Mike Cosper

Feb 26

8 min read ⭑

“Spiritual disillusionment and disorientation are a normal part of the Christian life, and we need to reclaim ways of thinking and talking about them that normalize the experience.”

In our day of religious nones and exvangelicals, Mike Cosper isn’t baffled. He gets it. After his own experiences with church abuse and leadership scandals, Mike went through a season of spiritual disillusionment. But on the other side of that dark season, his faith grew stronger.

As director of media for Christianity Today, host and producer of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, and co-host of The Bulletin, Mike’s got plenty of insights to share with us today about food and thankfulness, battling distractions, old and new ways of reading Scripture, and life-giving Christian resources. So come—and be fascinated.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

My hometown “comfort food” meal is any one of a chicken tikka masala (hot) at Kashmir Indian Restaurant in the Highlands of Louisville. My Indian friends will laugh and roll their eyes since the dish isn’t authentic. (One once said this is like ordering macaroni and cheese at an authentic Italian restaurant.) But the heart wants what the heart wants. And this stuff is amazing—I never order tikka masala elsewhere because it’s always bland. Not this.

The Highlands is an urban neighborhood I’ve lived in or near for almost 25 years, and this restaurant has been a mainstay through the economic ups and downs of two decades. It’s not a nice restaurant by any standard measure. The building is a converted house two doors down from the original location, which was also a converted house. They moved 15 years ago after a kitchen fire, but I still think of this as the new location. It’s shabby, dim without being atmospheric, and badly in need of new carpet and paint, but it’s also consistently the best food in the city.

In my earliest ministry years, when Sarah and I were truly broke, going to Kashmir and splitting dinner and a bread basket was a big deal. It’s now my 16-year-old daughter’s favorite place for takeout and my preferred food for watching the Colts on Sunday afternoons.

I’m enough of a regular that it’s a bit like when Norm walks into Cheers. They greet me by name and rarely ask me what I want to order.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity (or activities) do you love engaging in, which also help you find essential spiritual renewal?

These days, it’s cooking. I do about 90% of the cooking in our family, and I love the way the kitchen forces you into its own timetable—caramelizing onions, smoking meat, braising short ribs. There’s a need to suspend your own rhythms and pay attention to the alchemy of the dish, and hurry is absolutely your enemy. You’ll burn something or cut yourself if you let it manifest.

The reward for that slowness is a good meal—ideally, one you share with family or friends. There’s no better place in our world than the dining room table for attending to one another, reconnecting when you feel tired or separated, and doing the kind of relational maintenance required for healthy families and marriages.

There’s a reason the Bible talks so much about food and thankfulness, and there’s a reason God gave us a meal as one of two sacraments for the church.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?

I have the ability to hyperfocus on almost anything, which is both the strength and weakness of a lifelong battle with ADHD. On the one hand, it can enable me to absorb a lot of information in a concentrated period of time, and on the other, it can lead me to hyperfocus on a rabbit trail in a writing, research, or podcast project. It can also make social media hyperaddictive for someone like me, not because I crave the feedback of the medium, but because I’ll want to consume all of a person’ posts or find as many examples as possible of a given phenomenon.

The result is that I can lose hours and hours on ephemera, and if I’m under stressful circumstances—deadlines or whatnot—it can be even more tempting as a way of avoidance. The distraction itself is a kind of drug, and it’s highly addictive.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

My life changed pretty dramatically between 2015 and 2016, both because of the professional changes my life underwent—leaving full-time ministry, moving into full-time media, writing, and podcasting—and because of the way the spiritual and political landscape around me transformed. The circumstances of those changes are the subject of two books for me this year.

The first one, releasing here in a few weeks on February 27, is called Land of My Sojourn. It’s part memoir, part meditation of spiritual disillusionment.

My argument is that spiritual disillusionment and disorientation are a normal part of the Christian life, and we need to reclaim ways of thinking and talking about them that normalize the experience. I look at Peter and Elijah in particular, and I try to understand their stories as templates of a sort for normal experiences of “dark nights” and confusion.

The second one is coming in the fall, and it explores the idea of evangelical ideology—which I would argue is behind many of the church’s abuse and leadership scandals. It’s called The Church in Dark Times and involves a deep engagement with the work of the 20th-century German Jewish writer Hannah Arendt, though it’s not an academic work by any means.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

I don’t have a great radar for these things. I have friends who have a profound, intuitive sense of God’s presence and leading from moment to moment. I usually don’t know until after the fact, when it seems like God’s hand was on a project or in a conversation or interview in hindsight.

