607: The Gift of Disillusionment With Mike Cosper  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Holy Post]] - Full Title: 607: The Gift of Disillusionment With Mike Cosper - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b8e18611-cb6c-4f0d-bc9c-3ea5f4ceee19 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Disillusionment Challenges Faith's Goodness** - Disillusionment differs from disenchantment because it challenges the goodness and worth of faith, not its possibility. - Losing illusions forces Christians to confront reality and find what truly matters beyond grandiose stories. Transcript: Speaker 2 Whenever I meet Holy Posters at these things, I'll often ask them how they found our show or why they become supporters. And the thing I hear more than anything else is disillusionment. People say they become disillusioned with their church or with their faith or a ministry or maybe even the broader Christian-American subculture, and that they found the Holy Post Because it reminded them that they're not alone. And one of the most gratifying things I hear is when someone says that the show played a part in helping them continue with their faith or to remain connected with other Christians. That's really important, but there's also no denying that disillusionment is real and it's spreading. My guest today has been on that journey as well, but rather than fearing disillusionment, he says it's actually a gift. Mike Hosper is the director of podcasting for Christianity Today. He created and hosted the very popular Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast. He's the author of a number of books and his latest is Land of My Sojourn, the landscape of a faith lost and found. In it, he talks about being a founding pastor of Sojourn Church in Louisville, Kentucky, how the church's youthful idealism eventually became toxic, and how he's navigated life after Leaving ministry. Ultimately, the book is both deeply personal and raw. Mike is very vulnerable about his inner life and pain, but it also explores wider trends in American evangelicalism, like it's bent toward grandiosity and narcissistic leadership Cultures that ultimately fueled disillusionment for so many. While certainly painful, Mike says anyone who's been through the process of having their illusions shattered is ultimately grateful, because what we find on the other side is far Better because it's real. Here's my conversation with Mike Hosper. Speaker 4 Mike Hosper, welcome back to The Holy Post. Speaker 3 I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Speaker 2 Absolutely. Your new book Land of My Sojourn, The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found, has just been released. I've read it. It's powerful. It's transparent. It's raw. I think people who've listened to the Marcil podcast when they read this book are going to go back and listen to the Marcil podcast in a new way, understanding more. You shared a little bit on that show of your own journey, but not as clearly and transparently as you do in this book. I want to begin with this theme that comes throughout the book of disillusionment. Early in the book, you say this, if the danger of modernity's pressures on the Christian faith resulted in disenchantment, the new danger I was confronting was leading to disillusionment. I'm assuming you were referencing Charles Taylor's work there on the power of secularization to disenchant the world. What do you mean by disillusionment? And how do that, I mean, that's the whole book in a way, but how do you see that happening not just in yourself, but in the people around you, the Christians around you? Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah. So I would differentiate between disillusionment and disenchantment by saying that disenchantment is the idea that the possibility of faith is contested. And Taylor talks about how in a secular age, wherever you go, your doubts come with you, like they hang over you like a shadow. And I think that's self-evidently part of the modern world. Disillusionment is sort of on the almost on the other side of disenchantment. Disillusionment is for the true believer who it's not that they're calling into question the possibility of faith anymore. They're calling into question the goodness of faith, the worthwhile, like is faith worthwhile, is religion worthwhile? Is it a force for good? You know, there's that meme you see from whatever the movie is where the two Nazis are talking and they go, you know, did you ever think that we're the bad guys here? You know, I think for a lot of Christians, there's this, there's this midlife experience of going, wait a minute, what part of, what story have I been a part of here? And how do I, you know, especially on the other side of church hurt? How do I make sense of it? Speaker 2 Yeah, you, you are a few years younger than me, but not that much younger. And when I was a college student in the mid 90s, it felt like at a secular university, it felt like the primary question I was constantly having to deal with is, is Christianity true? And now the question I'm bumping into for myself and for most of the people I encounter, it's not is it true? It's, is it good? And the scandals and later on in the book, much later in the book, you talk about do