Mike Cosper on the Dangers of Ideology in the Church

Episode Transcript
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>> Paul (00:07):
Welcome to the Future Christian Podcast, your source
for insights and ideas on how to lead your church in the
21st century. At the Future Christian
Podcast, we talk to pastors, authors,
and other faith leaders for helpful advice and practical
wisdom to help you and your community of faith
walk boldly into the future. Whether

(00:27):
you're a pastor, church leader, or a passionate member
of your faith community, this podcast is
designed to challenge, inspire, and equip you
with the tools you need for impactful ministry.
And now for a little bit about the guest for this episode.

>> Loren (00:43):
Welcome to the Future Christian Podcast. Today,
Martha Tutarnick welcomes Mike Cosper to the
show. Mike Cosper has been creating
music, radio shows and podcasts for
more than 20 years. He produced and
hosted the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
podcast and is director of podcasts at, uh,
Christianity Today. He now co

(01:06):
hosts a weekly podcast called the Bulletin.
Cosper also leads cohorts for church
leaders and is the author of four books,
including Recapturing the Wonder and the Church
in Dark Times. He and his family live in
Louisville, Kentucky. A reminder. Before
we start today's episode, please take a moment

(01:26):
to subscribe to the podcast, leave a
review, and share Future Christian with a friend.
You can connect with Martha Loren and Future Christian
on Instagram and all the social media
platforms. Also find
us@future-christian.com where you can send
us a message with comments, questions, or
ideas for future episodes. We appreciate

(01:48):
your voice and how we faithfully discern the future
of the church.

>> Martha Tatarnic (02:00):
Welcome to Future Christian. I'm your host
today, Martha Tatarnic and it is a
privilege to welcome Mike M. Cosper to the
show because I've spent so much time listening to your
podcasts. Mike, I feel like I've been in
conversation with you for a long time
before now, but, uh, this is actually my first

(02:21):
opportunity to speak with you, and I'm really
excited to get to do so. Welcome.

>> Mike Cosper (02:27):
Yeah, I'm grateful to be here. Thanks for having me.

Okay, so let's just, um, frame our
conversation today with a couple of opening questions. We
ask all of our guests a little bit of background before
we get into the details of, uh,
the work that we're exploring today. But can
you just share a little bit with our listeners?
Mike, something, um, about your faith journey, what

(02:50):
it has looked like in the past and what it looks like
now.

Yeah, so, grew up in the church,
um, grew up with Christian parents,
um, more or less the
kind of life that you look back and you
say, uh, I don't know, a time when I wasn't
um, a believer, um, which
as a Southern Baptist where
crises, ah, uh, of conversion are kind of part and

(03:16):
parcel of the Christian life. Um, uh, uh,
that's, that's a funny, a funny story. But, but
that's definitely who I was. Um, um, when I
was 19, I, I joined
the team of a church plant
in Louisville, Kentucky where I, where I still
live today. And um,

(03:37):
um, and then about a year after that this
was, that would have been in 2001, I came on staff,
I was on staff at that church for about 15 years
and served as a pastor in a variety
of roles. Left
ministry in 2015,
um, and have been doing
media in one form or another

(03:59):
for uh, about a decade since
then.

Okay, well thanks for that
overview. Is there a
spiritual practice that you are
finding particularly meaningful in your life right
now?

You know, um, for me
it's the lectionary.
Um, I'm again
like, I'm a Southern Baptist, I'm
still a Southern Baptist. But um, just
having the daily rhythm of
reading widely in the scriptures,

(04:36):
uh, has been very, very important I think to
sort of grounding me in a
larger story. Um,
so yeah,
that's probably the central practice of my life.
And then outside of that,
um, I try to do an annual retreat where
I do a silence and solitude retreat and

(04:58):
I look forward to that a lot.
I talk for a living, right? Like I'm a podcaster so I talk for
a living. So having, um, having
something on the schedule where it's like, hey, for three or four days
you're not going to talk, that's
fantastic.

Yeah, I really respect both of
those answers. I mean I'm a dyed in the wall
pretty much Anglican and we live
and breathe the lectionary. It's hard for me to imagine
any other way, but uh, that doesn't
prevent me from feeling very blessed by
it. And yeah, when you know,

(05:34):
you're constantly creating content and
having things to say, it's really nice to be able to
just shut up.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I make a lot of noise in
my life and it's nice to not
have to make noise for a few days for sure.

Yeah, yeah, I hear that. Okay, well,
without further ado, let's get into
the meat of our conversation.
Um, now we're primarily going to be talking
about your new book, the Church in
Dark Understanding and Resisting the Evil that
Seduced the Evangelical Movement. I've got my

(06:10):
copy right here and you can't quite
tell from the video, um,
but it's very dog eared. I had a lot
of notes as I was going through it. Um, but
I do want to take a bit of a step back before we
get into the book because,
um, many of our listeners,
and myself included, have

(06:32):
probably been very familiar with your work
on the superb podcast the
Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. That's how I came
across your voice and your offering
in the church. I would say that, uh, that
podcast series really should be mandatory listening for
anybody in church leadership.

(06:53):
And um, your book really
takes us into a deeper dive of some
of the dynamics that you excavated in that
podcast. So maybe, um,
for listeners who aren't familiar with
it or who just need to be
refreshed on the background, um, can
you just share with us what led you

(07:15):
to the Mars Hill project and what you were hoping
to illuminate with it?

Yeah, so like I said, I was part of. A.
Part of a church for about 15 years, serving on
staff. Um, we were connected
to the Acts 29
movement. Um, so we weren't planted by Acts
29, but we joined them. I guess
we were part of the network from
2004 or so to about

(07:43):
2010.

Acts 29 is a church
planting collective.

Yeah, it's a church planting network that
um, essentially
Mars Hill sat at the center of that network.
And um, so
it gave me kind of a front row seat to
Mars Hill and um, the
leadership issues there and sort of,

(08:09):
um, the broader milieu that
it was a part of.
Um, my own church definitely
went through its own season of sort of
leadership turmoil and troubles.
And so in trying to sort of understand
and process what I had gone through,
I kept coming back to the Mars Hill story,

(08:31):
um, because I had seen, you know, there were a variety
of sort of parallels
and similar issues there. And
m. Yeah, so in 20, I
guess it would probably. It was probably as early as 2019
that I first started talking to some former Mars Hill pastors
about the possibility of doing a podcast to tell the

(08:51):
story of the church and what had gone wrong.
And
one, uh, thing led to another and 2021, we
launched the series.

