A Prayer of a Chance

Gordon Cosby, the founder and pastor of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., was interviewed by Jim Wallis at Cosby's office in March 1986. Through involvement with various inner-city ministries, including Jubilee Housing and Columbia Road Health Services, Cosby and the Church of the Saviour have pioneered a model of Christian spirituality, church renewal, and ministry that works to balance the inward, personal journey with the outward, activist journey. Christians in congregations across the country have benefited from their witness and experiences. - The Editors

Jim Wallis: Your ministry and the Church of the Saviour are often associated with spirituality - the spirituality of ministry and the spirituality of community. But the word "spirituality" is sometimes difficult to understand. I think there is a tremendous hunger, and at the same time a lot of confusion, about spirituality. Based on your life and your experience with the Church of the Saviour, what do you mean by spirituality?

Gordon Cosby: I think the image of spirituality that's best is one of intimacy in a relationship with Jesus. Jesus talked about his abiding in the Father and the Father abiding in him; he didn't do anything his Father/Mother didn't tell him to do or say anything God didn't tell him to say.

It appears to me that Jesus promises us the same sort of intimate relationship with him that he himself enjoyed with God. His own life was based on that intimacy, and he promises that the basis of our life can also be that intimacy. The relationship he has promised us - and the freedom that results from it - are, to me, the heart of spirituality.

How does prayer relate to spirituality and intimacy with God?

Prayer is this intimacy. Prayer is the sharing, the dialogue, the openness to God.

People often think of prayer in terms of techniques or how much time is given to prayer. But the goal of prayer is not just to develop a life of prayer but to develop the intimacy, the freedom, the authenticity, and the power that come from prayer.

They said of Jesus that he spoke with authority, not as the scribes and the Pharisees. It seems to me that his authority was the authority of intimacy. He was in touch with God's truth and reality, and when he spoke he was speaking out of the depths of that truth. So it is that intimacy, authenticity, and freedom that we long for.

We long to be true. We long to speak with authority. We long to be free so that all that we potentially can be will extend, unfold, and come into being, and we can be faithful to what we were intended to be. To me, all of this flows out of that intimacy.

It seems as if the creative and exciting ministries spawned by the Church of the Saviour in the low-income Adams-Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., continue to proliferate. Yet, in the middle of a conversation one day, you said to me, "Despite our best efforts and intentions, all the work and sweat, and our prayers and faith, the neighborhood has gotten worse; things continue to deteriorate."

You also said those of us who are working for justice underestimate the power of the demonic. That raises very painful issues of effectiveness, success, and faithfulness, and finally the question of what we mean by the cross. What do you mean when you say the demonic is always underestimated?

It seems to me that the whole business of effectiveness and success is so deeply ingrained within us that we often think of our efforts solely in terms of successes, which can be very superficial. The real issue is our faithfulness to discovering our own personal call and our corporate call. And that call is always a call to connect with the pain somewhere in God's world.

In our case, Adams-Morgan is where we connect with pain. We are opened up to the capacity to enter into solidarity with people who enlarge us. And we also learn that whatever we are doing against the increasing need there seems laughable.

Therefore, somehow, we have to learn to get our satisfaction and our joy in faithfulness and in our intimate relationship with Christ. Then the question of effectiveness and success, in the usual sense of those terms, is not the issue. We can transcend that and get energized and nourished by faithfulness, knowing we are doing what we must do to live - not what we must do to change the neighborhood. The constant struggle is the deepening of faith that enables us to really trust that somehow the whole show is going to come off right in God's timing.

The assumption many of us make in the early stages is: "I'm going to be faithful. God's going to bless my faithfulness. I'm going to give it the best I've got. I've got this amazing vision of what can happen." The cross is the fact that all those amazing visions and all those dreams and all those things that are going to happen don't work. In the early days I believed that if I were faithful, if I could just bring adequate faith to the task, God would honor my faithfulness and amazing results would occur. Well, I'm sure that those amazing results are occurring somewhere and they are going to be all added up in the final score. But they are not added up in ways which I can see.

