memoir

Review: Land of My Sojourn

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Land of My Sojourn, Mike Cosper. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2024.

Summary: The narrative of a former church leader who stepped away from a toxic leadership culture, the disillusionment that followed, and how reflections from a sojourn in Israel helped him process and find restoration.

Many who read this review will recognize the name of Mike Cosper as the host of the widely listened-to podcast series The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill, part of the podcasting work Cosper does for Christianity Today. In reading his new book, Landscape of My Sojourn, I couldn’t help wonder if what made Cosper so effective as host of the podcast series was that he had lived inside a church situation with some striking similarities to Mars Hill Church under the leadership of Mark Driscoll. In his new book, Cosper narrates his experience as one of the founding pastors of Sojourn, a “ragamuffin” church in Louisville, Kentucky, eventually connected to the Acts 29 movement Driscoll spearheaded.

He recounts heady early days as a leader of worship, and the development of a toxic leadership culture as the church developed into a multi-site congregation. He describes the feeling of always being “one good conversation away from getting things right and making things healthy.” Except it never happened. And then one day in 2015, in the midst of a “re-org,” he looked at the new proposed organization chart, only to find he was not on it.

That wasn’t quite rock bottom. After leaving the leadership of Sojourn, whose lead pastor eventually stepped down due to charges of leadership abuse, Cosper launched a media-focused non-profit to help Christians in the marketplace. After writing what he thought was a commonsense Christian reflection following the release of the Access Hollywood tapes of Donald Trump, he learned that first his lead investor, then others were pulling their money. Following closely on the departure from Sojourn’s leadership, he found himself in a place where none of the familiar touchstones of his faith made sense anymore.

Shortly after all this, Cosper had the opportunity for a “sojourn” in Israel. Visits to different places, and reflection on people like Peter and Elijah who had encounters with God, allowed Cosper to process both what had happened in his life and encounter God afresh for himself, beginning a process of restoration in his life. Each chapter of the book focuses on a particular place and encounter, interwoven with Cosper’s experience at Sojourn Church.

He begins with Mount Tabor, the Mount of Transfiguration and Peter’s desire to just stay there, remembering the halcyon days of Sojourn’s beginnings. He reflects on the heroic encounter of Elijah on Mount Carmel, and the desperate hopes of evangelicals, hoping our heroes are on the side of right and will bring a transformed culture, only to see one after another fail. He visits Mount Hermon, near where Peter confesses Jesus as Messiah and entertains illusions of the Messiah’s conquests and being in the vanguard. He considers Sojourn’s own pretensions to conquest, how they crumbled, and yet how God was quietly at work, as was Jesus, in changing lives.

The Mount of Olives reminds him of Palm Sunday, what seemed a triumphal procession, and how the crowds turned on Jesus. He reflects on the warfare metaphors Mark Driscoll used and how influential these were, and yet how wrong to the kind of king Jesus is. He describes the giant olive trees of Gethsemane, the twisted roots capturing the agony of Jesus, alone while the disciples slept. He considers the dysfunctions of sojourn’s leadership and the times, like the disciples, he was sleeping, and the agony to find himself alone. At Golgotha, he revisits the ways, like Peter that he had lived in denial, and the dissolution of his career and many of his friendships, and the departure of the senior pastor and the last time they spoke. At Sinai, he recalls the whisper of God to Elijah and that, like Elijah, he is not alone. Finally, by Galilee, at Capernaum, he recalls the post-resurrection encounter of Jesus with Peter, the questions that ask of Peter, are you still with me, even after the death of heroic dreams and denials? He’s wary, after all he’s gone through of glib suffering-to-glory narratives, even as he wants to believe.

The end of the book finds him back in Louisville, worshipping at what was once a satellite Sojourn campus, now its own church. He still believes, but with wounds. He describes himself still on the journey, sobered, not taking anything for granted, “still here, making this journey. Through the land of my sojourn.”

I found this book a powerful narrative, both as an inside look at a toxic leadership culture, and an account of coming through painful disillusionment. It’s honest about the losses and betrayals, the denials, and restoration that enables one to go on, not without wounds, but by faith. Because of the vulnerable character of the book, I think it can offer help to others who have faced disillusionment with the church and are tempted to throw in the towel. Cosper’s “I’m still here” makes no false promises but simply walks in the steps of Elijah and Peter, who decide to carry on in faith when dreams and illusions (including self-delusions) have died.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Bookseller at the End of the World

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The Bookseller at the End of the World, Ruth Shaw. Auckland, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 2022.