Yeah, I mean one of the things that
you do keep raising as a
question, I think, through, um,
the podcast series, and then of course that you
delve into more in the book is
like, why do we keep doing
this? Like, this is. It's a very
particular story. And I think that the podcast is really

(09:24):
effective because of how, you
know, particular you are about the landscape of
Seattle and the
specific characters that, um,
were very involved in the life of the community
and the forming of that community.
But at the same time. Like, you're naming these dynamics

(09:45):
that keep cropping up.

Yeah, for sure. And
really, like the church in Dark times,
um, is an extension of
that inquiry, so to speak.
Um,
I knew so many of these Mars Hill
pastors, um, in
a way that was very similar to. To what I had

(10:09):
seen at my own church.
Um, I was so aware of
the fact that, like, these were decent
people. These were good people, beyond
decent. These were good people who
would then find themselves on the side
of a, um,
church discipline hearing where they

(10:33):
punished and humiliated and ostracized
somebody who had really done nothing.
Done nothing more than sort of, you know,
question. A decision from Mark
Driscoll. I had seen similar things,
and I was trying to understand how
does this kind of stuff happen? And,

(10:53):
um. Yeah, so. So I guess I'd say,
you know, one thing led to another, and,
um, it led to me
working on this book as a result.

Well, let's get into that
specific dynamic,
um, because in your
book the Church in Dark Times,
um, you really
kind of drill into that
specific dynamic how it is that
good people almost sort of

(11:27):
knowingly do the wrong thing. Right.
Um, it's not that people
didn't know that there were, uh,
some toxic dynamics at work in
the person who's at the helm of
the community. Um, it's not
that there wasn't. Um.
You know, I think in your

(11:49):
analysis that in the example
of Paul Petrie that, uh,
you come back to a number of times in the book.
So this is a person who was a leader in
Mars Hill and raised
what sounds like some pretty
reasonable, just critical
pushback to, um, some

(12:11):
governance stuff at the church and
got completely. Not just fired, but
excommunicated. A huge amount of
spiritual trauma, um, done
to him and his family as a
result. Um, and
that, you know, there's this
sense of people knowing

(12:33):
it's not necessarily the right thing to do,
but that they feel like there's
a greater objective,
a more important objective that sort of
makes it okay to do the wrong thing.
Um, and you talk about that as
ideology. So can you

(12:54):
just give us sort of the
thesis of the book? What is it that you mean by
ideology? How does ideological
thinking lead to potentially
disastrous decision making?

Yeah, certainly. Um, yeah.
So,
um, when I talk about ideology, I always
try to sort of distinguish, like, there's like,
lowercase I, ideology, which is
just sort of our
worldviews, our systems of thought,
um, uh, the way we think the world

(13:31):
operates. Uh, and then there's capital
I, ideology. And this is a
very Modern concept. And
um, I think it
was Miroslav Volf who framed it this way.
And um, uh, apologies to
Dr. Volf if I get this wrong, but I think it was
Miroslav Volf who said that

(13:54):
ideology in that larger
sense, like capital I ideology
is this little idea that's going to change the world.
It's like if you have this one little
concept and the simpler the better, and if
we implement it fully, it's going to change the
world. So
in the political realm, it

(14:16):
was, um, um, you know, the, the
ideology of communism was that the, the
problem with the world was, was capitalists and,
and the bourgeoisie. And if we could sort of eliminate them,
then everything, you know, socialist utopia was on
the, on the horizon.

Yeah, for sure.

For the Nazis it was, you know, Jews were the
problem. Right. Um. What,
what's fascinating is there's a thousand
iterations of this kind of
ideology. This, this little idea that's going to change
everything. And evangelic been
seduced into adopting it,
um, time and time again.

(14:56):
Um, Mars Hill is a great example of
it. The ideology at Mars Hill was
that the problem. You know, Driscoll would say this
constantly. 90hm percent of the world's
problems were because of young men.
And so if you could reach young men with the gospel,
um, then their
conversions and them being sort of

(15:17):
redirected, oriented to the church, et cetera,
that would, that would change everything, that would fix everything. You'd
reach the city, you'd reach the world, you'd do the rest.
What, what makes it an
ideology is that it comes with
this sort of ironclad circular
logic where every

(15:38):
criticism can then get sort of chewed up
by, um, by, by that
ideology, by that logic. And so,
you know, if the problem with the world is young men,
and this is we're going to reach young men and we're going to build the whole
church around it. If you show up and you criticize
the church at any point. Well, your

(15:58):
problem is, you know,
you're, you're a feminist, you're
anti man, you're not,
you know, you're not sufficiently evangelical, uh,
in the ways that Driscoll would have,
would have announced. And the logic of that could sort of chew you
up and spit you up as it went. Spit you out
as it went. And

(16:19):
um,
I think there's countless examples of this. I mean, there's something
similar that goes on with Bill Hybels
and sort of the kind of cult of
leadership around Hybels as well. But,
um, if you want to
understand how does the church get to a place
where, um,

(16:41):
where good people are justifying evil
activities? Um, it
often comes with a
core idea like this that
they're rallied around and defending.

Now, is it fair to say that
wrapped in that, again, kind of
specific ideological idea for Mark
Driscoll and Mers Hill, that
generally in the church
and in, um, church
leadership, there's

(17:16):
a broader
ideological principle which is around
growth. Right.
And that becomes like, part of what is
ironclad as well. Like, if the church is
growing, if you're seen as
reaching new people with the, uh, gospel,

(17:37):
you know, converting hearts,
then how can you
challenge the means to that
end? Like, is.

Yeah, 100%. I mean,
um, the. The Great
Commission is. Is very compelling, you
know. Um, and. And
so when. When you're looking at the world in a way where it's
like all of life and
all of ministry, it's all this

(18:06):
cosmic battle between good and evil, and the
stakes are that people are going to go to
hell for an eternity. And just
to be really clear, like, I don't deny, like,
you know, I don't deny the
importance of the Great Commission or any of
that. Um, what happens though,
that. Where it starts to kind of turn awry

(18:30):
is that
churches and church leaders begin to think
of their particular
ministry and their particular work
in a way that, um,
it's almost like you take God's
providence out of the equation

(18:50):
and you say the burden is on us to figure
out how do we implement this Great
Commission, how do we reach this city, how do we
transform things? Um,
it's, you know, there's. There, there's
a. And, and I, I talk about this a bit
in the book. Like, there's a certain
godlessness to the church

(19:12):
growth movement which says, here's
a formula. And if you implement the
formula effectively, you're going to reach, you know,
your whole city. You're going to. You're going to transform the whole city. You're going
to grow your church.
Um, uh,
it's as though we've sort of mechanized

(19:34):
evangelism and,
um, the work of the Gospel in a way where it's
like, look, just obey the formula.
And what comes out the other side of it is going to
be, you know, this, this radical
transformation. Now, on. On the one hand, what part of.
What's complicated about all of this is like, it
kind of works, right? Like Mars Hill grew,

(19:57):
they got to thousands and thousands of people.
It worked for Bill Hybels.
Um, but the, the
question. The question you have to start to ask
when these things fall apart on the back end, and I hope
that the church is doing some reflection on
this. Is, um.
What. What exactly have you won people

(20:19):
to? What is the gospel that you
have won them with and transformed
them? And,
um. So,
yeah, so I think there's a lot of sort of.
I could rant for a while on this, but I think there's a lot of sort of
downstream consequences to
winning people to a. A kind of ideological

(20:40):
vision of the church rather than
the gospel itself.

Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I
appreciate the complexity that you always build into
all of your work, because it isn't
that God doesn't get in there too. You know, like, there
are lots of amazing stories
of people's lives being
sincerely, um, met by the
living God at Mars Hill and at,

(21:07):
uh, you know, sort of any of these examples.
But, um, I think
what you're calling us to is
to be accountable for,
um, how
we get there.

Yeah, no, thank you. That's kind.
And it's extremely important to
me. I mean, I think,
um. One of the things that was
interesting about them, you know, just for a little behind the scenes of the
Mars Hill thing, one of the things that was. That was
really, really important to me at the outset of that
project was to tell the story

(21:46):
in such a way that
members of Mars Hill could see
themselves in it. Um, and what
I mean by that is that, like, there's a way to tell
the Mars Hill story where you, you know,
you create this kind of caricature, cartoonish
version of the church and its members and

(22:06):
Driscoll himself, um,
where people. People from the outside can look in and
go, why on earth would anybody have ever
been a part of this thing? And I think it was
really, really important to me to tell the story in such a way
that Mars Hill members could say, yeah,
that's why we were there. That's why it mattered to us. That's

(22:26):
what was so significant about it.
And, you know, by God's grace, like,
that's. That's how the thing unfolded. I
mean, part of the. Part of the
comedy of the creation of that whole series was the
fact that, um, we got,
you know, we got, I think, five
episodes into it, and a number of

(22:49):
people who had
refused to talk to us, um, for the
series came around about five episodes in and
said, okay, we're ready to. We're ready to talk. And we had
to, like, throw the whole storyboard for the series out the window.
And we were producing it in real time,
um, because. Because we had new
Voices that we needed to include. Those people came

(23:12):
around specifically because of the episode
that we did on men and
masculinity and what masculinity meant at Mars
Hill. Um, they heard
that episode and they were like, okay,
you understand why we were there, so
we'll share our stories now. And,
um, I mean,

(23:35):
I'm proud of that. I'm proud that we were able to sort of tap into
that and honor their
experience by telling the story honestly,
because it's very tempting to caricature the whole
thing.

Yeah, for sure. And, you know, as a
listener, um, who is not familiar
with that world at all, to be honest.
And I do want to get into that a little bit more as well.
Like, I'm mainline through and
through.

Yeah, no, I'm sure it's a very strange world if you're
mainline through and through.

But no, I really, like, I felt like I could
locate myself in the story as well.
I felt like one of the exciting things as a
listener was that sense of the story
expanding and deepening in real time
as. As you're going along. Like, it,
uh, it was quite a remarkable,
um, uh,

(24:29):
yeah, multiplication of grace
that sort of got lived
out through the podcast. It was. It was really
interesting. Um, I want to come back to your
book though, because, um,
in your book you really,
ah, get into
a conversation with an

(24:51):
interesting companion. Um,
Jewish social theorist
Hannah Arendt. I
hope I'm pronouncing her name somewhat correctly.
Um, her life's work was devoted to
understanding how the Western world could have given
birth to a culture that would be capable of
murdering 11 million people in

(25:13):
Nazism.
Um, what drew you to
her work, and what do you
think her insights offer us
in Christian leadership?

Yeah, um, uh, well, so
first of all, I think you're doing a great job with,
uh, the name, so well done.
Um, yeah, Hannah Arendt. I mean,
she's. She's just a fascinating figure in
the 20th century. And,
um, uh, so, yes, she
was a German, Jewish social

(25:48):
theorist. Um,
she ended up fleeing Germany in
1933, um, after the
Nazi takeover. She, um,
was briefly imprisoned and questioned by the
Gestapo for subversive
activities. She ends up fleeing to
France. She's there until essentially right

(26:08):
before the German takeover of,
um, France, she's briefly
imprisoned in a, um,
what was essentially like a proto
concentration camp in Gurs in France.
Um, the vast majority of the people who were imprisoned there
ended up going to Auschwitz. They were actually

(26:28):
eventually sent to Auschwitz. But,
um, um, she ends up,
you know, kind of in a similar way that she sort of
talks her way out of the Gestapo.
She's um, part of
this um, conspiracy, uh,
inside the campingur to
create false documents to get

(26:51):
out and um, escape to England and
then eventually to the US and she spends the rest of her
life trying to understand how it
was that the very people that she
knew and loved, right, like
Arendt was this
brilliant young intellectual in
Germany, um, in 1933,

(27:13):
um, she was actually having an affair with Martin
Heidegger at the time.
Um, she was trying to figure
out how these people that she knew
and loved could be transformed into
collaborators, contributors, supporters
of the Nazi project, including
um, as you mentioned, including the

(27:35):
death camps themselves. And
um, what's so interesting
about Arendt is that in 1950 she writes
a book. She publishes a book called the Origins of
Totalitarianism. And
reflecting on what took place, she
essentially describes all of
um, the sort of ultimate result

(27:58):
of
the Nazi ideology and everything else as
radical evil. It's this sort of
unforeseen, um,
incalculable evil that emerges
in the world. And then about a decade
later she goes to Israel
to cover the trial of Adolf

(28:20):
Eichmann. Um, Eichmann was one of the
primary architects of the Final Solution,
um, and he had been kidnapped from
Argentina and taken to Israel to stand
trial. And she has this incredible
revelation when she encounters
Eichmann because she can't get over
the fact that Eichmann is just incredibly

(28:41):
normal and kind of stupid
and um, um,
and that you know, his
defense of himself is essentially this
perpetual appeal to cliches and
catchphrases and you know,
very simplistic ideas. And it
changes the way that she thinks about the whole

(29:04):
history of Nazism and
um, the Final Solution, where she essentially
says, you know, this is where people will be familiar with
the phrase the banality of evil.

