Ruined For The Old

by Duane Cottrell

 

 

All of a sudden, everything made sense. It was one of those moments on the journey when things converge with kind of a cosmic jolt; where everything that didn't make sense finally does, and everything you thought made sense doesn't anymore. For me, it was the sum of three years working to plant a new church, coming from a conservative evangelical background in youth ministry through a bizarre faith journey across the country. Faced with the impending end of our ministry, and three years of hard work slipping away, I was confused and struggling.

 

Sitting in the library at the Festival Center in Washington, D.C., I was surrounded by the written wisdom from many years of faith and ministry. Familiar names like Henri Nouwen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton adorned the spines of many aged volumes. Most names, however, were new to me-names such as Thomas Keating, Elizabeth O'Connor, Walter Bruggemann, Parker J. Palmer, and Jean Vanier. It was an exciting time, because in the midst of confusion and distress at the nearing end of our ministry, I had discovered something great: The Church of the Saviour.

 

I was initially drawn to the story of The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. because of the remarkable similarity of its beginnings to those of my own ministry. A young man named Gordon Cosby set out 50 years earlier to reinvent the church for our time, and with a small band of committed believers had given birth to this remarkable ministry. For the first time, it felt that someone was on the same page of the same book I was reading, and I was ready for a conversation. So, sitting in the library of the Festival Center with my wife and six month old daughter, I had a conversation with the then 85-year-old Gordon Cosby.

 

There was a great deal of wisdom in that conversation, much of which I will touch on in the paragraphs that follow. But the pivotal moment came to me in a story Gordon told. Gordon's late brother, Beverly, had endeavored to begin a church in Lynchburg, Virginia modeled after Church of the Saviour. After years of hard work, the fledgling congregation small and struggling, Beverly said to his brother, "Gordon, I don't know what I am going to do. I'm ruined for the old, but don't know how to do the new." For some reason, in that moment everything came together. I didn't receive a vision or some grand revelation, nor did I gain any special insight to my struggles. In fact, I didn't even discover the slightest bit of clarity. What happened in that moment was simply that for the first time I understood and embraced the lack of clarity I had been experiencing.

 

Ruined for the old.

I had spent the past three years pouring all my effort into a new church - a new kind of church - and had been truly transformed. I discovered that church can be a place of true community. Not surface-level social interactions, or casual friendships based on affinity, but genuine togetherness in spirit. I hesitate to even write this because it sounds so fantastical, but I discovered that people who have little or nothing in common can come together in the name of Christ and truly love one another unconditionally, challenge one another to grow spiritually and emotionally, and give sacrificially of themselves to one another and to the group. I discovered that church is about mission, which is entirely different from missions. I was taught about missions as a child, which meant that we gave our money so that a few special, holy people could go to scary foreign places and do God's work. But the idea of mission is tied to the idea of call, both of which are revolutionary to the church today. I actually found that church can be a place where people hear God's call on their lives, and in doing so discover their own personal mission. I witnessed people who found extraordinary strength to do what seemed impossible with their lives simply because God had called them and given them a passion they could not quench. I discovered that church can be a place of spiritual formation, where lives are changed at their most basic level to follow the radical, alternative lifestyle of Jesus. This was not simply integrating a few Biblical principles into a life already based on a Judeo-Christian value system. This was a complete reinvention of the way life was to be lived and experienced. For the first time, church was about being the Kingdom of God. These things were so radical, so revolutionary to me there was no turning back. I had discovered just a taste of what the Church was meant to be, and I could never go back to the old.

 

Don't know how to do the new.

That was the problem. I had this grand idea, this taste of what could be, but it had simply never come to fruition. For three years, I labored to reach people, mainly young people, with this new idea of church. I had a few faithful companions on the journey who were as committed to these ideas as I, but we discovered that for the most part people simply weren't interested in a radical, alternative life of following the high commitment to Christ. Most of the newness we saw in church was simply repackaging the old with a user-friendly exterior, making church accessible to the masses through contemporary music, relevant messages, casual dress, and everyday language. We started our journey here, and it was critical to do so. But over the months and years, we found that there was even more that needed to be changed. As we experimented with community, spiritual formation, and call, we found a little taste of what could be, but mainly we found out how much we didn't know about how to make it happen. How do you create community? All we discovered was that you don't create community; community creates you. It just happens. And when it does, you don't even realize it until your life is different. We worked on going deeper in prayer and scripture, turning to the ancient disciplines and monastic traditions. Again, we found more we did not know. The more we tried, the more we realized we simply did not know how to make this new thing work.

 

I realize that my journey is nowhere near over. I have come through some very difficult terrain, but there is much more to come, both rewarding and challenging. In the paragraphs that follow, I am going to try to make some sense of where I have been, hoping it will point me to where I may be going. This is merely a record of my own personal journey, not some new theology or method or church growth principle. But if you're interested, you are invited-along with countless others-to journey with me.