Getting to Know Cosby

I found this information about Cosby very interesting...

In the Second World War he was to hammer out a concept of leadership that would change the direction of his ministry. As chaplain of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, he saw the church from a new vantage point--outside it. It would never have happened if the circumstances of war had not forcibly placed him there.

For the first time he was an observer of the church in the world; he was in the position of receiving people who presumably had been trained by the church for a ministry to the world--to be light in the midst of darkness.

Yet these men, who had been in all the training units of the church, were no more ready for a deadly mission than the unchurched. What he observed was "Christian" men who could not stand up under pressure, not even moral pressure. "If they just didn't go to pieces morally, you could feel grateful for that kind of survival." What he had thought was character, he began to know was the structure of family, society, law enforcement agencies. When this was taken away life did not hold together because internally it was not held together. ...The demands of wartime were shaping the ministry of Gordon Cosby because they were letting him see himself against the back-drop of eternity.

A few days after the Normandy invasion they were to make the first serious assault into enemy lines. It was to take place at two o'clock in the morning. They were to cross a little river and take a hill. The assignment was dangerous enough for them to realize that half their number would die. Gordon decided that the best thing for him to do was to visit with as many of the men as he could in the moments before the assault. It was a cold, drizzly night, though it was June, and he could not see the faces of the men with whom he talked. Crawling into one of the foxholes, he started, "I'm the Chaplain. Just wanted to talk to you a bit." "I'm glad you're here," returned the soldier. "I wanted to talk to you. I have a premonition that I am going to die tonight--that I will meet God before the night is over, and I don't know Him. I want you to talk to me about Him." And then he added, "Don't give me any stuff about philosophy or theology. I just want you to talk to me about God."

In that moment the young chaplain discovered that he did not know nearly so much about God as he had five minutes before. He did not know what to say. Uneasiness filled him, but within a few seconds he found himself saying, "I would like to talk to you about a verse of Scripture which means a lot to me: ?For God so loved the world . . . ?" He talked to the soldier as simply as he knew about those words of Scripture.

The next morning he checked the casualty list. The man was dead. "I wondered about him," Gordon recalls. "He had been so close to me, and I wondered how those last words had hindered or helped him now that he was in the presence of God. Then it occurred to me that this man was every person. What difference does it make whether it is two hours, or two years, or twenty years. Everyone is going to be in the presence of God one day, and everyone is crying out, ?Speak to me of things which are eternal. Speak to me of God.'"

In moments like these he knew that he would be the minister of a congregation at home with the great words of the faith--God, Christ, Holy Spirit, grace, forgiveness. ...The church he dreamed of would be ecumenical: It would work and pray for the healing of the divisions between all churches. ...The church Gordon envisioned would know that its mission was to take a world for Christ. In this alone there would be unity."