My theological blogging comrade Jonathan Brink, author of Discovering the God Imagination: Reconstructing a Whole new Christianity, has developed a very affordable online class around the material of the book.  Here’s Jonathan’s announcement about it…

I’m pleased to announce that we’re finally announcing an online class with BeADisciple.com, a division of Southwestern College.

Title: Exploring a Postmodern Gospel

Dates: January 3 to February 18, 2011

Cost: $69

The class will explore the book over seven weeks and will include online interaction with those who are also reading the book.  If you’ve read the book and want to explore it in dialog in community, this is your chance to do so.  The beauty of the online format is that you can participate at any time during the day or week.

Enrollment in courses at BeADisciple.com is a two-step process. A person must first “register” in order to build an account at BeADisciple.com where he/she may then “login” to enroll and pay in a secure online environment. If someone has registered and now needs to enroll he/she may return to www.BeADisciple.com at anytime to do so. He/she will “login” (upper-right) using the email address and password combination created upon registering. Any problems/questions with enrollment may be directed to Lisa Buffum at beadisciple@sckans.edu.

This seven week class is limited to the first 20 participants, so if you’re interested, I would encourage you to sign up today.  I’m really looking forward to the dialog that will happen over the seven weeks.

The class takes place online using Blackboard’s classroom technology.  If you’ve used it before you’ll know it’s really simple to use.

If you’re into some of the great writing and question asking that Jonathan does on his blog, then I can assure you that the book and class would be well worth your time.

Like many others, I received a free copy of Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide by Mike Breen & Alex Absalom to read and review here on my blog.

I should probably say upfront that I have a ton of 3DM (the training network behind this book) friends.  I love them, their hearts, and their ministries, so as I come to this book, I’m already biased in favor of it.

The easiest thing to say about this book is that it’s practical.  While it’s easy, even fun, to read, it almost can be treated more like a resource manual than a book.  It doesn’t need to be read straight through and it’s easy to reference bits and pieces depending on your interests.

Before diving into all the good stuff I want to say, let me go ahead and get my one major criticism out of the way.  There is a small chapter entitled, “Attractional vs. Missional” in which the authors attempt to argue that we need both.  My opinion, however, is that the argument fails on both theological and analogical fronts.  They use the pre-Reformation phenomenon of Roman model churches (if you build it they will come) and Celtic model churches (more outward focused) to suggest that we need attractional and missional kinds of churches playing off of one another.  The analogical problem here is that what is generally meant today by attractional and missional does not at all correspond to the realities and circumstances in which these models of churches existed.  As for the theological problem, I can probably best articulate that by sharing the last sentences of the chapter and my notes in the margin.

The quote…

We just need to understand what Attractional does well and do it.

We need to understand what Missional does well and do it.

My notes…

Impossible – attractional and missional churches are such because they have divergent understandings of basic Christian doctrines.  What we need is a theologically robust understanding the relationship between the the Missio Dei, the gospel of the Kingdom of God, and the Church.  This will lead us not to the ‘best’ of these two models, but to a cohesive vision of a missional ecclesiology.  This is the great error of ‘AND’ thinking; you never get to core issues because you spend all your time trying to artificially hold incompatible things together.

The saddest part of this is that the underlying genius of the book actually does this work.  It undercuts the errant theology and philosophy driving attractional churches.  I just wish they had been more direct in stating it.

UPDATE: Be sure to check this post Mike Breen offered in response.

OK, on to the far more substantive praise.

The authors fully communicate their heart for the life and ministry of local churches in their various forms.  They offer not just a proposal, but a methodical plan for churches of any size (though it seems pretty obvious that they have in mind mainly new, smaller communities and then more established larger communities in mind) and kind to begin to incorporate missional communities into the life of their larger church community.

