds you of the hope of the resurrection, and it places you inside a story that’s so much bigger than your day to day that you can wake up tomorrow morning and the quote unquote wrong candidate will be elected president and.
You can say, and yet I will praise him because I recognize that in Christ, the best is yet to come, not the best is yet to come in that like our economy is going to be better and our weather is going to heal and all the rest of it. But no, the restoration of all things is guaranteed in Christ. And I. I [00:37:00] ultimately find my hope and comfort in that because I live inside that larger story.
Chris Staron: Amen. Well, Mike Cosper, thank you for joining me on the Truce Podcast. Again, the book is The Church in Dark Times. It’ll be out in November. I’m sure you can pre order it online. Thank you, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me. It’s a great conversation.
His book, The Church in Dark Times releases November 19th, 2024. Special thanks to everyone who helped me talk through the questions with Mike before I got them on the line. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to my brother Nick Staron, who’s a great sounding board. Truce is a listener supported show, and as you may have heard me say over and over again, I’m now doing Truce full time, which means I’m working super hard on the show, but also there’s not much of a safety net for me.
I’m earning just enough money to pay my basic bills, not much else. If you’d like to be a part of making Truce a sustainable show, visit trucepodcast. com slash donate. There you can give via credit card, check, [00:38:00] paypal, patreon, venmo, there are so many ways to give. Another way you can help is by sharing the show with your friends on social media.
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