Gordon Cosby was the founder and pastor of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., and a Sojourners contributing editor when this interview appeared. The following interview, conducted by Jim Wallis in May 1986, is the last in a three-part series of interviews with Cosby. The first, on spirituality, began this summer series on faith and appeared in the June 1986 issue. The second part, on community, appeared in the July issue. -The Editors
Jim Wallis: Speaking from your experience as a preacher at the Church of the Saviour, how would you describe preaching? What do you mean by it?
Gordon Cosby: What is important about preaching is its context, which is community. I have to start there. Preaching is a gift of the Spirit that is evoked from within the life of the community and confirmed by the community. The preacher lives the life of the community along with all the other people in the community, and it is out of that common life and living out of the same biblical tradition - seeking to embody the gospel in the community - that the preacher then offers his or her gifts. Even when preaching away from one's own community, one brings a word which is a word of that community to another community.
Now what is distinctive about this special gift? It seems to me that a community is very much helped by having someone who has the gift of making public what is happening in the life of that community. Oftentimes that community is undergoing experiences that it does not understand. The community needs to have someone who can articulate on behalf of the community what is happening in its life. Every community needs to have its pain brought to speech, because pain needs to be expressed. That's not traditionally what we think about when we consider preaching, but I think it's very important.
As a community evolves and grows, some areas are not as developed in its life as other areas, just as in individuals. Someone needs to be able to see that, so that the function that needs to be developed in the community is brought to its consciousness.
Another function of preaching is interpreting the faith and the gospel in such a way that newcomers to the community can hear the proclamation of the good news. They can hear it much more effectively if it's coming out of the life of the community that is living the gospel, embodying the corporate outcrying of Christ. Then the newcomer can sense the gospel embodied in the community and can be confronted with the decision of whether to give one's life to Christ, to enter into the faith, and to begin the pilgrimage of being a Christian.
Even people who've been in the faith for a long time may not understand the gospel very well. They know it conceptually, but they haven't put together a lot of connections, and they may need help to make those connections so that we all are maturing in the faith. So one of the functions of the preacher is taking the old truths that we were raised on and expressing them with a freshness and in the idiom of the times, and certainly in relationship to the issues of the times.
What is the difference between interpreting events in our life together and proclaiming the Word of God in the context of the community?
Essentially, the Word of God that we're proclaiming is a Word of God that has been embodied, incarnated historically, in a community for several thousand years. The only way that we can know the true God is the story of how this God has functioned. So we go back to the story to remember how God has functioned in the history of the people of God from the beginning. Then we do the best we can to understand where our own times and our own story fit that story. And so we are proclaiming that this is the way this God has worked, and this is the way we believe God is now at work, and this is who this God is. So it is within that context of community that the proclamation is being made.
But it seems to me that the proclamation involves interpretation; it involves teaching. You don't just declare that this God is at work. We declare that this God has been at work in a particular way through Jesus Christ. We also declare that, in light of the revelation that God exists in the local communities now, as God existed in the communities in history, so our nation is under the same judgment that Rome and Babylon were under. So to me proclaiming the Word of God and teaching are all wrapped together.
There's a very special, affectionate kind of relationship between the preacher and the Bible. What is that relationship?
The Bible is the record of the community of faith, and it must not be separated from the community. The community brought the book into being, and the book brought the community into being. So we have this record of community that is also the authentic record of how God has acted in the history of God's liberation community. The whole life of the community needs to be nurtured by the Bible. My intimacy with the Bible is the same as the intimacy of all the others in the community with it. I live from it every day, but the whole community lives from it, too.
One of the disciplines of our community is each day spending a period of silence, prayer, and working with the scriptures. It is my discipline, as well as the discipline of the others in the community. Several times a day we share with one another just how the day's scripture is speaking to us and what it means for us. The scripture is informing my life and the community's life.
Whenever one hears the Word of God, one is drawn into community. And one has not heard the Word of God unless one is drawn into an intimate relationship with others who have heard that Word.
Preaching today is often associated with television preachers. There's a lot of discussion about whether preaching can or should be done on television. Do you have any reflections on this?
In my mind that medium violates the relationship between the preacher and the community. If one spends the time to carry on the sort of program that the media preachers work with, then one isn't living a life as one among equals within the life of a community with shared gifts. Instead, there's an elevation of this gift, which, to me, is a distortion of it. The gift of preaching is a crucial gift, but it is just one of all the gifts that build the body.
Now Paul did a lot of traveling around, and he was very public. He was the best means of communication of his time, but he was still living in a community for much of the time. When visiting a community, he lived into the life of that people and, after I he had been there preaching and teaching, he stayed in touch with that community £ and wrote to it. To me, that is quite different. I'm not saying that I don't feel that television or the media should be used; I'm just saying that there can be a distortion of what I understand as the gift of preaching.
