Mail me comments, suggestions, warnings, flames, whatever Gordon was serving a congregation outside of Washington, D.C., when he enlisted in the army and was sent overseas as chaplain of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. In the winter of 1944 in England and later, on the broken terrain of Belgium, he began to work with concepts of ministry that were to be built upon, deepened, and refined over all the years to come. Like every other regimental chaplain, he found himself responsible for the spiritual life of more than three thousand men scattered over great distances and almost always under threat of immediate death. In many other settings he was to reform and restate the questions he began to ask then: How does one build the church in these circumstances? How can one be the church?
Reflecting on those war years Gordon now sees that his situation then was not very different from that of the minister of any congregation made up of men and women who throughout the week are spread out over large geographical areas in widely divergent places of work, many of which are oppressive structures that rob them of their lives without their knowing. How can one person, or even a team ministry, be pastor and prophet to the members of a congregation with whom there is very little possibility of developing any kind of depth relationship?
Perhaps, in a way that might otherwise not have happened, the battlefields of Holland and Belgium drew into sharp focus for Gordon the questions with which every minister in some way struggles if he takes with any seriousness the building of the church. Knowing as he did that he could not minister in depth to even two hundred men in a stationary situation, Gordon was painfully aware of how impossible it would be to meet the desperate needs of thirteen companies in combat. He moved quickly and decisively to bring into being a little church in each of the companies.
First he identified the man in each company who seemed most spiritually mature and, in effect, ordained him to the ministry as the "sky pilot" for his company. He then began a miniature seminary to train these men for the ministry and to help them identify and name an assistant. Around these pairs of men formed small bands who became responsible for the spiritual life of the others in their companies.
These little churches within the companies became known as the Airborne Christian Church, for their congregations were the men who were to be dropped by glider on the world's battlefields. They were also the forerunners of the early Church of The Saviour fellowship groups which later evolved into mission groups. As often as war allowed, Gordon met with the newly ordained clergy in a training program that included the sharing of their ministries. Here also was the beginning of the design for our own Schools of Christian Living which, in effect, are seminaries for the training of the laity. Before the Airborne Church left the English countryside, it had outgrown its borrowed chapel and moved into a school gymnasium.
Other war experiences began to shape Gordon's ministry. There was the night that seven men were selected from his regiment to infiltrate the enemy lines, make observations, and feel out enemy strength. They were to leave one hour before midnight, stay until almost daybreak, and return if possible. In all likelihood only three, or two, or one would make it back, but such a mission would provide valuable information for the activities of the whole regiment the following day. In the "terribly long and terribly short" hours before eleven, most of the men came to talk with the young chaplain. They brought pictures of the babies that they had never seen and of their wives and mothers. They left with him trinkets and valuables to send home "in case," and always they put into his hands the address of someone. They left scribbled notes. One man came to make his commitment to Jesus. He had put it off long enough. When eleven o'clock came they slipped off into the darkness.
Through the night Gordon waited and prayed and thought about all that might be taking place. As he listened to the sporadic barking of machine gunfire in the distance, he pondered the pictures of the families at home and hoped that God would comfort them when they got the news. He wondered if one or two would get back, and which ones they would be. And what of those who would die? Would the words that he had said to them have any meaning? Would the men be hindered or helped by those words when they stood in the presence of God?
That night he saw in those seven men Everyman and Everywoman. To none of us is given to know the time or the day, but the fact is ... "Maybe today." What does it mean for the church to be God's waiting people? Can our waiting be meaningful to others if we are not obedient while we wait? What does it mean to be "radically obedient?"-'radically committed?" What must our life style be?
It was almost dawn when a lone figure came through the morning mist. Gordon thanked God. And then came another, and yet another-until all seven were back. Such a reunion he had never seen. Their words tumbled over each other, "This is what happened to me." "Remember the first heavy exchange ... ? " "How did you get by that sentry?" "This is the way it was Seven dead men were alive-together again. There were new possibilities-things could be and happen once more.
That night became for him a parable of the church when she authentically gathers-"A group of people who have known that they were bound over to the power of death stumble on a treasure and that treasure is Christ. Miracle of miracles, doors that were closed open, gates of bronze are broken down. The words spill out as they try to tell one another what happened and how it happened, and of a Presence that was there."
