The Good Coward

What is a coward, anyhow? Cravens, dastards, and poltroons, we know at sight. But who are the cowards? And how do we distinguish them from the heroes? How does God tell?

by Robert J. Burdette, The Drums of the 47th, quoted in The Mystery of Courage, by William Ian Miller

The church tends to avoid discussing fear and cowardice. We attach a great deal of shame to feeling fear and choosing cowardice. We attach so much shame, in fact, to feeling these two feelings that people simply do not feel safe admit they feel these feelings, let alone to face them, name them, discuss them, process them, and understand their source and their object, then choose a different path forward.

Instead, we ignore, deny, medicate, narcotize, and feel spiritual and mature while doing it.

Where can we learn about courage and cowardice? Philosophers and theologians wax either esoterically or simplistically about courage, being brave, and ignoring our fear, but few have faced battle and understand the experience of it.

Raw terror

when the gun is at your temple

his eyes are crazy with blood lust

and you are nothing.

The American church rings its hands over why so many people from Gen Z to the Boomers are leaving the church. It’s likely that until the church will face its own fears, its own cowardice, and recognize that “negative” feelings are areas God wants to touch and heal but are also found in His heart, the church won’t recover.

It is this cultural current that says, “Unless I have feelings of peace and joy, I’m not walking with God.”

To the contrary, Jesus, who lived in perfect fellowship with a Holy God, was acquainted with grief. Not just acquainted - the English word does violence to the reality. Jesus knew intimately all of the fear and grief and feelings of inadequacy and the temptation to avoid walking into danger and the lack of control we often feel in our humanity. Yet at the same time, he knew no sin and remained in fellowship with His Father.

As sinners, we can follow his example, but it takes work. We need to recognize when we are cowards. When do we flee relational situations? What dangers do we face on the mission field that terrorize us? What causes us to tremble internally? What is overwhelming to us?

Most of us don’t experience fear and cowardice in life or death situations. Instead, we die a thousand small cowardly deaths in daily life and don’t even recognize we are doing it.

We withdraw, we avoid, we don’t speak up, we go behind someone’s back to “pray for them,” we obsfucate the issue, and we wonder why we aren’t prepared to face hard things or missionaries wilt in adversity.

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

We castrate, and bid the geldings be fruitful.

C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man,

Burdette defines cowards with a defining trait: “They all ran away before the battles when they didn’t have to run.” The examples he points to “They played sick the day before. They fell out of the marching ranks when we began to double quick. They stopped at the fence when the regiment suddenly deployed into line to tie up a shoe that was already so knotted they couldn’t untie it. They got details in the hospitals in St. Louis and Cincinnati and northern cities months before. There were scores of ways of keeping out of battle without actually suffering the charge of cowardice.”

As in the physical world, so in the spiritual. How do Christ-followers engage in cowardice on the mission field? How do Christ-followers refuse to go to the mission field but use a more spiritual reason? Have you ever been pastorally asked this question in a safe discipleship relationship? The sheep are neglected, and remain unshepherded.

The older I get, the more I feel my lack of patience and fury grows at Baptist Protestantism that lays a heavy burden on people to not feel fear or discuss their shame, then expects a level of Christ-likeness that is impossible because an entire area of life remains unaddressed, unprocessed, so little discipleship happens.

Becoming risk literate and risk shrewd are really discipleship for the most extreme circumstances of life, but the church, seminaries, and mission training programs continue to ignore the urgency and critical needs on the field. Mission executives refuse to listen to security professionals pointing the way of stewardship, which includes fear management and preparing our people for danger.

Courage is often not the big decision, the big action, but a thousands acts of courage that go unnoticed, unheralded, except by a God whose eyes roam the earth, looking for the righteous.

So what’s a “good coward?” One who can humbly admit when they are one, and move forward trying again, knowing Jesus has not left him or her, even if the Church has.