I’m sensitive to it in the sense that I work hard to alleviate the obstacles and blockages that distract from good work and creative “flow.” Specifically, I put a great deal of energy into clearing my head, and that includes attention to things like exercise, breath prayer, meditation, and exercises that Julia Cameron teaches, like morning pages and artist dates.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you right now?

For many years, I had a pretty rigorous set of spiritual practices that were my “rule of life,” and they served me well in those seasons. In more recent years, things have changed dramatically.

When I went through a period of spiritual disillusionment and had to reckon with experiences of spiritual abuse, the Scriptures became very difficult for me to read and engage with. I struggled especially with the Epistles as church leaders had weaponized them to wield authority and wound. For about two years, all I could really engage with was the Psalms—praying through them in a method I learned from Donald Whitney years ago.

Whitney’s approach is dead simple: Start with the day of the month, open to that psalm, and use it as a guide to prayer. If it isn’t speaking your heart language that day, add 30 and use that one. And let your prayers go where your imagination wanders. If the word “ivy” makes you think of a friend named “Ivy,” pray for her. There are no rules.

It was about the only lifeline I could maintain in that season, and it was a gift.

In recent years, by God’s grace, the Scriptures have reopened for me, and I’ve adopted a hybrid pattern where my day starts with the lectionary, and I spend a year immersed in a specific book of the Bible—reading it slowly, over and over, for the entire year. I have a regular breath prayer/centering prayer practice that I do throughout the day, and together, these two things remind me I’m human, God is close, and I am living in a story he is telling.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed the game and changed your heart?

If there were three resources that had the most influence on me, it would be three wildly different ones.

First is Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy. I read it the year it came out, and it’s as relevant now as ever—both for its indictment of our contemporary society’s moral poverty and for his robust vision of spiritual apprenticeship to Jesus.

Second would be Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. More than any other book, this one challenged me to think about the nature of evil, the madness of crowds, and the danger of ideology. Honestly, one reason my faith has been resilient through a number of church crises and disappointments is this book. It shows how a kind of mass psychosis can take over a population and lead to their moral corruption.

Third would be This American Life, Ira Glass’s radio documentary series. Glass is the Shakespeare of the narrative podcast, and I’ve been a raving fan since I was a teenager. No doubt, I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t immersed myself in his work.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or even thrive) in tough times—times like these! Name one resource you’re savoring and/or finding indispensable in this current season, and tell us what it’s doing for you.

The work of David Whyte has been particularly life-giving in recent years. His poems and teaching (available on Audible) have been indispensable as a guide for processing many of the questions we all face in midlife. He’s particularly helpful in providing some language and vision for discerning what really matters.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I’ve mentioned breath prayer and centering prayer a couple of times already. I find it interesting to see how much neuroscience and psychological research have shown the benefits of deep-breathing exercises in recent years. There are, of course, many traditions that involve breathing as the focus of meditation, and the work of Wim Hof and other “breathwork” experts has attracted the attention of many high-performance athletes, life hackers, and Silicon Valley types.

I’ve wondered if it wouldn’t be worthwhile to explore the contemporary research from a Christian perspective, thinking about it theologically (the “breath of life”), practically (breath prayer, singing), and journalistically (what hard data and anecdotal data suggest about these practices).

Disillusionment is a part of life, unfortunately—including for (or maybe especially for) Christians who are part of a church community. Why? Because people aren’t perfect. We sin, hurt others, make mistakes, say things we shouldn’t, and make decisions that, looking back, we might regret later.

That’s why we have to be soft. And by that, I mean… When people hurt us, can we choose not to put up walls against God or future relationships? Can we allow the Holy Spirit to lead us to a place of healing?

And when we hurt others, can we be soft enough to recognize it? To apologize? To make things right?

I pray we would be. This week, let’s take time to ask God where we’ve allowed hurts to harden our hearts—and where we might need to reach out to someone we’ve hurt in the past.

Mike Cosper is the director of media for Christianity Today, where he is the co-host of The Bulletin and host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. He is the author most recently of Land of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found and of the forthcoming The Church in Dark Times.

Justin Camp