Just one more bit of truth from the previous article on The Church of the Saviour:

Although that Life which you are talking about isn’t an other-worldly heaven, the way some people would think of it?

Gordon Cosby: No, no. This life is preparation for a birth into another level of Reality. And I’ve got a responsibility to do what I can to help it be a good birth. We are here to get to know the Living Reality that brought everything into being, that is sustaining it now, and into whose Reality we are going.

We are here to get to know God. The best way to know God is through his Son who was sent to us to help us know that nature. That is my job, the Church’s job. That’s quite different from what the church normally prepares people for—dealing with the vicissitudes of this life, and how to be a little more successful.

So here we are. What is life for? Life is to get to know Jesus Christ, really know Jesus Christ, and be formed into the image of Jesus Christ. To be formed into servants, servant leaders—not successful leaders. Therefore, I’m caught in a deepening mode to get to know the servant Jesus and become like him. The Church is that body of
people who are on that same journey, who are trying to corporately embody the being of Jesus in a broken world and with our broken, sinful selves.

Our verbal evangelism and our structures for evangelism must come out of the inner work. If we are still living in the world’s culture and haven’t begun to break from our addiction to power and money and influence and “upward mobility,” and we are talking to people about Jesus out of that place, well, that’s the Jesus that they hear.

As things exist now, after 50-some years, how hopeful do you feel about the Church?

Cosby: That’s a difficult question, because from what I see of the institutional, organized church, that which calls itself the Church, I’m not hopeful. As far as what God is committed to, what Jesus died for and rose for…nothing is going to stop it. It’s going to come into true fullness of being in God’s time and
in God’s way. He is going to accomplish his purposes. Hope, then, which is rooted in God and in God’s being – I’m seeking to keep my hope rooted there. To root hope in observable progress is always ephemeral. The deeper we go into life, the more disappointed we may be, because we are seeing how slow it is to us. It’s not happening. We
are up against principalities and power at deep levels. I would try not to root hope in the seen; I would try to deepen it always in the unseen, in the nature of God and of Christ who is the pioneer of our faith.