Discipleship, leadership and mission are the driving themes of both the book and the entire philosophy of missional communities.  To get the point of the book, you have to understand that from the author’s perspective, the task of the church is discipleship – period – the end.  And they are right.  You also have to embrace the idea that the replication of leaders is imperative to the larger task of discipleship.  If you don’t equip and empower leaders, you can kiss your changes of exponential discipleship bye-bye.  Again, I’m totally with them here.  Finally, mission is the context in which leaders are equipped and disciples are formed.  Amen!  If you can embrace and own these three things, then you’ll love this book and what it offers.

A few final things.  I deeply appreciate that they didn’t skip over the tough (practical) issues like kids, schedules, and finances.  they address these things as only those who’ve lived through the ins and outs of the details could.  They also interspersed quotes and stories from those who have gone through their 3DM training and others who have implemented missional communities (or some derivation thereof) into their larger church context.

Seriously, it was a great book – something that we are finding valuable at Life on the Vine even.  The guys behind 3DM are doing a good work and the people who contributed stories to the book are the ultimate testimony of that.  I highly recommend you pick up a copy or two to read through with a group that’s interested in the whole idea of missional communities – you won’t find a better practical guide for sure.

A few months back I mentioned the release of the book ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and everything in-between). I am one of 50 different authors who offers a brief reflection on what the “good news” might mean for my city (which was Memphis when I originally wrote).  The book has been doing quite well from what I understand and it now boasts an excellent promotional video.

You can still get single copies of the book through Amazon, or order multiple copies through Ecclesia Press.  I hope you’ll consider spreading this video around, maybe with a link to the book.

The video was made by Aaron Nee of the Brother NEE.  Check out this trailer from their feature film, The Last Romantic.

A few weeks ago I kickstarted a review of Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, by Dallas Willard (part 1 here).

After a comment by my friend Josh on that post, I thought I’d hop back in with some further reflections.  Josh asked about Willard’s reflections on knowledge and their connection to virtue, to truth/Truth, and the works of Polyani and MacIntyre.  To my recollection, Willard is not interacting with other contemporary philosophers (at least not directly), but he does speak to the matters of virtue and truth/Truth.  Regarding virtue, Willard says,

We today live in a curious period when almost no one is willing to discuss the question of how one becomes a truly good person.  There is now a widespread tendency in American culture to think that everyone is already good.  This probably arises out of confusion concerning the dignity of the individual or the equality of all people.  It seems to many that all you have to do to be worthy is just to be.  They mistake worth for worthiness; the most unworthy of persons still has worth, value, a certain dignity to be respected.  On the other hand, as we shall discuss later it is now widely thought that there is no objective difference between a good and bad person, or at least that we do not know what that difference is.  So, if that is true, a method for becoming a really good person would be presumptuous and pointless.  (49)

Willard is saying that there is such a thing as objective virtue, but more provocatively, he is saying that we can know it.  Let me trace his argument briefly by noting his comments on Jesus’ answers to the 4 core worldview questions.

1) What is real? Jesus’ answer, God and his Kingdom.

2) Who is well-off, blessed? Jesus’ answer, Anyone who is alive in the Kingdom of God.

3) Who is a really good person? Jesus’ answer, Anyone who is prevaded with love.

4) How do you become a really good person? You place your confidence in Jesus Christ and become his student or apprentice in Kingdom living.

The key to Willard’s line of argumentation here, I believe is found in this passing comment he makes – one that I think he would ave done well to devote an entire chapter (if not a book!) to.

… ‘knowledge’ as the biblical tradition speaks of it is always interactive relationship.

If indeed the sort of knowledge that the Bible is concerned with is characterized by interactive relationship, then it, by nature, has a dimension of subjectivity to it.

The apologetic value of this sort of knowledge therefore is found not in intellectual argumentation, but in inviting people into a relationship with the risen Jesus, manifested (uniquely though not exclusively) in and through the Church as the Body of Christ.

Let me stop there for now and see if anyone wants to engage with what Dallas is doing/saying here.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I recently finished a few books that I think are worth discussing.  I started with a review of Deep Church by Jim Belcher and though I’d try to tackle Willard’s book next.