Summary: The story of two small bookshops and their customers in the southernmost part of New Zealand, and the long journey of the bookseller running from trauma, broken dreams, and adventures until re-united with her first love and her work as a bookseller.

Ruth Shaw and her husband Lance run “two wee bookshops” in the southernmost part of New Zealand, a rural town named Manapouri, a scenic destination of vacationers and eco-tourists. This is both about her experiences of bookselling, and the long journey from a working class upbringing across much of the south Pacific until she married her “first and last love,” and after sharing duties of sailing a charter boat, settled down and started the bookshops, at first one, and then a second nearby for children.

Ruth had a pretty normal upbringing, living in Naseby, until it was shattered by a rape at a school dance that left her pregnant. As was the case then, she went away to stay with relatives in Wellington until she had the child, which she gave up for adoption. She tried the Navy but couldn’t handle the discipline. She returned to Stewart Island to assist her parents in running a hotel. It was there that she met Lance Shaw, fell in love, only to have their engagement broken off because Lance couldn’t agree to raise their children Catholic. From helping to run a hotel, she took off to Wellington, running for the next twenty years of her life from trauma and heartbreak

She had various jobs including cook and housekeeper for a house of priests, then went sailing around the Pacific with another man she met and married. But tragedy stalked with her husband dying in a car accident, leaving her with child, who died from an Rh incompatibility, a consequence of her first pregnancy. Later, she returns to the cemetery where he is buried and snatches the cross to remember him by.

She spends twenty years in a wild assortment of jobs, surviving a tsunami, encountering pirates, having run-ins with the law in several countries, returning home long enough to care for her dying mother, attempting suicide and spending time in a mental facility. There were more marriages, from which she ran. For a time she works with a social agency, drawing on her own life to help others. Then a phone call comes from a familiar voice from twenty years ago, asking if she was still Catholic, a reunion with the son she’d given up for adoption, and the move to Manapouri after selling the charter business and the decision to open the bookshops. Always a reader, she began with her own library as the core of her stock.

Interspersed with her memoir are delightful little vignettes called “Tales From the Bookshops.” She tells of giving as many books as she sells, including one to Hamish the hiker. We learn of a couple with a bizarre practice of reading books, of finding the right book for the man who loved tractors, and of how she handles the sale of family books–heirlooms. We are entertained by the story of Lex, the six year-old, who became her “bookshop assistant,” Cove, the bookshop dog, and many more vignettes from her bookselling life.

Ruth Shaw offers us a memoir combining resilience amid trauma and tragedy, a wonderful love story with a happy ending, and plenty of stories any bibliophile will love and identify with. Shaw exemplifies the wonderful quality of all the great booksellers–the ability to connect the hungry reader with just the right book, even from her small shops. You don’t have to go to the Strand, Shakespeare’s or Powell’s. There are dedicated booksellers, even at the end of the world in southern New Zealand who find ways to bring just the right book together with the hungry reader.

Review: Making the Low Notes

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Making the Low Notes: A Life in Music, Bill Harrison. Saint Louis: Open Books Press, 2023.

Summary: A memoir of an accomplished former bass player, from his beginnings of learning to play an upright bass, learning from and studying with other players, playing with jazz greats, and the physical and financial challenges of making it.

It began in sixth grade music, when there were too many drummers and his teacher pointed him toward the upright double bass. First concerts playing “Yankee Doodle.” Listening to virtuosi and what they could do with the instrument. Lessons with Mr. Bruno. A first gig playing at a bowling alley. Music camps. College decisions. From New York to Northwestern. Deciding to focus on the instrument. More jazz gigs and the Chicago music scene. Better instruments. Traveling. Teaching younger players and playing with jazz greats. Performing at Montreux and playing in pit orchestras for stage shows.

All of this is part of Bill Harrison’s memoir of life as a musician, a bass player (especially the upright, but also various electric basses–ya gotta be versatile). He chronicles the peculiar life of a bass player–on stage in the background, laying down the musical foundation along with the percussion for the other players, on the edge of most people’s awareness, except for the other players. It’s a role that fits this somewhat introverted man who later realizes that he has struggled with depression for much of his life.

