lifeasmission

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

September 10, 2009

This post was supposed to have gone up back in February, not quite sure how it got lost in the fray.  Oh yeah, that’s right – I was busy falling in love

I was able to polish off another book I have been working on yesterday, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch.  Recommended by several others, it was another one that had been on my reading list for a while, but once I started I flew through it.

Taken in the dual senses of creativity and interpretation, Crouch offers an understanding of culture as “what we make of the world.” (23) As any good author on the subject might, Crouch devoted the first section of the book to trying to unpack the huge and loaded term, culture.  From language to lasers and omelets to interstate highways, the author seeks to help readers understand the subtle nuance and the huge impact of cultural goods and practices.

Perhaps because it helped me understand so much of the way God has wired me personally, the import of the book came down to one single phrase…

Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. (64)

I think at heart I am a culture shaper – always thinking about practices and activities people and communities can engage in together which offer the necessary context and space to think differently (perhaps more on this in a future post).

At any rate, this notion leads into the author’s central section on the gospel.  This is a masterful section in which Crouch offers a narrative account of the relationship between God and humanity through the whole Bible highlighting God’s culturally creative nature and our place in that work from the Garden of Eden to the city of New Jerusalem.  There is simply too much goodness to unpack here.  The author rounds out this section with a helpful discussion of Niebuhr’s classic, Christ and Culture.

The final section of the book is on our subsequent “Calling.”  This section was good, but to be honest, I thought Crouch missed a huge opportunity to speak more directly to the implications of “Culture Making” for the local church.  To be sure there are, in this section, the seeds of further thought which the author may have intentionally planted and left unwatered, but I felt let down.

Culture making is intrinsic to the Church’s participation in God’s mission in the world.  With God, we seek not to convert culture, neither to condemn it.  Rather, as those who live in the reality of the Kingdom of God, we create culture that both reflects and engenders the purposes and character of God.  I can’t think of anything more incredible to give my life to.

Posted in: books, culture, kingdom