So I have to do some dying to what I feel I can do through my own efforts and my own capacity. Somehow it's a matter of becoming aware that evil and the demonic are much tougher and much more resistant than I thought they would be. It takes a deepened faith for me to keep hope when there appears to be a deterioration of the political climate and the neighborhood where we are struggling.

I can talk for a long time and very excitedly about what I feel are the manifestations of God's power in the neighborhood and in the lives of the people that we are working with. But if one is looking at it from the standpoint of whether we're seeing a real flow toward love and sharing and unselfishness, and the blacks and the Hispanics and the whites and the rich and the poor coming together to the feast of the kingdom, and children not being abused and the elderly having the essential minimums for human beings in my neighborhood - that is just not happening.

What does it mean then to take the demonic as seriously as we ought to, and how does that change the way we respond, whether to the arms race or a neighborhood or any situation we're in?

We tend to think in terms of projects - housing projects, job programs, and so on. For instance, we've got 258 units of housing, and we're planning now to buy another building. We placed about 800 people in jobs through our Jubilee Jobs program last year. And we've got The Family Place, where we are working with parenting needs. But there's something important that is beyond those programs: It's what happens to the people in those buildings; it's getting access to the deepest levels of their lives.

But to get access to the deepest dimensions of the lives of people is something we cannot humanly do. That is where Christ is the evangelist. That is where the Holy Spirit has access to a person's inner life and produces a conversion. And we, through our programs, are getting very few conversions.

No matter how hard I try and no matter how well I plan and no matter how many gifted people I gather around for one of our programs, the real change is a change that takes place at a level of human life that I don't have access to. And I don't think it comes about through our programs. All the configurations of life keep changing, and if the poor get power you change the players but you're not getting a change in hearts and lives.

So part of what I'm talking about is evangelism, and not just with service efforts. How do we present the things of Christ? How do we pastor these lives? How do we let them pastor us so that fundamental change takes place?

Part of the secret of it, it seems to me, is really believing that we are not doing it. As scripture tells us, unless the Lord builds our house, those who build it labor in vain; unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. And how then do we tangle with the powers of darkness? How do we "go down to Jerusalem" and expose those powers? We need to trust God that we are the instruments of another level of change taking place.

I see the social justice programs as a sort of "stage setting." But I see a tendency to stop there: "Here is our program. Isn't this wonderful!" Sure it's wonderful, and we are grateful for it; but all you have is the stage. How to get the kind of conversion that drives me and drives the community into a deeper level of our own inner conversion is the question. Part of the power of the demonic is evident in how hard it is for me to be converted. It's not just in the poor and the situation out there that I see the demonic working; look at how it works in me. Look at how it works in our communities, in how we set the limits as to how much we are going to give of ourselves, or in how our own darkness is triggered and can use our energy up in working through crises that come up again and again. It's that darkness, the power of death, in me and in our communities, that I'm more aware of; and then I see it working out there in the inner-city environment.

I'm now part of our church's Evangelism and Pastoral Care Group. Our task is to assume responsibility for developing a spiritual relationship with two people in the neighborhood and working with them until the time comes that we can present the claims of Christ to them. If they are already in the faith in some sense, then we will pastor them and serve as spiritual guides to them. This is the hardest thing; all of the programs are easy compared to that.

It's the right direction, but it's hard to make that shift in mission to building the sort of relationship that will help a person to meet God, to meet Christ, and to be pastored. That's a new revelation - that it would be that hard. In developing those relationships we cross cultures and racial boundaries. Presumably we are there because Christ is in this thing, because Christ has called us to this, where we can begin to be in a spiritual relationship with the people we work with in our programs.

This has come about from sensing the inadequacy of the service programs by themselves. But you're not disparaging the programs; you're not about to disband them, are you?