He describes the magical moments of playing in a jazz quartet where each anticipates the other and the highlights of meeting truly great players like Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach, who praised his playing. He shares the joy of finding a beautiful old instrument with a wonderful sound that just fits him. Harrison also helps us understand that along with playing music one loves at a high level comes the wedding and corporate gigs, theatre jobs that offer a steady income, and giving a lot of lessons.

We also hear of the other side of this life. The challenge of scraping together a living. Fallings out with other musicians. The physical challenges that eventually ended his career. The knife edge between brilliance and disaster in playing in a pit orchestra. The challenge of making a career change in one’s fifties.

I learned a lot about an instrument for which I had little appreciation. His narrative of listening to Miles Davis’ Kinda Blue helped me listen to it with fresh awareness of the extraordinary bass playing that is one part of this great album. His account rang true with the stories of musician friends I’ve known–both the moments that make it all worth it and the challenges of making a living for all but the most elite players. His memoir reminds us that it is not the instrument alone that makes the music but the human being who plays it. More than most, Harrison underscores the physicality of this work as well as the matters of the psyche.

Harrison gives us the romance without romanticizing the life of a musician. It’s a good book for an aspiring musician, offering an honest look at what they are signing up for. And it is a good book for anyone who loves jazz, or music more generally and wants to know more of what goes into playing that huge thing that looks like a giant violin.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program.

Review: Testimony

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Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation, Jon Ward. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: A national journalist who grew up in an influential evangelical movement describes his separation from this movement as he witnessed its embrace of control and power, both within churches, and in increasingly authoritarian politics, at the expense of both truth and character.

Jon Ward is a national correspondent with Yahoo News who has covered the White House as well as several presidential campaigns. He is also the child of parents who came to faith in the Jesus Movement revival of the early 1970’s. That caught my attention. The Jesus Movement was significant in the spiritual journeys of both my wife and myself. And the words “the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation” in the subtitle are deeply troubling to me. I’ve written about the spiritual ideals and vision for society of evangelicals of my generation, and am deeply chagrined with how so much of this has unraveled. We failed our children.

Ward was born in 1977, several years after the wave of the Jesus Movement swept through the country. In its wake, a number of independent churches formed, many charismatic, believing in the baptism and gifts of the Spirit and worship expressing ecstatic emotion. He grew up in one such church in the Maryland suburbs of DC. His church, initially called the Gathering of Believers was pastored by C. J. Mahaney and Larry Tomczak. Ward’s father was also a pastor for a time until he was asked to step down, for reasons later found to be suspect.

He describes the Christian culture of the time, the music, personalities like Keith Green, who tragically died young, going to early pro-life rallies, the first connections of pro-life and Republican politics, a mission trip to South America, doing skits and getting people to pray. He describes the growing sense of being in a culture war, books like This Present Darkness that framed things as spiritual warfare. He describes the distrust of the intellect, learning how to feel and what to believe, but not having any understanding of why or any sense of engaging with the culture. It was an enclosed, insular life in church and Christian schools and Christian music. The church became Covenant Life Church. Larry Tomczak was forced out and moved the Cleveland. He describes people being slain in the Spirit and his own experience of being prayed for, feeling nothing, except C.J. Mahaney gently pushing him backward. He went along and fell–and began to wonder. Yet he eagerly wanted to please God and his leaders and around 1998 went on a trip with Mahaney to one of Louie Giglio’s Passion Conferences, being groomed for leadership, along with Josh Harris.

Then Mahaney took a right turn into the New Calvinism. This was also the time of the purity movement and “accountability” groups. By this time, Ward was a student at the University of Maryland and felt he was suffocating. It was time to get out. Teaching for a couple years, he pursued writing, getting a job with the Washington Times. He was a part of Chuck Colson’s Centurions course, and for the first time, was challenged to a faith with intellectual heft. While he left Covenant Life, on its way to becoming Sovereign Grace Ministries, he followed developments in the church of his parents–two streams. One was Mahaney, a thinker, gifted speaker, and increasingly exerting control over the churches within the movement. The other was Lou Engle, a culture warrior, seeing politics and spiritual warfare as conflict, violent if necessary. He describes both the scandals around Mahaney’s use of power, and later, Sovereign Grace’s cover up of sexual abuses, even while sharing the platform with Al Mohler at Together for the Gospel conferences.