Reviewing a book by Dallas Willard is a formidable task.  The guy is nothing short of brilliant.  Add to this his personal humility and Christlikeness, and we have no choice but to take his words to heart and call ourselves, not him, into question if we think we disagree or have come to understand him fully.  Such is my stance as I offer my reflections on this excellent book.

The fundamental issue Willard aims to grapple with in, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, is this,

In the Western world, a great historical struggle between what might be called ‘traditional’ knowledge, represented by the church, and modern knowledge, represented by science, has brought us to where many can only think of religion as mere belief or commitment. (23)

From here, Willard goes on to explain how both conservatives and liberals, in their own unique ways, managed to divorce knowledge from their versions of Christian faith and life.  To summarize, on the left, the removal of Christian teachings from the domain of knowledge “was largely a defensive move, designed to insulate Christian faith and practice from any possible negative impact of the results of scientific and historical studies.” (24)  On the right, “knowlege was pushed away as inessential to saving faith, having nothing to do with it.” (25)

What willard is after is a vision of Christian faith that ushers us beyond profession (what we say we believe, even if we’re not committed to it or don’t actually believe it), commitment (what we do regardless of its correspondence to reality), and belief (which doesn’t necessarily correspond to truth or knowledge – “we can believe what is false and often do” (16)), to the realm of Christian knowledge.  Of Christian knowledge Willard says,

We have knowledge of something when we are representing it (thinking about it, speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. (15)

He goes on to say,

Knowledge, but not mere belief or commitment, confers on its possessor an authority or right – even a responsibility – to act, to direct action, to establish and supervise policy, and to teach… Knowledge also confers upon belief and action a stability and communicability that other sources of action do not.  This is because knowledge involves truth: truth secured by experience, method, and evidence that is generally available. (18)

Let me go ahead and stop there for now.  I will jump back into what Willard is after in this book and its relevance for the lives of disciples and the Church in forthcoming posts, but at the outset, does anyone have initial thoughts on Willard’s project or observations at the outset?  Is “Christian knowledge” something you think much about and if so, for what purpose?

Just caught this short video from a favorite author of mine, Andy Couch.  A while back I took the time to review his latest book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.  See what he has to say about the link between idolatry and the questions which define us.

Jim Belcher, the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, and I have much in common.

We both did masters degrees at Fuller Theological Seminary.

We both have a heart for church planting.

I teach a class on the Emerging Church based on the intensive that he references in his book. (35)

We get frustrated when people talk past one another, defaulting to caricatured stereotypes rather than embracing a posture of openness.

And we both value looking for a “third way” to approach dichotomistic thinking.

He is right when he says,

It seems that every time someone criticizes the emerging church, they pick the worst-case scenario or the most extreme statements. (49)

He is also correct in noting,

It seems the emerging church, for rhetorical purposes, uses sweeping generalizations about the traditional church that are unfair. (76)

The larger Body of Christ would indeed be served well by discourse that is deeper, more specific, and marked by a sense of humble openness.  Belcher’s chapters on Deep: Truth, Evangelism, Gospel, Worship, Preaching, Ecclesiology, and Culture, are essentially his attempts  to facilitate just that – a worthwhile enterprise in my opinion.

While Belcher’s book is truly helpful in this regard, I’m not sure he really hits the mark in terms of articulating a true “third way” as a means of engaging these topics.  Very often, his conclusions in these chapters are a combination of a chastened version of the EC position he articulates and an expanded version of the traditional position he articulates (usually w/ reference to Tim Keller and his church!).  I suppose this is a kind of “third way,” maybe even precisely the one Belcher desires, but I’m not certain it’s the most helpful kind of third way for the Church to pursue.