You've been preaching now for how many years?
Well, I started when I was 15. I'm 69 years old this summer, so that would be 54 years.
Where were you preaching when you were 15?
I started with a small, black, Baptist congregation up in the foothills of the mountains just outside of Lynchburg, Virginia.
One day my brother and I were up in the mountains trying to find a pig for a greased pig contest. I couldn't get any of the farmers to lend their pigs, because when they asked, "What are you going to do with it?" I replied, "Well, I'm going to grease it up and use it in a greased pig contest for a boys' group that I'm working with." And they'd say, "I'm not going to give you my pig for that." So I had to go farther and farther and farther, until I got up in the foothills of the mountains. Finally I had to buy a pig and carry it back in the trunk of my car. If it weren't for that pig, I would never have gotten up into that part of the world.
While we were there, we noticed a little country church that was vacant. My brother and I wandered around the neighborhood to find out why it wasn't being used. We found the chief deacon and asked him whether they were having any services. He said, "Well, we haven't been able to pay a preacher." So I asked him if he would be willing for me to come and preach in that little church. He looked at me - I was white and 15 years old, and he and the community were black - and he said, "We'll give it some thought and we'll let you know."
I checked in with him a little later, and he said, "We have thought about it, and you can come preach one sermon, and we'll see whether we like you or not." So I went and preached my first sermon at that little church, and they invited me back for a second time, and a third, and I preached there in their little church for a couple of years.
At 15 you felt called to preach! Where did that come from?
I had the problem many people have of feeling that if you are really going to serve God totally and be fully surrendered to Christ, that means preaching. After I did that for several years, I began to sense that something was pulling at the deeper chords of my being, and I went off to the Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
When did you found the Church of the Saviour?
It was formally founded in 1947; we got it started in 1946. The idea to start a new community took shape during the time that I was a chaplain in the Second World War. When I got back to the United States, I didn't know how to get back in my denomination because several things had happened to me. I felt that there needed to be a much longer period of preparation for a person to come into the church community if they were to have any understanding of the life and nature of the gospel.
The second thing that happened was that I felt that I could not be the pastor of a segregated congregation and I didn't know how I would get a call from any Southern Baptist congregation because of that feeling. But I continued to feel a call to preach and to be the pastor of a church, even though what I had been taught to believe was the church had changed.
How did you get your radical ideas about the gospel?
My father-in-law was a minister of my home church, and he was a renegade in his denomination, seeking to make the church more ecumenical and offering a different interpretation of the gospel. So I had the beginning there.
But the thing that really affected me was the intensity of life and suffering under combat conditions for long periods of time during World War II and being able to see from a perspective of 3,000 miles away the products of the churches. I had the responsibility of being with very young men, preparing them, watching them die, being with them when they died. Many of them died within a week of the time they got there. They were some of the best the churches had to offer, and they were totally unprepared for what they faced. I was able to see the results of what was happening in the church life of this country under those circumstances, and it was pathetic.
These young men were in an entirely different setting, where they were up against issues of life and death, the pressures of combat, the pressures of being away from home, with all of their support systems gone, and finding out what their faith was able to mean in their lives. Their response was so disillusioning that I knew something was not just a little wrong, it was radically wrong.
You've been preaching for more than 50 years - that's a very long time. How do you think your preaching has changed?
In some ways there's been a consistent strain. I remember the text of my first sermon. It was from Revelation, about the church that was neither hot nor cold but lukewarm. Even then I was sensing an understanding of total commitment. So in a sense I had always known that the gospel was radical and that if I really believed in it and took it seriously, it was all or nothing.
There have been a lot of changes over the years as to what that means. I have come to an understanding of the body of Christ being totally ecumenical. Also in the early days I understood faith as a much more private thing. Now I know that there's a very important personal dimension and that the inner life has to be deepened but also that the outer life has to connect us with some segment of suffering. That then constitutes the call - waiting for that suffering. And to be faithful, the personal has to express itself in the public realm.
But commitment is the key. That presupposes a clear understanding that there are two kingdoms. There is a kingdom of heaven, and there is the kingdom of darkness and death. Repentance is a willingness to be transferred from the kingdom of darkness and chaos into the kingdom of Christ. So that commitment is not just a commitment to the person of Christ but also to the kingdom that Christ came to proclaim and embody and share with us. And that has to be much more sharply proclaimed in our preaching.
You said that one of the reasons you couldn't find your way back into your denomination was your refusal to pastor a segregated church. And a church, as you understand the gospel, is a multiracial community of faith. Preaching in the black churches in the United States has been very different from the preaching in the white churches. The black preaching tradition in this country is one of the strongest of anywhere in the world. And the white preaching tradition in this country, with few exceptions, has not been very strong. Why is that?