By 2013, he is working for Yahoo News as a national correspondent. Because of his background, he covers Republican politics and the deepening alliance between evangelicals focused on abortion and sexuality issues, even as the party turned toward Donald Trump. Meanwhile, he is growing in his awareness of the grievances of Blacks, getting to know the work of Bryan Stephenson and others, and how the racial fault lines of the country were being exploited, giving encouragement to the White Supremacist movements and the tragedy at Charlottesville. He recounts watching people he cared about, even most of his family, become radicalized by this movement. ignoring flaws of character, outright lies, racist rhetoric and more, simply to advance pro-life and pro-American values. He painfully describes his pleas with his father, only grudgingly heard after January 6.

As the book ends, as disheartened as he is by political developments and the failings of the churches in which he grew up, exacerbated by the pandemic, he also describes a deepening Christian life, learning to pursue the way of the cross rather than the way of acclaim or power. He believes this is what the church needs to be about. He decries the attack on truth, and the complicity of those who should believe in truth. He argues, from his experience as a journalism, that we are in desperate need of nuance in a world the reduces things to soundbites. Many of the things we confront are complicated and good solutions are achieved by people who do the hard work of listening, who achieve workable compromises. He believes in the role of evangelicals who have followed neither the C.J. Mahaney’s down theologically precise, narrow roads nor the Lou Engles who frame things as a black and white battle. They are those who forgo dominance for repentance, seek reconciliation rather than race wars with Blacks, and seek to rebuild rather than tear down institutions.

This, for me was a powerful “testimony” in two ways. One was in how it traced the diversion through its weakest elements, of a genuine movement of God through the Jesus Movement. The anti-intellectualism, the framing of the church as a persecuted minority in a spiritual battle created the foundations for the political captivity of evangelicals in the Trump era. While many of us traveled different roads than Jon Ward, we recognize the landscape.

The other is in its call for the remnant who did not bow to these things to Christian faithfulness in this time–to repentance, to the way of the cross, to relational healing and racial justice and reconciliation, and to institutional and intellectual renewal. Only God knows if the tide can be turned–indeed he controls the tides of history. But we cannot sit around and feel sorry for ourselves–there is still work to be done!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Officer Clemmons

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Officer Clemmons, Dr. François S. Clemmons. New York: Catapult, 2020.

Summary: An autobiographical memoir of Dr. François S. Clemmons, from his earliest years in Alabama, his youth in Youngstown, Ohio through his college years when he accepted that he was gay, his relationship with Fred Rogers, and subsequent performing and teaching career.

Recently in connection with my “Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown” series, I wrote about François Clemmons after discovering that he also grew up in Youngstown. I also learned that he had recently published a memoir, and intrigued as I was, I picked up a copy to learn about this man who worked on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for twenty-five years, breaking down racial barriers through his very presence.

My article viewed Clemmons as an outside observer. The memoir gave me a sense of what it was like to be François Clemmons from those early childhood years, the years of awakening to his homosexuality, the extraordinary relationship he had with Fred Rogers, and his later career. He begins with his troubled childhood with a violent father. His Great Grandmama Laura Mae protected him, forcibly removing him when his father kidnapped him at gunpoint, shooting the father in the shoulder! It was his Great Grandmama who led the effort to gather enough money to send a group of men, his mother Inez, and himself to the industrial north, to begin a new life away from his violent father. He also writes of his Granddaddy Saul, from whom he learned to sing.

Youngstown was not any better family-wise. Inez, his mother, took up with Warren, who she adored, but who became an abusive step-father to Clemmons. Singing, especially in the city’s churches became an escape and he rapidly gained status, learning to read music, eventually becoming choir director at his church. Even then, he was beginning to realize that he had feelings for his own sex, “tamping” these down, discouraged by both friends and his church’s, and especially his mother’s, beliefs. He also discovers the racism that would put him on a vocational rather than a college track and excluded him from music venues, except for special Blacks-only nights. His ticket out of Youngstown came in the form of a social worker who paid for music lessons from a well-trained choral director and encouraged his application to Oberlin College. He describes the day a high school principal who was part of the Oberlin Alumni Association called him to his office to share the news that he was going to ask the alumni to provide a scholarship to attend Oberlin, which had a very fine conservatory. That support was crucial because, by then, he was living with friends to escape his step-father’s violent temper.

The next part of the memoir recounts Clemmons musical training under the tutelage of Ellen Repp and his acceptance of his homosexuality. Ironically, an effort of his mother and stepfather to “fix” him by taking him to a prostitute led to his taking refuge with the Beechwoods, whose son was gay and who fully accepted both him and François. They would be his home in Youngstown until his graduation. He became involved in civil rights advocacy, meeting Dr. King and learning about Bayard Rustin, a key organizer who was also a gay man. When he met Nick, he experienced deep fulfillment in a relationship with another man.