disillusionment again, you said this, I watched friend after friend grow disillusioned with the church And step away from it, marriages failed, pastors and leaders, I mentored seemingly one after another had moral failures or lost their faith or both, and left the ministry, others started Leadership consulting businesses proving once and for all that irony was dead. That was a great line. But you finally landed a place much later on this spoiler alert where you say disillusionment is actually a gift, although it's not a pleasant one. Why is disillusionment a gift? Speaker 3 Because, you know, well, I mean, you can even look at the word for the, for the answer to the question, right? Like disillusionment is essentially like, you know, well, or better yet, well, it's quote Guns N' Roses, you're losing your illusions in in the process. There's this, what disillusionment does for us is it actually is a, it actually forces us to deal with reality and to ask questions about what is real and what is worthwhile. ([Time 0:59:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/577d3e2d-b2cc-4d4d-b0b9-64bda612b43b)) - **Illusions Delay Painful Acceptance** - Clinging to illusions shields us from painful realities despite knowing reality could be better. - The idealized vision creates hope, but accepting its falsehood leads to a hard, necessary reckoning in faith. Transcript: Speaker 2 Once we deal with reality, it'll be better. Why do we just, especially with an evangelical context, want to keep reality as far away as possible? Speaker 3 Well, I, I don't think we believe that actually. I see, I think, I think we think that, because, because when you're, when you're, when you're living, my friend Rich Plast refers to these as like wish dreams, right, that you sort of, You create this, you create this fantasy world that you're living in, in, whether when you're in ministry. And it's the grandiose story, we're going to change the city, we're going to reach the nation, you know, all those kinds of things. And what, what you do when you tell yourself that story over and over again, is you're kind of setting before yourself, like here's the destination, here's what it's all for. And no matter how bad it gets, you have that sort of idealized vision of what you're going to achieve on the other side of it. And so it's like, yeah, this is really hard, it hurts that those relationships got severed. And you know, what, what happened to that person that was serving in ministry next year, that was really, was really unfortunate. But ultimately, we're going after this thing and we're all on the same page and it's going to be, you know, everyone's well intended and it's all going to be good when we get there. When you reach this place where you start to go, well, wait a minute, maybe we're not actually going to get to that place. And maybe we're not all well intended. And maybe we're not all on the same page in the same journey. If the most terrifying thing in the world is to accept that reality, because then you have all these other stories you've told yourself, it was, I can live with this, this collateral Damage and that collateral damage and this wound and this personal sacrifice or whatever, because the destination made made all of those difficult choices worth it. But if you have to sort of accept the reality that the destination itself wasn't real, that the dream in a sense was not achievable. So for instance, I mean, in the book, I liken this to like the life of Peter and Peter's vision for what the kingdom of God was going to be versus Jesus' vision for what the kingdom of God Was going to be. And the gap between those realities, like, you know, having spent a few years trying to write this thing, I still don't think I can fully comprehend how wide that gap was. But I think it's a good metaphor for the kinds of gaps that we all eventually encounter with the idealized thing that we think we're going to become and that we think our ministries are Going to become or whatever. And then the reality of like, oh, we're just a church, you know, we're just a bunch of people, you know, serving together and some of us are really jacked up and, you know, and some of us Have really hurt each other and we've done a lot of damage. ([Time 1:08:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d936661-338e-45fe-a96e-814c32c6c9d6)) - **Self-Awareness Key for Leaders** - Lack of self-awareness in leaders fuels toxic church cultures and injury among members. - True growth comes when leaders hear feedback, believe it, and explore why they impact others negatively. Transcript: Speaker 3 You? Yeah, you know, I remember one time talking to Chuck to grow about this. And he said, he tries to get with pastors and Chuck wrote the book when Narcissism comes to church. And he's worked with a lot of pastors who have gone through various levels of kind of crisis and narcissism, leadership abuses. And he said, you know, one of the thing I try to do with pastors more than anything else is to get them to sit with the leaders around them and essentially ask, Hey, how do you experience Me? And once they ask that question, they need to do two things. They need to, they need to really listen to whatever that person has to say. And the hard part then is they need to