I think it is very hard to produce great preachers in a tradition of a people who are not oppressed. You have to be struggling with the issues. The gospel is the good news to the poor. They are really taking that story in their hands, creating their spirituality. And so they are the recipients of the gospel, the real gospel for the poor, for the oppressed.
So it seems to me that you can produce orators if you have an advantaged, privileged church. But I don't know whether you can produce great proclamations of the gospel except in a setting of people who are oppressed. This is where there's a feeling for suffering and oppression and a knowledge of the good news that the oppression is going to be broken.
What does it mean, then, to preach the gospel from the perspective of the poor?
I marvel at how God works with us beyond our understanding and our knowing. I look back on the experience I had with that first little church. Without deciding to do it, I broke with all of the cultural traditions. I used to go and visit with the families in their homes, sit around in their kitchens, and talk. And I came to be bonded with them and grew to love them. It happened so naturally, simply because I was doing what a pastor ought to be doing.
It seems to me that as I identify and cast my lot with the poor, then I'm the recipient of their gospel, and I can sense it and feel it. I can declare it with more consistency, because I've become one of the poor in my identification and where I'm putting my energy and my time. I do a very poor job of bringing my lifestyle into line with that of the poor, so I have to work with that.
But as I invest myself in and with the poor, their future and my future are linked. God says the future lies with them. So to the degree that I'm part of them, I can take hold of that claim, and I can speak with some authentic clarity.
Their destiny becomes my destiny. That's where the promise is. I don't know how to preach it otherwise now.
On the practical level, how do you prepare a sermon, and how do you prepare yourself for a sermon?
This is where I'm probably least helpful. I used to feel guilty if I had not gotten a sermon theme early in the week, outlined it, and internalized it to have it ready for Sunday morning. I struggled with that for years and never succeeded. So I just gave that up.
What I do now is to live deeply into the life of the community, feel the currents of it, what's taking place, and try to determine what is most needed. At the same time, I work with my own prayer life and with the scriptures. I depend on the Holy Spirit to give me that which will be alive for me. If it is not alive for me, it is not going to be alive for anybody that I'm talking to. The Holy Spirit gives me that awareness of what people in the community need to hear on any Sunday. When I'm feeling inundated and grappling to find hope, I've got to go back and recall my memories of the community and how it got started, and what God is about. Then I share that with the people. And so I'm preaching to the limit of my vision, even if I'm not there yet, or am not feeling it. So by faith I proclaim that hope.
And I find that as I do that, my own faith is renewed. The community oftentimes needs what I need. And what I need is oftentimes what the community needs. And so I'm preaching out of my own need as well.
If the Holy Spirit guides the community in the decisions that we make, why shouldn't the Holy Spirit guide us in what we need to be sharing with our community? I just live the life of our community as deeply as I can and ask for guidance. Then I just try to be available, to see what erupts from just living during the week.
Preaching comes out of a deep involvement with the people. One of the functions of preaching is to bring a Word which says there is an answer to a community's need. For instance, if the community is hurting and discouraged, one of the most important functions in our time is to offer hope. Most communities that are really involved with living the gospel and getting their hands dirty are finding out that evil is much more intractable than they ever realized. They are discovering its forms and how it works in a way that they never knew before. And they begin to discover how it works within themselves.
Our communities need a spokesperson who will provide and share hope. That is definitely needed, because many of the finest people are desperately tired. They have conceptual hope, but they don't have any real hope - there are no streams of hope flowing within their lives.
All that you've said about how we need to preach hope, particularly to people who have committed themselves to the gospel, strikes me very deeply. It fits my experience of community and my own life. But the question that leaps up in my heart is, how do you preach hope when so many people hold a conceptual hope but they don't feel it vibrant and flowing in their lives?
In Luke 4 Jesus went back to the 61st chapter of Isaiah, which was written during the time of the exile, and used it to inaugurate his ministry. He went back to the story of the people of faith in the midst of devastating circumstances. That's one way - finding the stories of faithful people in difficult circumstances for whom hope was real.
Also, if I can reach down and touch bottom in my life and find that the bottom is solid, then others may feel they can touch the bottom and that it will be solid for them. Then I have to trust the Holy Spirit to make a direct intervention in the depths of people's lives.
My job is to proclaim the hope of the gospel more frequently and preach to the limit of my vision, even if I don't embody that vision myself. Some say that if you don't embody the gospel message you can't preach it. I say that's not true. I do not wait until I embody it. I will preach to the limit of my vision and will be seeking to embody it and will be spending the rest of my life embodying it. But I'm going to preach more than I embody - for my sake, for the people's sake, for everybody's sake.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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