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Even if somehow you don’t know Mike Cosper’s name, there’s a good possibility you’ve heard his voice. From 2021-2022, he served as producer and host of the award-winning podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, which, with over 2.5 million downloads, was an unparalleled sensation. That ambitious documentary project profiled the simultaneous (and bewildering) attractiveness and abusiveness of a church plant in the Seattle suburbs. For so many, including Cosper, that story is a mixed bag: It tells of mission-driven, incarnational friendships juxtaposed with shattered dreams and a tattered witness.
In his 2024 book, Land of My Sojourn, Cosper explores this duality — how the churches we love can knock us down and leave us out, and how, after long periods of feeling adrift, we can be restored to faith. “It’s a story about grace leading me home when I thought all was lost,” he says. Equal parts memoir and travelog, Land of My Sojourn weaves together the stories of Peter, Elijah, Jesus (and even Dante) with vivid descriptions of the Mount of Olives, Galilee, and the Garden of Gethsemane, to encourage readers that the only way out of the wilderness of exile is through it.
Mike Cosper is the director of podcasting for Christianity Today. He served for sixteen years as a pastor at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the author of Recapturing the Wonder, The Stories We Tell, and Rhythms of Grace. Mockingbird is indebted to Mike for being one of the early producers on our very own Mockingcast.
— The Editors
MOCKINGBIRD: One of the things you wrestle with is this idea of church as home. The great irony is that your church was called Sojourn (which is kind of hilarious). But in the beginning, you felt like you’d found a home, like Sojourn was an island of misfit toys. Can you talk about how that came to be?
MIKE COSPER: For a lot of us who were part of the church planting thing in the 90s and early 2000s, we’d grown up in the Evangelical world where the church is supposed to feel like home, because it felt like home for our parents. It embodied the culture of, you know, the Boomers in the suburbs; and Christianity was a pathway to a happier, healthier life and a happier, healthier marriage. And in the 90s there was a lot in the air culturally that formed us to become very different from our parents. Like, I listened to very depressing dark music and watched Tarantino movies — the world was a much darker place than the church that I attended on Sunday mornings. And so of course, church always felt like a weird fit. It never did feel like home.
But the gospel was still incredibly appealing, and so church planting was about finding a way to enculturate Christianity in a language — a visual language, a musical language — that made sense to us and resonated with who we were. And when that happened, it united us in an incredibly powerful way. That’s why I think church planting boomed the way it did in the early 2000s, because so many people stepped into that and said, “Oh wow, church can feel like this. Church can connect with us on this heart-language level.”
Yeah. It felt like we’d come home for the first time.
M: I love that you’ve identified how the musical shifts in the culture, basically around grunge and indie rock, made it almost impossible for someone of our generation to feel at home with “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” Instinctually, it just was not going to happen, right? Instead, you guys were saying people could come in, even a bunch of young people wearing black, singing depressing songs about death. And somehow there was this infectious joy about it.
Yet when your church becomes a proxy for home, or a place where you’re re-parented, it can draw you in too tightly. What happens when church-as-a-home goes wrong?
MC: Yeah, gosh, I mean, I should say that I came from a relatively stable household, but I think it probably feels a lot like when your actual home becomes suddenly unstable. Church can feel like that as well, and the worse it gets, the more painful and dissonant it gets.
Something that Tim Smith once said to me was, “You know, it always felt like we were just one good conversation away from making things right.” That sums it up so perfectly, because in order to say that, the place has to feel really good for the most part — there has to be so much about it that’s right, that feels worth fighting for, despite the various humiliations of an abusive culture.
At the same time, it’s like having something in the bottom of your shoe — you can’t ignore it.
M: It sounds like Sojourn began as a set of friends who cared about the same things, who really cared about the gospel, and then things happened — power structures and hierarchies developed.
There’s a very vivid scene in the book where you are asked to look at the church’s new org chart, and find out that you’re not on it. This home has kind of cast you out. Did it feel like a personal rejection at the time?
MC: So I have this weird tendency to not know something bad is happening to me until after the fact. Like, if I have a really unpleasant conversation, or if I’m in a confrontational situation with somebody, I don’t really register it for a while. It often takes me a day or two to go back and go, “Oh, wait a minute. I think that was really condescending,” or, “Wait a minute, I think that guy was just straight-up lying to me.”
I mention that because a lot of people read that particular story and go, “Man, that was so cold and calculated, it was cruel …” It didn’t come off that way to me. It took a while — literally it took months — for me to think, Wait a minute! That’s not normal. Like, I’ve been here for fifteen years, I’ve given my whole life to this church, and my exit is really passive aggressive. Like, “Hey, check out the new org chart: You’re not on it.”
I was not emotionally and psychologically capable of embracing what was taking place in front of my eyes; I couldn’t say I was being forced out. And in fact, it was a whole journey coming to a place where I was able to see that for myself — in a sense, to stand up for myself — even in my own head.