believe it, right? Because the general reaction is to go, well, let me tell you why you're wrong about how you're perceiving me. Or let me tell you why you deserve whatever, you know, it is that I'm bringing to you. He says, if they can do those first, if they can do those two things, if they can really hear it and really believe it, then the next step is to become curious about why am I coming off that Way. So, so if I'm a tornado of energy, if I'm a tornado of ideas, if everything around me feels unstable, if if people tell me that they feel anxious when I walk in the room, because they feel Like they never know what's going to come next and everything is unpredictable, then the most important thing for me to do is not to think about, well, I need to get people, because some Leaders would say, well, I just need to make sure that I get people in the room who are strong enough to handle my energy, because you know, I'm just this kind of energy, you know, energetic Leader. Instead of going, well, actually, I want to be a life-giving presence in every room that I walk into. I want people to be glad that I'm, that I show up. Yeah. So, what is it in me that needs that? What am I getting out of that frenetic energy? What is that, what is that providing? What is that either creating in the culture that that I'm feeding off of? Or what is that reflecting about kind of the unsettled nature, the busyness, the noise in my own soul? And that's, I mean, that's just an incredibly hard journey. It's, it's, it's funny. I have this weird, like, and I know I use the word in the book, but I have this weird allergy to the, to the language of self-awareness, because, you know, in our church, I mean, I, I cannot Imagine the amount of money that was spent in the last four or five years that I was there on staff on various self-awareness tools, you know, because there's a million of them, right? Like, I mean, you would agree. Speaker 2 And it sounds like you would say they weren't very effective. Speaker 3 Well, here's the thing, they're, they're all extremely effective. If you take them seriously and implement steps to actually address the issues that they raise, what, what they can become instead is in an unhealthy culture, they can become a way of Sort of perpetuating conversations that are themselves kind of grandiose. Oh, this is how I, this is how I am. So this is, this is what I need around me, or this is how I am. Let's get into my story and why I'm this way. And, and, and I'm not just talking about one person, I'm saying like, generally there's like a narcissistic culture around a narcissistic leader. And the, the effects of that are cascading. I know that, I know that I was probably a, a tornado of a presence to, to some of the people in my life. And, and, and so I don't want this to sound like I'm just sort of putting this all at the foot of a single, single individual. Um, but, but when we, yeah, when we, when we create this culture where we're all like, well, here's my anneagram and here's my disc profile. Here's my Myers, I mean, it can get insane after a while. Yeah. So many letters and numbers, you don't know where to quit. Um, uh, but if none of that actually leads to confession of sin, repentance, reconciliation, structures of accountability, figuring out how to restrain those things, looking for How can I heal my wounds in ways that, that are actually healing rather than sort of feeding off the energy of other people. ([Time 1:12:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b058114-4980-41d8-af3a-ea1a93304747)) - **Seminary Aspirations Reveal Ego** - Seminary students expressed grandiose and ego-driven reasons for pursuing pastoral ministry. - This revealed early signs of insecurity and ambition disguised as spiritual calling. Transcript: Speaker 2 There's a story that can't, came to mind, I may have shared this before on the show when I was a seminary student, my first year in seminary, I was in a class, it was a small class, probably 10 or less of us. And on the first day, the professor said to introduce yourself what program you're in and why you're here. And the first student shared and he said, I'm in the MDiv program and I'm here because my grandfather was a pastor, my father was a pastor and I'm called to be a pastor. And I remember sitting there thinking maybe or he has significant father issues. The next person shared and he said, I'm in the MDiv program. And he said, I'm here because my denomination requires me to be here in order to be ordained blah, blah, blah. But he said, my church is growing so fast that I'm probably not going to finish because we're going to be at X thousands of people by next year. And he had this smugness like, I don't, I don't need to stick around with you idiots learning Hebrew. I'm going to be a big mega church guy. And I was like, whoa, that the arrogance, the ego. The next guy shares. And he says, I'm so and so I'm in the MDiv program. And he says, I'm here because God's called me to be the next Bill Hybels. He actually said that. Now this is in the late 90s before, you know, and I was like, we, we, we have a Bill Hybels. We don't need another one. Like, and so I'm watching these guys and I'm sitting back and I'm going, these people are all completely bonkers. Speaker 1 I