Starling Creative Studios was founded by Mike Cosper.

Mike Cosper is a writer, journalist, podcaster, producer, musician, and speaker whose work explores the intersection of faith, culture, politics, technology, and public life.

For more than 25 years, Cosper has worked in digital audio—as a musician, recording engineer, producer, and eventually one of the most distinctive voices in long-form narrative podcasting. He was a founding pastor of Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where he founded Sojourn Music, a collective of musicians and songwriters that released more than a dozen records and helped reshape the sound of contemporary church music. His work at Sojourn also included the 930 Arts Center, an ambitious experiment in bringing together music, visual art, community, and faith in Louisville.

In 2019, Cosper joined Christianity Today, where he developed and produced more than a dozen podcast series. In 2021, he created, wrote, produced, mixed, and hosted The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, the acclaimed long-form narrative series examining the spectacular growth and collapse of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church and the broader questions it raised about power, celebrity, media, and institutional culture. He later helped create The Bulletin, Christianity Today’s flagship news and ideas podcast, serving as a co-host and lead interviewer for more than three years.

His journalism and essays have appeared in Christianity Today, Comment, the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty, The Dispatch, and other publications. His reporting and commentary have ranged from American politics, antisemitism, Israel and Palestine, and the crisis of institutional trust to technology, spiritual formation, leadership, and the changing place of Christianity in American life.

Cosper is the author of six books, including Rhythms of Grace, Recapturing the Wonder, Faith Among the Faithless, Land of My Sojourn, and The Church in Dark Times. His work draws on theology, philosophy, history, and narrative journalism to examine how people and institutions are shaped by the stories they tell, the communities they inhabit, and the technologies they use.

As a speaker, Cosper has addressed audiences in the United States and internationally on storytelling, media, faith, culture, leadership, institutional failure, and the challenges facing Christianity in contemporary life. His appearances have included Acton University, the Faithful Work Conference, the Exiles in Babylon Conference, and Christian Media & Arts Australia, along with churches, universities, leadership gatherings, podcasts, and public forums.

Before turning full-time to writing and media, Cosper spent years as a studio and touring musician, playing guitar, pedal steel, and dobro and working with artists including Sandra McCracken, Bill Mallonee, and Peter Searcy. Across music, journalism, podcasting, and public speaking, the consistent thread in his work is a fascination with ideas—and with finding the human stories that make those ideas matter.