The banality of evil, yeah.

Where this emerges for the first time
is she, you know, she, she coins the phrase while,
while talking about Eichmann because she's like
th. This very normal
careerist, self interested guy,
administrator. Uh, yeah, yeah, this
bureaucrat became, became this

(29:36):
monster. And how, how does
that happen? And so
when I was making the Rise and Fall of Mars
Hill, um, I
remember the interview, I was having a conversation with somebody
and we were talking about the Paul Petrie
thing and they basically said yeah, it was like

(29:56):
for a decade we had been told church
leadership is this one thing,
this is the structure for it, this is how it should be
done. And then all of a sudden we
turned on a dime because the mission was
so important. We couldn't stick to this,
you know, arcane structure of our church polity.

(30:16):
We had to vote on something new and different.
And, um, you know, Paul objected to
that. And it. That was the first time I thought
about Arendt because,
um,
what happens in dictatorships always
is there sort of comes a moment for the
dictator where they say, hey, we have to suspend the normal

(30:38):
rules. Right? Um, the normal
rules of democracy and the way
we're governed. We need to suspend all of that
because there's this crisis, whatever the
crisis might be. The crisis is so
urgent, we have to deal with that.
And in the church, we do that
with the mission, we do that with evangelism,

(31:00):
we do that with, again,
this cosmic battle that we're a part of. Uh,
m. Trying to. Trying to,
um, win people's souls before, you
know, before they go to hell. And again,
I'm still an evangelical. I still think those
convictions are real. But this idea that we suspend the

(31:20):
rules for the sake of the mission,
for the sake of the growth of the church, is
extraordinarily dangerous. And I think time and
again, you've seen examples where that's
happened and you've seen what. What the results
are, and Mars Hill is the pinnacle example
of it. So I think the parallels between

(31:40):
kind of the cult of personality that takes place around
a leader like Mark Driscoll and the cult of
personality that takes place around
dictatorship are very clear.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I want
to come back to what you said a little
bit earlier about wanting to make
sure that, um, your portrayal of Mars
Hill was not a caricature that the
people of Mars Hill could see themselves in
the podcast. But I think the
corollary of that is that

(32:15):
listeners who aren't part of the
Mars Hill story, um,
don't walk away thinking, well, that's about
other people who aren't like me, and I would
never do that. And, you know, it's.
It's kind of an interesting spectacle, but
there's no, like, takeaway. Right.

(32:35):
And, and I. To me, that
is, I think, an important,
um, an important
insight in the banality of evil as well,
is that, um,
like, we shouldn't hear the
story of Nazi Germany

(32:56):
without doing some
interior work in our own souls and
our own capacity to
participate in things that,
um, are absolutely
horrific. Right.
So. Sorry, do.

No, let me. Yeah, I mean, if I can just
jump in, I would just say, like,
yeah, I think it's so critical,
um, I think it's so critical for people
who heard that series
to resist the temptation to
say, wow, those people are crazy.

Yeah.

Um, because the reality is,
if you had been there, if you had been in those
pews, if you had been in those community groups, if you had
been part of the scene in which that
church emerged, um,
um, the, the
predominant likelihood is that you would have been
drawn into it, totally compelled by it, devoted

(33:57):
your life to it, and been burned
horrifically, as so many of those
people were in the aftermath. So.

Well, yeah, and the other component
that I kept coming back to and listening to
it, like, I'm a church leader, you
know, um, and as I said
before, like, I am,
um, mainline through and through. Um,
there's a lot about the evangelical

(34:26):
church culture that is quite foreign to me
and certainly, like, I
wouldn't see myself as having a ton in common
with a Mark Driscoll. And I really
like the levels of
celebrity and the
platforms and kind of
the, the reach

(34:47):
of a Mark Driscoll is
in a, uh, different universe from
anything that most of my
colleagues or that I experience.
And yet at the same time, like,
I, I felt
like I needed to do some soul searching
with regards to his story. Because,

(35:10):
yeah, like, our churches
might be smaller, but they can
also be very personality driven.
Um, and mainline leaders
can also very much
succumb to messiah complexes
and to feeling,

(35:32):
you know, that,
uh, as you said earlier, that
kind of, like, godless,
um, agenda of
like, it's all up to me. It's all up to me
to, to save this thing.
I, I think any of us in church
leadership should be able to

(35:54):
relate to that weight
of expectation that gets placed on us
when, when we're at the front of the
church. So,
like, what are. What are.
What's kind of a different model from
that, like, cult of
personality? Because I think it can trip us

(36:15):
all up.

No, I, Yeah, I appreciate
the way you're framing this because I think it's. I think it's just
so. I think it's so key that,
um, Christian leaders keep
in mind that, you
know, this is not unique to mega
churches. This is something that is a

(36:36):
temptation for all of us. Um,
one of my favorite podcasts of all time
is, uh, an episode of this American
Life, um, that I think. I think it's called
Petty Tyrant is the name of the episode. Or Petty
Tyrants. And in this
episode, they,
um, uh, they told the story

(36:58):
of, uh, a guy who was
essentially the.
He was like the superintendent of
maintenance for a school system.
And you hear that and
you think, how could that guy be
like a petty tyrant?

(37:19):
But they tell this story of the
way this guy just like, had a
stranglehold over the entire school
district and everybody was subservient to him.
And he ran his,
you know, he ran his team with this
sort of mob like, sense of

(37:39):
loyalty and discipline and militancy
and, um, all the rest. And
it's a wild story. I mean, it's a crazy story.
But for me, as somebody who had been inside
of an unhealthy church,
uh, with a leader who had an unhealthy
grasp of his importance and the role of

(38:00):
leadership and all the rest, it was just also totally
believable and familiar.
Um, and I love
referencing it because I think it
reminds us of
the. The church's problems are.
They're ultimately like just deeply
human problems. We have a problem with

(38:22):
power. Power is an incredible
temptation. Um,
and it also reminds us of the
fact that, like, I
think. I mean, I think the reason a
Mars Hill can happen
is because people are lonely and isolated and
they're looking for purpose and meaning. And someone like

(38:44):
Mark Driscoll comes up with an
extraordinary amount of
charisma and conviction
and says, give your life away
to this and you'll
be happy on the other side of it.
And, um,

(39:04):
it's the same way that, you know, it's the same way
that, um. Um.
Populist movements of all stripes kind
of end up working. Um,
David Foster Wallace said, you know, we're all dying to give ourselves
away to something. And. And smart leaders have a
way of, um, of tapping

(39:25):
into that desire and saying, like, here's your
purpose, here's your meaning. Here's what you're supposed to give yourself away
to.
Um.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I feel like I've lost your original
question. But, um.
Um. I think
that's certainly what the book is about, is how does

(39:46):
that happen? And really sort of tracing
it back into even
just the history of modernity and trying to
understand why are we rootless?
Why are we lonely and isolated? Why are
we so vulnerable to
people who show up and say, I have a
wonderful plan for your life.

