Hey, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology Nira. All right. I've got Mike Cosper on the show today. Mike is the creator and host of the Uber popular rise and fall of our sale podcast series. It's going to be a 12 part series. I think he's in episode. I want to say eight right now, and it's stirred up a lot of discussions, some controversy as well. And so we talk a lot about that kind of why he created it. What he hopes to get out of it.

When he wants the church to learn from the series, and then we, he responds to a whole bunch of, you know, criticism that he's gotten through the creation of the podcast. So this is super raw, super honest conversation. You're really going to enjoy it.

All right. Here with Mike Cosper, the man of the Christian hour.

What, what, I just, I'm almost done with the most recent episode. I've listened to most. I've listened to them all, but there's been glitches where I use to listen to podcasts at night. So sometimes I'll fall asleep. I'll pick it up the next morning. I gotta go back and finish. But anyway, I've listened to almost all of it. And I, I've really enjoyed it. And then I started googling around and saw that a lot of other people really enjoyed it too.

But man, yeah, it's, it's definitely kicked the horn. It's nest. What, I guess we could start by like what led you to do this? Was this something that was like years in the making? Or do you have, I don't even know if you have like a personal connection with Mars Hill. I know you a lot, obviously, know a lot of people on the inside. But did you know Mark or, yeah, just what led to creating this, this thing.

Yeah, so I helped plan a church in 2000 in Louisville called Sojourn. And I served on the staff there for, for about 15 years. And in 2003 or so, like late, oh, three, early, or four, we joined X 29.

So they've been up and running for quite a few years. Darren Patrick connected with us, kind of through the SPC and recruited us to the network and said, hey, you know, great partnerships for church planting, all of that. We knew who Driscoll was.

I'd first heard Driscoll at a conference back in 2001, a month after 9, 11, this, this kind of wild event where he, you know, it was, it was like early emergent days. And so it's a month after 9, 11 and the coordinators of this conference decided to kind of try and do like a, you know, I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but kind of like a piece love and happiness, like let's come together.

Yeah, with our, with our muscle neighbors and, yeah, and Driscoll was, was having none of it. So he showed up and screamed at everybody for an hour and, and went away. And it was left him left an impression.

What was that? You talked about that in the podcast, right? You have clips from that. That's right. Yeah. When he got in like some, some people are pushing back in a session. Oh, right. Okay. So you were there. That's right. Yeah, I was, I was in the room. And it was kind of a legendary thing. You know, I came to find out kind of a legendary thing for a lot of the guys at Mars Hill.

Because it just was sort of like a delineation moment for them with that relationship with a lot of the kind of emergent crew.

Okay. So, yeah. So we were reformed, you know, had had a lot of sort of commonality. I mean, the, the missional vision of X 29 those early days was really, it was really theologically driven. There was a lot of talk about new begin and, you know, yeah, it was, it was a, it was a very different feel than it was maybe five, six years later.

So we were really drawn to that and we're a part of it until 2010. That was around the time of like the elephant room and all that that stuff started to happen. And so, so as that's going on, we had a clearer vision for, you know, what we wanted to do with church planting and made our exit.

And, but you know, over those years got to know a lot of those folks met Mark a few times. He was always really kind to me, kind of my family. And, but, you know, but also heard the stories, you know, heard the stories from people who worked there about what it was like on the inside.

So how long was it when you started to think about doing doing this podcast series? So then a lot of the making.

Yeah, for sure. You know, I got into podcasting in 2016 as sort of what I felt like was an opportunity to do some storytelling that can serve the church.

So did a variety of things for a number of years, but I think probably pretty early on, maybe 2017, 2018, I started thinking about this story. Wow.

Not seriously, but just kind of in the back of my head like this could be a really interesting, you know, really interesting story to tell as a podcast.

And in part, because in spite of the fact that it got a lot of news coverage, it got a lot of blog coverage, you didn't hear a lot from people who were really on the inside, who were leading the organization, trying to lead it through the crisis.

You know, the story was often told through like leaked documents, leaked letters, you know, PR statements, which, you know, you know, PR statements are right.

It's like everything's kind of kind of fine tuned and in spun. So man, it was just an awesome opportunity when I came to CT and kind of pitched it to the folks here, like I think we could do this.

They gave me a lot of time and a lot of a long leash to get it done.

...