All through the war the storytelling went on-more often when the men broke open C-rations and sat around eating and talking. Under the circumstances the usual defenses were gone, and quickly their conversations moved to a deeper sharing of themselves. When men are involved intensively in a common danger and do not know whether they will be around the next night, let alone the next week, they move with directness to satisfy the basic human need to be heard and to be known. Even gruff and untutored men listened without judgment and treated with tenderness each other's stories. Deep bonds of friendship were forged.
"We were drawing easily," said Gordon, "on the tremendous capacity for intimacy that is in each of us. I think this is why men sometimes romanticize war. We had that sense of community that we all yearn for and which many of these men had never known before and would never know again." It is not strange that Gordon Cosby has become the minister of a church whose unwritten covenant is that we will be enablers of each other in the telling of our stories.
In retrospect one finds other wartime experiences shaping Gordon's ministry. As he shared his understanding of Scripture with men from different expressions of the church and they shared with him out of varied experiences, their excitement about faith grew, and they knew once more an unexpected communion with one another. In those incredible moments when bread was broken and Christ stood in their midst, Gordon committed himself to becoming the minister of an unknown church that would be ecumenical in its spirit, in dialogue with all the churches-indeed, with all persons. He began to write home to Mary about the church that would later write into its member's commitment the words, "I will seek to be loving in all relations with individuals, groups, classes, races, and nations."
There was another who shared his dream of the church. While his regiment was still in England, he had become friends with Carl Werner, a large, vital and exuberant man, who was excited about what a community might be that took Christianity seriously. In their youthful enthusiasm it seemed to both of them that such a church would surely be empowered by the Spirit and infuse the whole of life. War would end. Men and women would put aside their arms-not because it was good strategy or something laid on their consciences to do, but because there would no longer be any need for weapons.
Wemer wrote home to the girl to whom he was engaged, describing the church and suggesting that when the war was over they go to Washington and help to get it started. She not only wrote back yes, but said that she had a friend who was a potential donor. "Please send a prospectus." Gordon and Carl began work on it immediately and had the last draft almost completed when the invasion of Normandy began. After the landings were made, the intense fighting gave them no time to meet and plan the church. On the 16th of June, 1944, after days of fighting so fierce that they did not even try to see each other, Gordon picked up the casualty list and Carl Werner's name leapt out from all the others.
He spent that long and anguished day picking up bodies and loading them onto trucks and then unloading them in a designated field. Literally hundreds were piled in that field when he left with the alcoholic jeep driver for a lonely plain several miles away where he was to bury the dearest friend he had-the man who had befriended with him a vision only dimly seen. In the spiritual biography that he wrote years later he told something of that day:
Powerfully disciplined German Panzer troops were a few miles away, covering the Normandy countryside. With a damp New Testamcnt in my hand opened at I Corinthians 15, save for one wizened alcoholic at my side, I was alone with an impossible dream. I knew the power of envy, a strange envy-the envy of my friend who was experiencing that which was denied to me for a while. I knew the power of the resurrection in the midst of unbearable loneliness and death. From that moment I knew that I could go on alone, if necessary. Faithfulness to what I had seen did not depend upon human support. Those agonizing years were to make me singularly unconcerned with "success." Also I felt delivered in large measure from the fear of death. I was to be close to it many times during the next months, but its sting had becn removed. The impact of this quality of experiencing is difficult to describe. It is so vivid and real afterwards it is as hard to disbelieve as before it was hard to believe. There is another realm! To touch it is to live. To become immersed in it is the only worthwhile pursuit, to give it to others, the deepest joy.
As the war went on and the 101st Airborne Division moved into Germany, Gordon's uneasiness about the larger church grew. Always he had felt the discrepancy between what the church proclaimed and what she embodied in her structure and life style. Now he was observing day by day men who had been raised in all the' structures of the church, and yet were no more men of
faith than those raised outside her life. Under the pressures of fatigue and suffering, removed from law, order, family-- the externals that in normal times keep things together for us all-they were confused and unable to detach themselves from the mores of a culture that sanctioned a different morality for war than for peace. It was a lawless morality that was to prevail for months in occupied Germany as though the peace had not been made. Again he was pondering the question of integrity of membership in the Body of Christ. What were the structures of the church that would so nurture men and women in discipleship that Christ would always have first priority in their lives no matter what the circumstances?
For two and a half years he and Mary had written back and forth to each other their dreams for the unnamed church, continuing by mail the conversation begun so long before around a kitchen table. Somewhere in their writing they begin to feel that it would be much easier to fulfill their dream outside the denominational framework. For one thing, their church would have to be interracial and, for another, it would have to be free to experiment with new structures. Few churches of the 1940's allowed for either.
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