swear this is true. No, I know. Speaker 4 I have to swear. Speaker 3 I get it, man. Speaker 2 Then I had this thought like everyone in this room is crazy except me. And then I was like, oh, I got it. Speaker 4 There it is. There it is. Speaker 1 Like, oh, I'm as blind as they are. Speaker 2 And why am I here? And what, what gross thing? I mean, we're always a mixed bag, right? Maybe there's some genuine calling and altruistic faithful reason I'm pursuing ministry, but there's got to be mixed in that. Some real garbage that I'm not yet aware of. ([Time 1:17:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b38c30ea-31e1-4b70-9432-777f9890056f)) - **Systems Foster Unhealthy Leadership** - Leadership systems in evangelical churches incentivize and amplify narcissistic behaviors. - Such systems can make even healthy people develop unhealthy traits over time. Transcript: Speaker 3 Yeah. And I don't remember the exact quote. I'm, I'm, I don't want to say that it never does and that there's no element of that. What, what, what I think I was trying to get at just before we get to it, what I'm saying, I'm trying to get at what I say that is that we, we jump very quickly to saying the problem is narcissistic Leaders, right? And there's no doubt that to a great extent, the problem is narcissistic leaders for sure. But I think there's an, there's an element of that, that if we're not careful, we end up like, you know, we end up attributing a lot to narcissism, that, that is systemic. And so you have a narcissistic leader come through the church and he does a lot of damage. And if the church doesn't fundamentally reform its as an institution, the likelihood that they're going to find themselves with another narcissistic leader, a generation or so away Is, is pretty high. Because, because you've built an institution that's built around a narcissistic personality, you know, that, that in a sense, like the institution doesn't even know how to function Without the narcissist there. They're dependent on that, that person, that energy. But yeah, I mean, dude, like, where, where else, like name another vocation that you can step into, where for an hour a week, people voluntarily show up to listen to you talk for 30 to 40, I mean, we were next to me in nine church, 50 to 75 minutes at times on a, I only know one. Speaker 2 Yeah. And that's stand-up comic. Right. Right. Speaker 3 Which is, and they're not exactly the healthiest profession either. No. Richard Pryor's great quote. Yeah. You know, happy will of adjusted people don't get into this business. That's right. Speaker 2 I found, I found the exact, well, this on page 70, you right, I'm not a believer in the idea that unhealthy pastors get themselves into leadership looking for opportunities like this. Rather, I think that the leadership model we have in our evangelical world incentivizes grandiosity. Yeah. Maybe that is itself a factor in filtering who shows up for the job in the first place. But regardless, there's a way in which those incentives can bring out the worst and absolutely anybody including us. Yeah. So yeah, you're acknowledging both pieces. It can draw unhealthy people, but it's also, it is systemic and I 100% agree with you. ([Time 1:20:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33e6cf0f-5a9a-441a-b883-328b02a34bfa)) - **Church Planting Tests Leaders** - Church planting involves sacrifice and poverty, attracting audacious true believers. - The intense challenges reveal leaders' true character and spiritual resilience. Transcript: Speaker 3 I know it is different actually, because I've been to the boot camps and talked to 22 year old church planners that are going to change the world. But you don't get into that like there's, there is, you are choosing a poverty life for a long season. You certainly were in the 90s when we were doing this late 90s, early 2000s, you're choosing a poverty life for a season to do this. You're choosing an incredible amount of time and sacrifice. You know, I think, I mean, I think if there's one common thread for everyone who, who finds themselves in these communities, it's that you're all a true believer. You're a true believer in like, we can really change the world. And, and, and it, and it takes a certain kind of audacity to, to step out and, and do that. And, and I don't know, I mean, honestly, I don't know if, like one of the things that genuine they wrestle with is, I don't know if you can do that kind of meaningful church planting or you, You hear the stories of some of the sort of the great missionaries of the last two centuries, like some of those people sound kind of, kind of nuts, like sound kind of emotionally unhealthy, Right? Yeah. Right. So there's an extent to which I don't know that, again, like, happy, well-adjusted people, maybe they don't, maybe they're not drawn to that kind of a career because they're going to Be like, and that sounds kind of rough. I want to raise a family and be an engineer and do something, you know, work a nine to five and have a lot more stable life. The key though is for, it doesn't matter who you are, ministry will find you out. And it will, it will take you to your breaking point. ([Time 1:23:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f2f8854-9e85-44d6-8a93-a5bc04341d8d))