The final part of the memoir covers the years in Pittsburgh and the development of his singing career in New York. Much focuses on his extraordinary relationship with Fred Rogers, who he first met during his MFA studies at Carnegie Mellon, while singing in the choir at the church Fred and Joanne attended. From the first lunch he had with Fred, he discovered someone who loved him unconditionally. He describes on particular episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood where Rogers ended as he always did, saying, “You make every day a special day by being you, and I like you just the way you are.” Clemmons felt like Fred was looking at him, and asked him, after the show, “Fred, were you talking to me.” Rogers replied, “Yes I was. I have been talking to you for years. You finally heard me today.” While Rogers personally accepted Clemmons homosexuality, he would not permit Clemmons to be publicly out and remain on the show. That just would not have been possible in the 1960’s. Clemmons describes the tension he struggled with between his homosexuality and his recognition of the work he was able to do on the show to change perceptions of Blacks. He admired Rogers support of civil rights, typified by a time when they were on tour in Cincinnati and a music director refused to let Clemmons rehearse. Rogers asked the man to apologize or they would not work with him.

Rogers supported his singing career, including standing with him, supporting him financially, and mentoring him through further racist treatment with the Metropolitan Opera. Eventually Clemmons retired from the show, going on to research and perform the great spirituals in the Black American music tradition, first with the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, and later, at Middlebury College, where he now makes his home. One of the heartwarming episodes he describes is the opportunity to invite Rogers to Middlebury to receive an honorary degree.

The memoir concludes with a man who seems to be at peace, having finally found the way to forgiving his two fathers, accepting his own sexuality, championing the distinctive music of his people, and reveling in the love of this most unusual figure in television history, Fred Rogers. The memoir helps us to see how hardwon this peace was, given the racism, the opposition from family and society to his sexuality, and the challenges of making it as a Black in the classical and operatic world. It’s a story of both persevering in a gifted calling, and the difference that a few people who did the right thing–a great grandmother, a social worker, a choral director, a principal, a music professor, and finally, Fred Rogers. In the end, through teaching and through this memoir, Clemmons has turned around to give to others the best of what was entrusted to him.

Review: Dusk, Night, Dawn

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Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage, Anne Lamott. New York: Riverhead Books, 2021.

Summary: An exploration of the values that sustain us when we see a world as well as our own bodies falling apart.

Anne Lamott wrote this in the first year of the pandemic amid illness, lockdown, and death, reports on the dire consequences of a rapidly warming planet and a presidential election fraught with conflict. And she writes of being newly married, three days after she signed up for Medicare. The book evidences a consciousness of both bodies and the world falling apart. Internally as well as physically, she seems more aware than ever how messed up we are, both by the complicated histories of our families and our own lousy choices.

A predominant message of this book is “that love is sovereign here, and that the hardest work we do is self-love and forgiveness.” We try to pretend we are better than we are, only to fall flat on our faces, as Lamott describes during the time she struggled with alcoholism, sprawled on a cliff ledge after having blacked out, with a battered toenail and all muddy. If anything as we get older, we have a diminished capacity to keep up the façade.

Along the way, we listen to her as she describes the awakening to the challenge of living with another person with all their foibles, trying to teach Sunday school to a bunch of kids who are more concerned about when is the snack, who think that the passage in Exodus about seeing God’s back is about seeing his butt, and the challenges of a new cat in the house. She explores the strangeness and difficulty of repentance, the growth of forgiveness in us like the growth of a nautilus shell, her alarm at swallowing pills meant for her dog, and enduring a night of people telling the stories, droning on and on.

Somehow, she maintains hope that in the end, all will be well with the climate, and with us. She believes we’ve risen to other occasions and will to this. I think Lamott’s gift is self-deprecating honesty, grown even more acute as she gets older that eventuates in both forgiveness and recognition of the moments of grace. At times one feels that her efforts to share wisdom end up as platitudes like “love is the gas station and the fuel.” Then, on the same page you encounter the staggering insight that as messed up as we are “we are loved out of all sense and proportion.” Perhaps in the end, that is what makes all the difference between hope and despair. Platitudinous or profound, one has the sense that Anne Lamott stumbles day by day toward that love and toward that hope (and she really doesn’t care how it sounds).