Fred Tomaselli, Shack, Compound, Commune, 1998. Acrylic on wood, 72 x 54 in. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. © Fred Tomaselli
M: Have you heard from any of these people since your book has been published? Have they been like, “Yeah, we really could have handled that better”?
MC: No … no.
M: Looking back, do you think that in this experience you were all growing up? Is that a fair thing to say, or does that let them off the hook too much?
MC: I think that’s fair. Institutions have life cycles kind of like human beings do. Having documented a lot of church crises in the last few years, I think there’s often this sense of romance at the beginning; you feel like you’ve stumbled into a utopia and you almost don’t want to even name it because you’re afraid that it’ll vanish if you do. That’s really common. And the slow unraveling of that is also common. And then the slow unraveling turning into a sudden unraveling. There’s a Hemingway quote that goes, “How did you go bankrupt?” And the answer is, “Gradually and then suddenly.”
That’s the way churches seem to fall apart. There may be a number of years when something doesn’t feel right, but you’re like, we can fix this. And then suddenly your illusions unravel.
What was so hard to let go of was the belief that if we just got the right pieces, the right people, the right systems, we could make it magical again.
But for me, the real turn of the story is coming back to the church. But I came back to it with a very, very different set of expectations for what it could and should be. Much less romanticized, but content at the same time.
M: Of course, a lot of people don’t come back. A lot of people who go through what you went through just wipe their hands of all of it. What do you think made the difference? And what do you say to those who are going through it now?
MC: Yeah, man, that’s a good question.
I’m fortunate that circumstances allowed us to stay, and a lot of people aren’t going to be so fortunate for all kinds of reasons. One reason it worked for us is because the leaders who were the source of a lot of wounding are gone. Another reason is that — this is a grace of God thing — the current pastor at Sojourn went through a similar journey. It’s his story to tell, but essentially he really gets what we went through. So if I went to him tomorrow and said, “Dude, I just feel like the best thing for my health and my family is if we find another church home,” he wouldn’t begrudge us. He’d bless us. And that’s rare, I think, unfortunately. But it’s what allows us to be where we are.
A lot of it also has to do with letting go of the utopian vision. In fact, one of the really big risks for Christians who are going through a deconstruction season is that, if you don’t let go of the utopian impulse for church to be perfect, you’re going to chase that dream wherever you go next. So you see a lot of people replacing a quasi-fundamentalist church-camp utopian vision with a justice-and-accountability culture-war kind of utopian vision, right? Like, I’ll find a community of people who are just as committed as I am to calling out the sins of the church and correcting them. And what I’m chasing is the high of a community that feels like we’ve got it right. We’ve got our ducks in a row. It’s an incredibly intoxicating thing when you feel like, man, we’re doing this right.
And when that idealism is driving you, it can tear you apart, it can be destructive. Even if you’re the victim of church hurt, you leave yourself very vulnerable to being hurt just as deeply over and over again.
M: The word dislocation is pretty central to Land of My Sojourn. Tell me what you think of when you hear that word, and how would you help people think about it in a way that doesn’t eat them alive?
MC: Yeah, there’s so much literature in the Christian tradition — whether it’s about the stages of spirituality, or the second half of life, or the dark night of the soul — where wise Christians tell us, “You will have an incredibly disorienting experience at some point in your faith. God is not doing that to test you. God is not doing that to punish you. God is not doing that to drive you away from him. What he’s doing is refining your desires and expectations.”
That’s where the Bible stories are so helpful, because there’s just so many examples of God taking people from the familiar to the unfamiliar in these very specific places. Take Peter’s journey. In following Jesus, he goes to Mount Hebron and Mount Tabor, and at the end of all this, Jesus has been crucified, and he’s resurrected, and the disciples are in Jerusalem, and they’re very, very confused. And what does he say at the end of the book of John? He goes, “I’m going fishing.” Like, “I’m going back to a world I know, which is Galilee, and I’m going out on a boat and I’m comfortable there — that’s a world that makes sense to me.”
There’s something very powerful in that return to Galilee. And Jesus repeats a miracle there, with the haul of fish. It’s a very poetic bookending. It’s almost like Peter goes back to the place where he found his first love, and that’s where he re-encounters Christ and is restored and called to ministry.
And it’s a ministry that’s the polar opposite of what he’d been looking forward to throughout Jesus’ career. Throughout Jesus’ career, he thinks he’s going to be this triumphant hero, and that’s why he’s carrying a sword, and he’s jockeying for the place next to Jesus on his throne. And at the end of the book Jesus says to him, essentially, “Look, if you really want to be reconciled to me, here’s what it means: You’re going to follow in my footsteps; you’re going to be bound and shackled and taken places you don’t want to go. And you’re going to suffer like I did.” And at that point he’s ready to go where he never would have before.