No, I think they ought to be deepened and expanded, and we will do so. But unless we can put primary effort and energy into the work of conversion, I don't think the real, radical, fundamental change that we all long for is going to take place.

So without conversion, the social programs you've engaged in end up not changing very much?

I think they are a very important contribution, because it's important that we have the minimal essentials of housing for 260 families, rather than leaving them on the street. I think it's important that over the years we've been responsible for putting 1,500 to 2,000 people to work. I think that feeds into their dignity, their self-image. I think that's right and so to belittle that would not be fair.

If we are not willing to pay that price, then it seems to me that the work of conversion is cheap. To talk to people about Jesus without demonstrating that we care about the essentials of their lives is shallow and has little meaning. All I'm saying is that social justice work alone is only the stage setting.

Jesus fed the 5,000. Great! But he also said, "You shall not live by bread alone." He fed them. But he knew there was a deeper dimension and that bread alone was not the whole answer. That's the paradox I'm trying to describe.

We've got to be willing to be with people at the point of their physical hunger, their need for housing, their need for health, and all of these things. If we have anything of the love of Christ in us, and concern for the pain and the suffering of the world, then we must be concerned with those issues. But we can't stop at the point of those concerns. It must not be assumed that conversion will somehow happen on its own.

The concerns of social justice are a necessary foundation of evangelism. But to assume that because we're doing projects people will be converted, will touch the gospel, will come to know God, is a wrong assumption. Therefore, on this foundation we must learn ways of relating,, of sharing the gospel, and a new depth of intercessory prayer, so that this yearning, this hunger will be so heightened in people that they will cry, "What must I do to be saved?" In these programs people would find a community which can then be the midwife to get them into the kingdom.

When Sojourners Community first came to Washington, D.C., we met a young teenage boy who has been our friend now for a long time. He lived with one of our families for several years. Then he went back home for a while.

He became involved with a fundamentalist, evangelistic group that works in the city. When he came back to us and the family he had lived with, he said, "I learned so much from you about the meaning of following Jesus. But I never was clearly told what I needed to do to be saved."

The fundamentalist group had told him that, and he was converted. Although he had trouble with its politics and legalistic attitudes, something happened for him in terms of conversion. It was a clear word about conversion that in our early years in the neighborhood I don't think we were giving.

This is my point, you see, and I think this is happening all around the nation with the groups that are working with the various neighborhood responsibilities. It's very, very hard to bring together both the work of justice and the work of conversion.

Wasn't that indeed the experience of the early church - a church which in some cities would feed 5,000 people a day and which was so known for meeting the needs of the people that it was profoundly evangelistic? In that sense it was not like most of the evangelical churches today, on the one hand, or most of the more liberal churches, on the other hand.

Bringing these seeming polarities together in that sort of integration gets back to the question of spirituality. It is an expression of spirituality to get social justice programs under way. It is an expression of spirituality to share the gospel in a more explicit way. Both of them are expressions of it.

And this integration has also been the only adequate response to the power and pervasiveness of the demonic.

The Inbreaking Work of Christ
This is where we started our conversation, you see. We must work with our social programs; but they are not going to stop the flow of the demonic. They're pathetic against the flow of the demonic.

We've got to deepen our capacity for Christ's whole life and being to penetrate us at a deeper level. And we've got to know that as we are working with all of these other efforts, our task is to help open up people for Christ to break into their hearts.

If we leave it at the level of just providing minimal necessities, that does not necessarily open the human spirit. Some of us have our basic needs met, but that doesn't mean we are open for Christ to penetrate our lives. By our actions we have not arrested a fundamental selfishness.

And that's what I'm talking about - the darkness is a fundamental selfishness.

Now what's going to break that fundamental selfishness? That's the power of the gospel; that's the power of Christ breaking in.