Yeah. Yeah. And I really appreciate
how thoroughly,
um, you explore all of those
different dynamics. There's a thread that I'm really
interested in pulling on with you.
Um, I
interviewed last year Michael
Graham, who was one of the authors of the Great

(40:30):
Deterging. And,
um,
you know, I think that the research
in that book, um,
highlights a, ah, reality that we're all facing
across the evangelical and mainline
world, which is decline right

(40:50):
across the board in people
interested in institutional
religion. Um, and
this feeling that, like,
something that we love, uh,
and care about is
disappearing in front of our eyes.

(41:11):
Like, to what degree do you
feel like that background of
secularism, of,
um, anxiety for the church's
survival plays into,
I think, both,
um, the hero worship of a Mark

(41:31):
Driscoll who comes along and seems to
have the answers, and then the success to back it
up, but also then,
um, feeling threatened by critical
voices that might try
to, you know,
um, break that
facade in any way.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean,
I think the rise of secularism plays a huge
role in all of this.
Um, something I talk about
in the book is, um,
uh, the philosopher Charles Taylor.
He has this concept that he refers to as

(42:14):
bundled identity. So, like,
if you're born 500 years ago, you
know, you're Bavarian, you're a
baker's son, you're betrothed to the
butcher's daughter, you're Catholic, you know,
you can kind of go down the line of all these identity
markers, you know, where.

You'Ll live your whole life.

Exactly. None of those things are questions,
right?

Yeah.

Um. Uh, not only are they not questions,
like, the thought of
questioning those identity markers is never going
to cross your mind just because of the structures
of society and the, you know,
what he refers to as the social imaginary. Like,
that's all just kind of baked in and locked in.
And what modernity does is

(42:59):
it unbundles all of that. And
so unlike this guy born
500 years ago, you know, when.
When we come of age, we have to figure out, well, what am I
doing with my life? Where am I going to live? Who do I
love? Do I love men or women? Like, you
know, um, you can just kind of go down the line

(43:20):
of all of these questions. And
on the one hand, you can look at, you
know, all of that and the Industrial Revolution and
all of these things and say, hey, there's a lot of positives, right?

Like, a lot of positives. Yeah.

You know, as, uh, um, as. As.
As, you know, the guy, uh,
as Owen Wilson says in. In Midnight, uh,
in Paris, like, these people don't have antibiotics.
Right. Looking back in the past, like, yeah,
we. We love modernity. I love air conditioning. I love
antibiotics. Like, there's a lot of positives, but the

(43:54):
negatives are that all
of that unbundling,
it doesn't just give us questions, it gives
us anxiety. Because even when you answer the
questions, I'm going to live here. I'm going to do this, I'm going to marry this
person, I'm going to do whatever,
um, you're left going, well,
did I make the right decision? Um,

(44:17):
did I marry the right person? Did I choose the right
religion? Did I move to the right city? Did
I take the right job? And
that anxiety creates all kinds
of problems for us.
Um, and with it,
um, comes this loosening

(44:39):
of connections to institutions that are
meaning making, whether that's the state or
the church or the family or whatever else,
our, uh, bonds with those meaning making
institutions have grown weaker and weaker.
So when a charismatic person comes along
and says, I've got a story for

(45:01):
you, I've got meaning for you, I've got purpose for you,
I've got a direction for your life,
um, it's profoundly compelling.
And once somebody
locks in on that, I mean, this was something that the Mars Hill
guys would talk about all the time.
They would say, you know,
um, I remember one guy

(45:23):
saying, I resonate
with,
uh, he said, I remember talking to
a Vietnam vet and
that guy saying,
um, of course I don't miss
the war because I don't miss having bullets
fly by my head. But

(45:44):
I do miss waking up in the morning having a purpose.
And these Mars Hill folks kind of feeling the same
way. Like, they don't miss Mark, they don't miss
the manipulation. They recognize it for what it is
now. But that sense of
purpose and meaning, the way it bonded
them with one another, they miss all

(46:05):
of that. And I get that. And I think that's
a, that's a
phenomenon of modernity, for sure.

Yeah. I just want to open up
your book here because there's this one little
part that, um, I just keep
coming back to.
Um, the
book of Revelation tells
a much larger story in which
ambiguity about the church at

(46:36):
Ephesus future is ultimately
overshadowed by the defeat of the devil and the victory of the kingdom
of God. It's a clear, sobering message
that our communities may not last forever
and that redemption doesn't depend on
them. An honest church mission
statement based on these warnings would be
so and so community church here in fear and

(46:58):
trembling until God removes our lampstand.
I think that that contrast
between kind of the biblical
reality of just how
fragile, um, our human
efforts really are and how dependent
upon the grace of God they

(47:20):
actually need to be.
Um, you can see why
that's not the mission statement that most of us go
for. That, like, having that
much more. Um,
yeah, do this and you'll be successful
and you'll know what your life is about.

(47:41):
Um, and we'll have the numbers to show for it. Like, of
Course, that's such a
compelling antidote to all of that
modern angst that you talk about.

Yeah, no,
um, I was just talking to somebody
about this yesterday and
um, uh,
they said if you could offer one prescription for
pastors who are trying to figure out how do I not
get sucked into the

(48:17):
grandiosity, uh, of
ideology and all the rest, what would it be?
And I thought about it for a minute and I
said, I said, well this is very, this is
very, it's very on brand for me
in terms of its sort of crushing
morosity. Um, but,
um, my.

(48:38):
Sorry, my headphones unplugged.
Um, my prescription would
be to remember your death.
Um,
I, um, I mean I feel
like so much of what,
so much of what happens around

(49:00):
celebrity pastors and
um, uh, the, the whole sort of
church growth phenomenon and all of this, it's like,
um, it's Tower of Babel stuff.
It's let's make our name great, you know?
Yeah. And you know,
at the end of the day, like,

(49:20):
one reason I think the Mars Hill story is so darn
important is because
by 2013, when
you removed M. Mark from the church,
the church collapsed.

Mhm.