M: You’ve become a bit of a spokesman for Christians who feel homeless denominationally, politically, institutionally. I find that someone who feels that way can almost get smug about it … But of course, to be homeless in these ways is also painful. It hurts. Like, I actually do want to feel at home in the church. I do want to be at home denominationally, theologically, etc.
Yet the experience of homelessness seems to be almost necessary spiritually — for the sake of our relationship with God and ourselves. Would you agree with that?
MC: A hundred percent. I mean, Ward and June Cleaver are fictional characters — on this side of heaven, our homes are imperfect and broken places, and our churches are also going to be imperfect and broken places. So I think the experiences of dislocation or disillusionment or disorientation — they expose the myths we’re clinging to about what is supposed to happen on this side of the restoration of all things.
Now, the “dark night” years that my family went through — the psychological effects we’re still reckoning with — were brutal. I don’t wish them on anybody, but they brought me a clarity of understanding of who I am and who God is and what his mercy really means.
M: It’s very cruciform of you, Mike.
Tell me about the response to the book. Have people responded well? Did they think you’re silly for staying at Sojourn?
MC: It’s been really encouraging on a lot of levels.
The last chapter of the book is called, “I’m Still Here,” and it refers to the fact that things got so dark for me, and so dark for friends of mine that they’re literally not alive anymore. That’s been a brutal thing to live with. It’s not that I myself ever thought I was going to end my life, but that kind of despair became familiar to me. Yet somehow I’m still here.
But the double meaning is that I’m still at Sojourn. And that’s a big surprise. Moreover, I’m still in the church in general. The fact is, Jesus hasn’t let us go.
And so the response that makes me happiest is when I hear from readers who say, “Hey, I’m still here, too,” and they resonate with that sense of surprise on the back end of church hurt and sorrow. Whatever deconstruction or disillusionment has looked like for them, it hasn’t meant the abandonment of the faith altogether.
And I’ll get social media messages saying, “Hey, you know, I just finished your book, and I’m still here too.” Beth Moore actually tweeted that one day!
M: This is a testament to the fact that churches are not always just one thing and not another. Like they can grow up too — or that’s in the background of what I hear in this story. So for our readers who don’t feel like they have a church home, or who used to have one and are pining for it in a nostalgic way, what words of wisdom do you have?
MC: Well, let me quote from Tina Fey’s memoir Bossypants. She says that Lorne Michaels would always tell Saturday Night Live cast members, “Never make a big career decision at the end of the season,” because the SNL season is brutal on actors and writers, and when the season ends, everybody wants to quit.
I think there’s a ton of wisdom in that, because oftentimes, when you’ve been through a conflict in your church or in your workplace, you arrive at a certain point and go, “We just got to quit. We just got to move on.” And you may actually be inviting more stress and difficulty into your life than if you said, “You know what? I’m just gonna take time to decompress.”
Who knows what that looks like for different people. For some, that may mean a season where they say, “I’m just gonna meet with this small group of people I trust.” It may mean saying, like, “Look, this place isn’t perfect, but until some other things in my soul settle, I’m not going to go searching for another church” — because, again, I think the danger is that when church has been hard and we immediately go looking for another church as a solution, we’re just extending those utopian impulses someplace else. And you’re actually projecting really dangerous expectations on another church. Sometimes you go in there thinking like, “Man, this is the place where I’m going to come and heal,” not realizing that you’re stepping into another broken community where other troubles await you.
All that is to say, I think, that for Christians experiencing dislocation, there’s wisdom in being very slow and very patient.
That doesn’t mean I’m saying don’t leave your church — if you’re being abused, by all means get out! But if you’re dislocated, discontent, unsettled, and unsure about some things, you might want to stay planted for a season while you give the Holy Spirit and the community around you time to start sifting what’s what in your own soul.
M: I have a friend who says to never make any major decisions in February, for all the same reasons.
But Mike, one of the things I like about this book is that it’s a reminder that exile and pilgrimage are just part of the story. They’re not the end of the story. God is still at work. So “Don’t just do something, sit there” can be a profoundly faithful response.
I know it’s not the book you set out to write, but are you grateful that it’s the book that came out? At this point?
MC: For sure. I mean, it was an incredibly healing process just to write the thing. Part of what was healing about it was that writing forces you to articulate some things that were unsettled. And it’s easy to come out of a situation like this and have a lot of blame for a lot of other people. But in this case, I wanted to make sure that, without minimizing what we went through, I put the preponderance of the blame on my own expectations.
Because when you look at the stories of Elijah and Peter, that’s where the preponderance of the blame goes, right? They had a certain set of expectations that were disappointed — their dreams were crushed, and it ended up being a good, life-giving thing for both of them. And for us as the recipients of their legacy.
M: It’s not a rationalization so much as a realization of a much longer view. The expectations were ultimately both disappointed and completely exploded.
MC: Exactly. I hope people can understand that it’s a gift to wake up to reality in that way, even when it’s incredibly painful. If I could take the blue pill and make it all go away, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
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