“What I’m trying to warn the church with a book like this is not to say like politics are the problem or a certain kind of church or church growth strategy is the problem. What I’m trying to say is…ideology is the problem.”
“The question I got over and over again is, how does this happen? How does the church find itself in a place like this? And the more I pressed into it, the more…it sort of led me to look at political ideology and how people get captivated by all of that.”
“I think one of the unfortunate realities that’s related to this is that the church has such a short memory for conflict, for persecution, for suffering for its problems, that, you know, we think being challenged in an election with ideas that we don’t like or laws we don’t like or whatever, we think of that as a crisis.”
“The reality of our death, the reality of the fact that our life is a breath, that we are dust, that we’re here today and gone tomorrow, it’s a really sobering thing around the way the church engages with, not just politics, but also with church growth.”
“This surprises people all the time: I genuinely don’t have a problem with megachurches. What I have a problem with is when the megachurch confuses itself for the universal church and confuses its purposes and its mission with the universal church.”
“The first thing I would say to pastors who are trying to figure out, OK, how do we lead through a season like this, is reckon with your death…you might die of a heart attack in your sleep in 50 years, or you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. Is your ministry built in such a way that it can continue?”
Mentioned in the Show
“The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil That Seduced the Evangelical Movement” by Mike Cosper
“The Bulletin” on Christianity Today
“The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” on Christianity Today
Check out Mike’s website
Follow Mike on Instagram and X/Twitter
“3 Trends Shaping the Post-Pandemic Church” by Dr. Ed Stetzer in Outreach Magazine
Arthur Brooks
Bill Hybels
“David Foster Wallace
“Eichmann in Jerusalem—I” by Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker
Hannah Arendt’s articles in the New Yorker
Immanuel Kant on Radical Evil
Jonathan Edwards
“Mike Cosper: What ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill’ Means for Church Leaders” by Jessica Lea on ChurchLeaders
Miroslav Volf
“The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt
Sojourn Music