That's horrendous. That's a nightmare, that's
disaster, that's failure on every level. And
that, that should be the most damning
aspect, uh, of that story for anybody who's trying to sort of
assess what happened there in Driscoll,
is that the church couldn't outlive the
guy. That's

(49:54):
horrific. And so if we're not
building our ministries in such a
way that, I
mean, I think it was the Moravian missionaries had the
phrase preach the gospel, um, preach
the gospel, die and be forgotten. If
that's not in our minds,
that we can be

(50:17):
forgotten and that
ministry can sort of move beyond us
or move on after us. It has to,
it has to. Um, then
we've truly gotten this whole thing
backwards. And unfortunately, I think
the reality of where the, the church is in North America

(50:37):
and in the west in general,
um, there are a lot of churches
that are really built on the backs of
personalities and
um, death is going to be,
death is going to be a cold awakening
for all of them.
Um, and

(50:59):
bad news. You're not going to escape it.
It's like, and that's where it's like,
the tradition is such a gift to us
if we actually paid attention to it. Because Ash Wednesday
every year ought to be reminding pastors of
like, dude, don't make this thing about yourself.

Yeah, your dust, man.

Yeah, Exactly.

You're going to return to the dust. All of us go down
to the dust.

I say dude, but I use the
universal non gendered dude. Men, men,
women, the non gendered dude. It applies to all.

It certainly does. Yeah. So remember your
death. Celebrate, um, Ash Wednesday.
What are some other, um,
some other acts of resistance?
Because like we've
identified very clearly. I think we're all
susceptible to um, these cults

(51:54):
of personality. I think we're all
susceptible, uh, to the, the
arrogance of getting. Thinking that
it is about us. Um,
and I think that we'd all
like lots more certainty,
um, and people

(52:16):
showing us
the road of success. So the
last part of your book does get into
practices of resistance. Do you want to name
any others to that list?

Yeah, no. Uh, I talk about
a number in there. Um,
um, the book ends
with an emphasis in particular,
uh, on the practices of
worship. And
I try to sort of delineate worship as

(52:52):
something broader
than um,
uh,
the sort of revivalistic,
um, experiences, like
trying to look at worship as something that is
um, really about orienting
yourself around a particular story. And I

(53:14):
think that's the key thing in all of this.
Um,
um. In the modern era,
people who are lonely and
purposeless, uh, and searching
get drawn into,
whether it's a populist political
movement or uh, a sort

(53:35):
of church growth phenomenon or
a cult or whatever, they get drawn
into those things because of all of the, you
know, all of these sort of historical,
um, um, historical, uh,
things we've been talking about here.
Um, the church's cure for that
is not to provide like a

(53:58):
counter narrative in the sense of, well, here's
a populist. I mean Mars Hill was a populist
movement in a lot of ways.
And that was no solution because that thing's going to fall apart
the minute that mark leaves.
Um, what the church has to offer is something
that's, that's, that's this

(54:18):
bigger story, this, this larger narrative
to find meaning and purpose inside of.
And I think, I think worship and liturgy are
a key way of doing that. Um, I
think, I think creating culture and
storytelling are a really key way to do that
as well. I mean, one of the reasons, I think,

(54:39):
you know, for me personally, one of the reasons
doing the Mars Hill podcast was so important
was um, I
felt like it was a way to
shine a light on the
futility, um, and
toxicity of these

(54:59):
phenomenon and
um, maybe to get some Christians to think about their
faith in a bigger and broader
way, um, to point to
a better and more beautiful church. That is
possible outside of this kind of thing.

Yeah. Uh, I
mean, just kind of following up on
that for a moment, like,
how has your work been received
in the evangelical world? Like,
do. Does what you have put
together, does it feel threatening to
some people? Like, has it?

(55:40):
Yeah. What's the reaction?

Yeah, um, great question.
Um,
what's encouraging is that I would say
that by and large
the vast majority of the reaction has
been a recognition of the
truth to the story and a

(56:03):
recognition of the,
um, the. The reality of the
issues and the challenges. And so
I'm. Overall I'm. I'm very encouraged
in terms of the way people have responded to it and all of that.

I'm glad to hear that. That's really good.

Yeah. No, I was,
um. I wasn't surprised
by that. I kind of expected that people would
hear the thing and go, yeah, this makes a lot
of sense. Um, plus I think
the nature of kind of how we told the
story because we focus so much on kind of telling it

(56:39):
from the inside, focusing on leaders who are
actually really a part of the
movement, um,
it makes it, I guess, um, it makes it hard to
argue with.

Well, and it wasn't an expose like
it was a number of years after the
whole thing collapsed. So it's not like you were trying to bring it
down in the midst of its, like.

Right. We weren't breaking news with it. We weren't. We weren't
telling people things that for the most part, we
weren't telling people things that weren't already kind of a
matter of the public record. I mean, I think in the
last three episodes, we did
have some things in those episodes that had not been published
or talked about before. But for the most
part it was all pretty much out there.

(57:25):
So it was really about
challenging people to just sort of reckon with the reality of
it. Um, that said,
there were a handful of
folks who,
um. There were a handful of folks
who were very unhappy with what we
did. Um, uh, I'll never

(57:48):
forget. So in the midst of this,
I got invited to go speak at a,
um, um,
uh, or. Or to do, uh, like a Q
A, like an on stage Q and A at a conference,
um, for some very, very, very large
churches. And I had been invited by.

(58:09):
I'd actually been invited by the pastor of,
you know, um, I won't name
drop any of these folks, but like, I was invited by the
pastor of a very, very large church, one of the largest
churches in North America, asked me to come and do this Q
and A with him at this, at this
event. And
um, I, I get

(58:30):
there and um,
I'm looking at the schedule and
uh, this is a fault of mine but like,
for, for events like this,
I often don't pay a lot of attention to what is on the
schedule. You know, I just sort of like, right, I know I'm speaking,
I'm going to do my thing, I'm going to show up and do it and then I'm going to go
home. And um, so I didn't really

(58:53):
pay a lot of attention to what else was on the schedule. And I get there
and I'm looking at the schedule and
I see that uh, our
Q and A is right before the main
speaker for that evening. And it just so happened that the main
speaker for that evening was another
big time megachurch
guy, um, who

(59:16):
the weekend before in his sermon
to his church of, I don't know,
40, 50,000 people had denounced me
from the stage.
And so I'm looking at the schedule going,
um, oh wow. Like I'm the opening
act for, you know, for, for this

(59:36):
guy. And um, so in the
green room before the, you know, before the session, he comes in
and um, when he realizes who I am, he
says, uh, you know, he makes some snide comment
about um, uh, I, uh, hope you
don't make a podcast about the dumb things I said in my
30s. And you know, I
said, oh, well, were you in the habit of

(59:59):
saying these kinds of things? And I, you know, threw some Driscoll quotes
at him, um, just to be
clear. But it was, the hostility was real. It was,
it was, it was thick. And, and then,
and then I just felt this incredible irony because
I did this Q and A.
Um, I did this Q and A.
And the last thing that

(01:00:21):
they asked me was,
um, if you had one piece of advice to
give pastors, um,
who don't want to become the next Mark
Driscoll, what would you tell them? And I told them that
Moravian missionary quote, it's one of my favorite quotes,
preach the gospel, die and be forgotten.
And uh, I said, I think pastors need to remember

(01:00:44):
their death and they need to embrace a
posture that says, you know, preach the gospel, die and be
forgotten. And I
walked off stage laughing at the irony
that, you know, people
sort of, people reacted very positively
to that.