It seems that you're saying there is also another problem: It's a lot easier to give and minister, to conceive and carry out projects and programs, to have meetings and make sure you have all your resources and your personnel. It's a lot easier to do that than to enter into your own conversion. Good, well-meaning people can do those things without ever facing what their own conversion might mean.

Unless there is a continuing inner journey, it's much more painful to get the plank out of our own eye and open ourselves to our own continuing conversion than it is to see the problems out there and then develop the programs to address those problems.

The witness of lifestyle is being made to the poor, even while we're serving the poor. Here's a guy who never had anything, and he's being witnessed to about the gospel by Christians, who are also witnessing by their lifestyle regardless of what they're saying. It seems to me that you can sometimes say exactly what Jesus said in Matthew 23 about the scribes and Pharisees - "...you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when that person becomes a proselyte, you make them twice as much a child of hell as yourselves."

What Jesus is saying is that you can bring people into your religious system and your scale of values, all of which is done in the name of God. They will accept your religious system and your value system, but they are worse off. We've had some success in helping people break out of the poverty cycle, and that's good. But some have adopted our upward mobility kicks. They will have a harder time having the kingdom break into their lives than before.

In some ways it's not only a problem of the social programs finally not getting to the heart of the issue, but also those administering the programs don't get to the heart of the issue in their own lives.

That's right. If we are not being changed and energized by our programs and projects, then the first mission isn't taking place. And if we are not being converted, then we are only satisfying a certain need to do good or to be generous. Without the inner change taking place within us, our good deeds can "protect" us from the deeper plan of the gospel, rather than serving the purpose of nurture.

There is no protective antidote to the demonic. It's ridiculous to be up against the demonic without spiritual armor. Everybody knows it's a tragic world that we're living in, but somehow you can know that and not carry a serious view of the demonic. When you're aware of it, you've got to put on this spiritual armor.

Just as you were talking, my mind went immediately to Paul's words in Ephesians 6. What does that passage on the spiritual armor, which begins with verse 10, mean to you?

"Finally then, find your strength in the Lord, in God's mighty power." What that means to me is to work as faithfully as I can with all of these things but to know that what matters is what God chooses to do through what I am doing. The tendency is to feel that I'm doing it, that I'm going to use my best thinking and my best organizational powers in whatever it is.

"Put on all the armor which God provides, so that you may be able to stand firm against the devices of the devil. For our fight is not against human foes." The fight is against the cosmic powers, the powers and potentates of this dark world, and against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens. I need to be aware that as these forces are superhuman, they're beyond what I can handle, or what a committed community can really do anything about. They are beyond me.

I think this is the reason that many of us are exhausted. We have been up against these superhuman forces, and we have been trying to do it on our strength. As a result, we haven't taken up the whole armor. "...Then you will be able to stand your ground when things are at their worst, to complete every task and still to stand."

"For coat of mail put on integrity." Integrity, it seems to me, would be the embodiment of the truth. As we really are rooted in that which is eternal, then we are rooted in Christ and this intimacy. The truth is that love is available to me in Christ and that I can have an intimate sort of relationship with Jesus. Integrity is for that to be integrated within me, not compartmentalized.

Integrity is bringing the whole of your life into the situation and not living a different lifestyle while taking on this ministry.

That's right. "Let the shoes on your feet be the gospel of peace, to give you firm footing;...take up the great shield of faith...to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one....Take salvation for a helmet." What does salvation mean then?

It may mean the conversion that you're talking about. The shield of faith protects us from the flaming arrows of the evil one or the assaults that seem to be coming at us constantly. I don't think we're conscious very often that we need a shield, the shield of faith, to protect us against those assaults.

If we don't have that shield, then all of the assaults register at an inner level; we have to deal with them, and they are exhausting to us. A shield would keep those darts away from the human body. One of the ways I would interpret that would be as detachment: I can take that which comes and act detached from it, and not bury it within myself. Because I know that there are protections around me and around my loved ones.

