Mail me comments, suggestions, warnings, flames, whatever As a teenager Gordon Cosby stood on the street corners of Lynchburg, Virginia, passing out the Gospel of St. John and asking permission to speak with passersby about Jesus Christ, while all the time there grew in him doubts that this was the best way to share his excitement about the faith.
A childhood mentor, Graham Gilmer, filled his imagination with stories of the second coming. When Reverend Gilmer met him on the street he would point one finger upward, lean toward Gordon and say, "Maybe today..." He would conclude their conversations with "See you next week, Gordon ... unless the Lord should come before we meet." This expectation was a part of the Southern church which nurtured its people in doctrine, Scripture, and hymnody. Six weeks of every summer Gordon went to an intensive Bible school where he was given reams of Scripture to memorize, and a gold star when he succeeded in memorizing more than anyone else in the group. Even today from time to time he takes up again this memory work, choosing a chapter from Ephesians, or a passage from the current study of the groups. More often he is memorizing a Psalm. He feels that this is, a way to care for his own life and keep it steeped in the deepest mysteries of the faith.
All through his childhood he went on Sunday mornings to the Rivermont Avenue Baptist Church with his father, who was a confirmed Baptist and a deacon in the church. In the evening he went with his mother to the Presbyterian Church where Mr. Gilmer was the pastor.
He moved easily back and forth between these two congregations, absorbing with extraordinary equanimity the more fundamental, dispensational approach of his mother's church and the more liberal, patient and inclusive strain of his father's. When Ernest Campbell became the minister of the Baptist Church and moved into the manse with his wife and three children, Gordon found in the midst of this family a special home for his heart and mind. Dr. Campbell put the fifteen-year-old in charge of the young "Royal Ambassadors," while Mother Campbell favored his dramatic productions and other imaginative pursuits. His own home had always encouraged his adventuring and now, when the teenage years imposed on him the crucial task of establishing a new relationship with his parents and world, he found himself moving in the warmth and support of the family in the manse. Often a companion and always his admirer was ten-year-old Mary, the younger daughter in the Campbell family.
When Gordon was fifteen he and an older brother stumbled on a one-room church in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about four miles from their home. When they discovered that it belonged to a black congregation that had no minister, they offered their services, and were later invited to preach. Gordon gave the trial sermon that first Sunday. When the service was over they were both asked to return.
They preached in that church every Sunday for the next two years, during which time the membership swelled to forty. They were followed in their pastorate by two younger brothers. A first congregation must surely have a larger responsibility than is usually acknowledged for the response to, and care of a young minister. This little mountain church encouraged the gifts of their youthful pastors. They punctuated Gordon's sermons with their amens and in one way or another let him know that they were hearing what he said. One old man who sat at the end of the second row on the right interrupted each sermon at least once to shout, "Say it again, Brother. Say it again!" In the young preacher grew up a confidence that was never to leave him, a confidence in the power of the Word, and in himself as a proclaimer of that Word.
After high school he went to work in his father's savings and loan company to be groomed for a place in the business. All of his free time was spent in the activities of the church or at the manse. Around the Campbell's kitchen table or in the living room where young friends gathered, the talk more often than not turned to the church. These were the hours that excited Gordon and helped him to decide that his father's business was not for him-that he was to be a minister. Something broke within him, so that later he was to describe call as "a sense of being dealt with by that which is ultimate, of knowing that one was born to this, that one has found one's place in the scheme of things-in salvation history."
Then he simply announced to his family that he was going to the seminary. "I did not go the usual route," he says. "If I had written ahead I don't think that they would have accepted me. I didn't have any credentials." Two years after he began his seminary training at Southem Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, he began his college work at Hampden-Sydney College, not far from Lynchburg. He was never able to put his roots down very deeply in either the seminary or the academic community. During this period he had become the minister of a church in a nearby railroad town, and being the minister to these people was always more absorbing to him. These were also the years that he courted Mary Campbell who had grown up at last and was enrolled in Randolph-Macon College. Despite these diverse activities, in 1942, four and one-half years later, he was graduated magna cum laude from the college and in the same year completed his seminary training and was ordained to the ministry. This was also the year that he and Mary were married.
Mary, beautiful and gracious, had a passion for the church that was like his own. She complemented his shy seriousness, and added to every church occasion the festive note, which was in part her reaction to paper plate suppers in church basements. One man said of The Potter's House whose decor she had helped to select, "It's the only place I know where the atmosphere takes care of you." This is true of all the rooms where she has been. Flowers stand poised in a special way, candles are always lighted and the music playing. One feels received by the room itself.
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