>> Martha Tatarnic (01:01:01):
Mhm.

>> Mike Cosper (01:01:02):
And I walked off stage laughing at the irony that
right after they had reacted so positively
to that, the introduction
began for this
celebrity pastor guy with I don't
know how many campuses and video streaming
and you know, this, that and the Other,

(01:01:22):
um, whose. Whose
entire empire is really built
around his personality.

Yeah.

>> Mike Cosper (01:01:29):
And. And if he gets hit by a bus tomorrow,
they're in big trouble.
Um, so.
Yeah, so he was not a fan.

Okay.

>> Mike Cosper (01:01:40):
That's a long answer to your question. Um,
there have been a few encounters like that that have been fascinating
to me, and honestly have
ultimately just sort of led me to,
uh, a deeper and deeper conviction that
what we did was the right thing and it
mattered.

Yeah. Yeah. I would be really
surprised if a few buttons didn't get pushed
because of the level of truth telling
and, you know, it should ruffle a few
feathers, I think.

>> Mike Cosper (01:02:12):
Yeah.

Um, okay. I want to
wrap up with one more question before we
take a break and go to our closing
questions. On your
podcast, um, you
always concluded your description of the
project with the note that along
with excavating the growth and collapse of this

(01:02:34):
church, this is also a podcast
about God showing up in broken
places and the mystery of God showing up in broken
places. So
can you just say a word about where
you see God showing up
right now in all of the ways that

(01:02:54):
the church can get things so horribly
wrong?

>> Mike Cosper (01:02:58):
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great
question. Um,
I.
Yeah, uh, I'm sorry. I'm trying to think about how
to formulate this answer.
You know, one of the.

(01:03:21):
One of the funny ironies in my
life post, um, Mars
Hill is that,
uh, I have a bunch of family members
who, around the time I was making
the show, um,
showed up on the doorstep of a

(01:03:45):
sort of. Sort of infamous
celebrity pastor. Let's put it that way. The kind of
celebrity pastor where, when you see the
name, you know,
um, there's been plenty of scandal
around this person.

Okay.

>> Mike Cosper (01:04:00):
Um, and they
just wandered in the doors of that
church, um, on an Easter
Sunday because they were looking for a church, and it was the big church in
town and kind of where things were happening.
And they all had a
radical and beautiful conversion experience.
They got baptized that day.

(01:04:22):
Um, and, you know, it's been quite a few years,
and they're still there and they're still connected.
Um, so
I love that fact. I love that
they're there. I love that that happened. I love that they've
encountered grace and that,
um, uh, the message of the

(01:04:43):
gospel has cut through to their hearts in
an environment like that. Because
I would have, you know,
I could talk to you for an hour about the reasons why
I'm concerned about that
guy and what he's about and what his community
is kind of about. Um,

(01:05:05):
but the gospel breaks through and
I'll say this too. One of the great
ironies about, um, the
rise and fall of Mars Hill, lots of people listen
to that show and make assumptions that
the voices they're hearing have all
deconstructed and abandoned the faith. And you know, they're all

(01:05:26):
bitter and angry and they hate God and all the rest
now. And,
um, with maybe
one or two exceptions,
that's not true of any of those folks.
Um, almost every single person
that you heard on the rise and fall of Mars Hill

(01:05:47):
is still going to church. They're still tied into a
community. They're still people of faith.
They still believe that Jesus died and rose again
on the third day. Um,
and,
um. And yeah, they're rough
around the edges, but you know what? They were rough around
the edges before Mars Hill collapsed. That's kind of what

(01:06:08):
Mars. That's part of what made Mars Hill such a
remarkable and interesting and beautiful place.
So, um,
I just see constant evidence of God showing
up in the midst of it. And it's,
I think, what I wrestle with,

(01:06:29):
I do genuinely wrestle with
what's the duty of someone that's a
journalist like me,
what's our duty for.
How do I put this even,
um, what's our
duty to truth telling versus what's our duty
to sort of

(01:06:52):
honoring, um, the experience
of victims in these different
places versus what's
our duty to hold out the
gospel as a hope that shines above
and beyond all of it.
Um, but that said,

(01:07:12):
I'm just always
happily surprised by the way the gospel seems to continue
to break through.

Yeah, I think that,
um, there's a lot
of. You could
feel a lot of cynicism about
these patterns and
um, you know, about the ever
thus sort of nature of
these stories of

(01:07:42):
how wrong we get it as
Christians and as church communities.
But, but you can also walk away
with just a profound sense of
the ultimate truth of
God's power.
Um, even,
well, in response to that sinfulness, you know,

(01:08:03):
in response to how wrong we get it for
sure. Yeah. Okay, well,
let's take a break and uh, we'll come back
for a couple of closing questions,
um, as we wrap up our conversation today.
Welcome back to Future Christian. I

(01:08:24):
am going, um, to wrap up my conversation
with Mike Cosper with a couple of
rapid fire closing questions. So these
are questions that we ask all of our guests on Future
Christian. And you have the
choice about how seriously you want to take these
questions. Um, you
can take them with a grain of salt

(01:08:46):
or you can take them very seriously. It's up to
you. So, Mike, if you were made
Pope for a day,
what would be on your agenda for that day?

>> Mike Cosper (01:08:58):
Goodness. Pope for the day. That's a really.
Pope for the day is so specific. Right.
Um, because I'm not like the emperor,
um, and I don't have a magic wand,
but I can adjust doctrine.
Um, you
know, I mean, the funny thing
is, and this surprises people sometimes

(01:09:20):
because some
people think that, um, the rise and fall of Mars
Hill was like, ah, uh,
an unsubtle attack on Reformed
theology. But I'm actually very reformed. In fact, I'm.
I'm probably more reformed in. In terms of my
convictions than I. Than I was before

(01:09:40):
I, you know, um, before I made
the show. Uh, not. Not having anything to do with the
show. So all of that to say if I'm
Pope for the day,
um, I'm probably doing something with the 95
theses that.