"For sword, take that which the Spirit gives you - the words that come from God." That ties in, it seems to me, with the temptations that Jesus had. That phrase, "the words that come from God," is almost the same expression as "You cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that God utters."

And so we hear once again that word of intimacy. That's the word that has the power to change, to do what needs to be done. It has the power to penetrate, to go where human words cannot go.

And this ties in with whether we are offering the Word of God in our programs and our work. Is the Word of God being offered, or simply affordable and safe housing?

That's exactly right. You can't offer that Word of God except out of intimacy with God.

Give yourselves wholly to prayer and entreaty; pray on every occasion in the power of the Spirit. To this end keep watch and persevere, always interceding for all God's people; and pray for me, that I may be granted the right words when I open my mouth, and may boldly and freely make known his hidden purpose, for which I am ambassador in chains. Pray that I may speak of it boldly, as it is my duty to speak.

This refers back to community and its members' obligation to pray for one another, so that each of us may be able to speak those words boldly every day. Then they are words that are going to have penetrating power.

Not long ago President Reagan appeared on television to pressure the Congress to give aid to the Nicaraguan contras.

I was impressed with the power of evil to mask itself in light. He lied, and it sounded like the truth. Then the Democratic Party opposition came on, and they basically said, "We think he's right about everything he said, but we think there's a better way to do this." But no one tells the truth.

And so you despair. You look at your own resources and your own power, and you wonder how in the world you can counteract all of that. You envision educational campaigns, but you know that what Reagan is appealing to finally is the same values and assumptions in the American public that need to be changed. He's saying, "We don't want to lose what we have, and we're going to do whatever it takes to keep it."

The Bible doesn't say that the armor of God is, say, an hour of TV time to respond. How do we respond and keep ourselves from being overwhelmed?

Well, I feel all of the things that you are saying very, very deeply, and it is the most unmatched face of evil that I've seen in my life. We have the American public believing the lies, or knowing that they're being told lies and not minding, which may be worse.

I would look at what happened during the Nazi regime in Germany. It feels to me like that is the kind of thing that is taking place. And I don't want to just go belly up on it, I want to put on that armor of God.

I think we have to do what we can do, get whatever television time we can get, and so forth. But it won't be enough unless something is happening at a deeper level with the people of God in this nation, and around the world, and unless God is hearing the people who are crying out in their pain and their suffering. Because God hears those cries, God is raising up Moseses here and there to respond and help bring the deliverance. And we need more of these Moseses.

We've got to recognize the flaming darts of the wicked one and try to protect our own inner integrity and the inner integrity of our communities. We've got to hold on to the faith, no matter whether death comes to us personally, corporately, or as a nation. As this stuff swirls around us, we witness to the fact that life is one long storm. I think we are reduced right now to thinking in terms of whether we can retain our own hearts in purity and in faith.

The power of evil becomes so strong that simply battling it on its own terms cannot suffice. All we can hope for, cry out for, is a deeper and deeper awakening of the power of God in our lives and in the community of faith. And that conversion, finally, is the only response that is spiritually sufficient to counter what I saw on television that night - not getting an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times the next day saying it isn't true.

That's what I feel about our neighborhood, you see, and the same thing is occurring within the nation. You can feel the power of the demonic. It's unbelievable. And therefore fighting it on its own terms is a joke.

And yet it's interesting that one can see the power of evil and not be depressed by it. I'm much less depressed by all this than I used to be, but I think I care more.

I'm much more impressed with the necessity of that cross - for me or for anybody. God's getting into this situation was not just something that was peripheral. Jesus' living, dying, and being raised again is absolutely essential for any of us to make it.

The response to the power of the demonic, whether it be in the neighborhood or in the nation, is the traditional affirmation: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." Finally that's all that we can say, and it's the only thing that is sufficient to respond to the power of evil.

That's right. And it's the only thing that's got a prayer of a chance in this universe.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.