Okay.

>> Mike Cosper (01:09:57):
Undoes a lot of Catholic, uh,
doctrine very quickly.

All right. You're gonna have fun on that day.

>> Mike Cosper (01:10:07):
Yeah.

Who is a, uh, theologian
or historical Christian figure who you would want
to meet or bring back to life, have supper
with?

>> Mike Cosper (01:10:20):
Yeah, this one's easy. Thomas, um, Merton.
Um.

Oh, good.

>> Mike Cosper (01:10:24):
So. So I live in Louisville,
Kentucky. Um, uh, about an
hour and ten minutes down the road from us
is the Abbey of Gethsemane, which is where
Merton lived, uh, out his
monastic life. I, um, think
Merton was so
dialed in. I mean, the irony of me saying this is

(01:10:46):
about Merton right after saying I'm super
reformed, um, now I'm going to advocate for
a Cistercian monk.
Um, I think. I think Merton was so dialed
in to the
challenges of modernity and what that
meant for the soul, what it meant for identity.

(01:11:06):
Um, Uh,
I also think Merton was somebody who was just so.
He was just,
uh, he
so understood,
and he was the best articulator of
modern angst, of trying

(01:11:26):
to understand, like, uh, how
do I live the Christian life in this world
where identity is contested in all of
these weird and bizarre ways?
Um, and, you know, just
his humanity, his generosity,
his interest in other people. I. I just
adore the guy. And I, um, love his

(01:11:49):
writing. And, yeah, it's.
That's very easy for me. I would just. I'd.
Yeah, I'd walk a mile on broken glass to have dinner
with, uh, Thomas Merton.

Okay. I love that answer. And I do love
the contrast to the. The first answer. I think
that's great.

>> Mike Cosper (01:12:07):
Yeah. My first answer is Martin Luther,
and my second answer is Cistercian monks.

So, you know, I feel like there's room
for all of it and they'd probably enjoy chatting with each other
too, so.

>> Mike Cosper (01:12:20):
Oh yeah. I mean, put those two together at a dinner table,
that'd be a lot of fun.

Yeah, I think. So, um, what
will history remember from our current time and
place?

>> Mike Cosper (01:12:32):
Hmm.
You know, I,
um.
Gosh, that's a great question.
Um, it's a hard
question. So I think we're living
in this, uh, moment of
populism on both the right and the left,

(01:12:53):
especially in the U.S.
um, that is,
I guess I'd say, like the outcome of it is
uncertain. So
hopefully not that.
Because if we're remembered for the
populist moment, it means something

(01:13:13):
went even worse from where it is right
now. Um, so that's my fear,
I would say with that fear
is my fear about,
um, and this is
where my journalist hat comes on.
Um, uh,
likewise. I hope this moment isn't

(01:13:34):
remembered for what's happening in Eastern Europe right
now. Um, because I think that
if the, if the war in Ukraine
goes badly, um,
if Ukraine doesn't win more badly.
Right, yeah, exactly. If Ukraine doesn't win,
um, we're looking at

(01:13:54):
a much more significant
conflict in a year or two down the
line from here.
Um, so hopefully neither of those
things,
um, positively. I don't know.
Uh, I'm not a big Elon Musk fan,
but what SpaceX is doing right now is kind of

(01:14:16):
awesome. Yeah, hopefully we'll
remember this era for,
you know, we'll forget Elon being weird
on Twitter and we'll just, we'll remember him
for, you know, um, efficient electric
cars and uh, uh,
renewable rocket, uh, technology.
Because man, I don't know if you saw the video of

(01:14:39):
SpaceX landing their own booster rocket
back on the launcher.

Uh, no, I did not, I did not see that.

>> Mike Cosper (01:14:46):
Utterly incredible. Amazing.
Um, and
economy transforming, frankly.
Um, hopefully we remember
that. Right. In fact, actually
given the question, um, sorry I'm
ranting now, but Elon's
the perfect example. It's like, hopefully the

(01:15:09):
past looks back and they remember elon
Musk for SpaceX and Tesla. They don't
remember Elon Musk for,
um, his investment in right wing
populism.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, well this is
a, a very, um,
balanced answer as well.
And time will tell.

>> Mike Cosper (01:15:31):
We will. Yeah, it sure will.

In the future. Yeah. Where can people find
more about you?

>> Mike Cosper (01:15:40):
Where can they connect with your work?
Yeah, so, um, I'm on Twitter. I'm
on Twitter more than I should be. Um, my,
my wife is constantly encouraging me to get off Twitter.
So. Okay, um, but I'm on Twitter at Mike
Kosfer and um, reachable there.
And then I
um, I work for Christianity Today and

(01:16:02):
produce podcasts there.
Um, I'm the co host
of a show called the Bulletin, which is a weekly
news and issues show.
Um, it's also a show that we
do. Um, it's also a show where we
do um, like weekly deep
dive one on one interviews on

(01:16:24):
specific topics as well. So subscribe to the
Bulletin wherever you get your podcasts. You'll
find me there. And um, I write and
contribute at CT on a fairly regular basis
as well.

And make sure to pick up your copy of the book
the Church in Dark Understanding and
Resisting the Evil that Seduced the Evangelical
Movement. I highly recommend it. I assume that
people can get that wherever they get their books.

>> Mike Cosper (01:16:51):
Wherever fine books are sold for sure.

Okay, well we always. Yeah, thank you
so much. I really appreciate your
insights and uh,
all of the um, journalistic
research that has gone into years of work
really with the book and um, the
podcast and your writing.
Um, it's an a, ah,

(01:17:15):
really important offering to the life of the church. We
always conclude with the word of peace. So
Mike, may God's peace be with you.

>> Mike Cosper (01:17:24):
M. Thank you. Also with you.

>> Loren (01:17:33):
Thanks for joining us on the Future Christian Podcast.
The Future Christian Podcast is produced by resident Resonate
Media. We love to hear from our listeners with
questions, comments and ideas for future
episodes. Visit our website@uh,
future-christian.com and find the Connect with Us
form at the bottom of the page to get in touch with Martha
or Loren. But before you go, do us a

(01:17:55):
favor, subscribe to the POD to leave a review.
It really helps us get this out to more people.
Thanks. And go in PE.

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