The mistake, I believe, comes in the assumption that one can simply pit the positions of the EC against the positions of the traditional church.  The main problem here is that many in the EC camp are themselves trying to articulate and maneuver a “third way” between the modern categories of conservatism and liberalism, a feature that Belcher seems to either overlook or discount w/o comment.  An indication of this is his quick dismissal of the Anabaptist tradition from which many in the EC draw as one which is able to circumvent many of the dichotomies addressed in this book on account of its fundamentally, Christendom-rejecting, stance.  Belcher never seems to ask, “How might people in the EC camp already be searching for a third way in response to classic approaches to these issues?,” but assumes that their positions are simply reactions against the positions of traditional churches.

Belcher sets himself on this course in stating,

We need to define it [the emerging church] as a movement, particularly its theology.  The best way to do this is to look at what the emerging church movement is against – the things they are protesting and the rasons why they are calling for change. (38)

For the life of me, I can’t grasp why someone would want to define a movement by what they are against (even it it is a protest movement) rather than what they are for.  We certainly regard what the classic reformers were for as far more more important than what they were against!  But more than this, Belcher fails to identify missiology as a core motif for the EC.  For many, if not most, in the global EC movement, it is an attempt to participate with God and God’s mission in the world that is reshaping how they understand the sorts of topics that Belcher raises in his book, not vice versa.

These criticisms notwithstanding, I am glad that Jim wrote this book and don’t doubt for a second that it has an will continue to help many.

**Jim has recently decided to resign from his position as lead pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA.  You can read a letter he wrote to the congregation regarding this transition here and some additional discussion about this sort of trend here.

While Amy was away I had the chance to read some books that has been on my hitlist for a while.

Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional by Jim Belcher

Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Wilard

Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community by Tim Conder and Daniel Rhodes

I plan to offer some thoughts on all three eventually, but I was wondering if there might be some lifeasmission readers out there who have read any of these and were anxious to have some discussion on one in particular.

(Books link to BetterWorldBooks.com, my book supplier of choice).

Almost a year ago to the day, my friend JR Woodward asked me to contribute a post to a series he was doing on his blog.

I was asked to answer the question,

If your local city newspaper asked you to describe the ‘Good News,’ what would you write?

I was living and pastoring in Memphis, TN at the time, a city broken and divided in many ways, so I was more than happy to participate.

A year later, that series has morphed into a book, Viral Hope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and everything in between).

The most exciting thing about the book, to me anyway, is that as I read these essays, I realize that I am privileged to personally know about 1/2 of these men and women who have a deep gospel hope for the place in which they live.  I’m almost as excited that this book marks the debut of Ecclesia Press, a new publishing division of the Ecclesia Network that I think has the potential to be a huge resource to missional church leaders by giving voice to those who are in the missional trenches, seeking to cultivate disciples and communities that join in God’s mission in the world.

Here’s a blog post with links to the 50 authors of the book and their original posts.

If you are looking to pick up 1-4 copies of the book, you’ll need to go to Amazon.  But, if you’d like to pick up 5 or more, be sure to go to the Ecclesia Press site to get discounts based on the quantity of your order.

You can follow ViralHopeBook, EcclesiaPress, and EcclesiaNet on twitter.  Or, if you really wanna get crazy, you can follow me

About a month ago I offered a book review of Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People by Scott Sabin.  Scott is the Executive director of Plant with Purpose.

Plant With Purpose is an international environmental organization that transforms lives in rural areas where poverty is caused by deforestation. For over 25 years, Plant With Purpose has provided lasting solutions to heal the relationship between people and their environment by planting trees, revitalizing farms, and offering loans to create economic opportunity.

Yesterday, I had the chance to actually interview Scott and ask him a few questions about the book.  Besides providing an overview of Plant with Purpose and the book, Tending to Eden, we spend some talking about the devastation in Haiti, one of the places where they serve, the vicious cycle of poverty and environmental degradation, and the relationship between creation care and the gospel.  The whole interview (~ 22 mins.) is worth the selection of the book that Scott reads toward the end.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader and don’t see the audio player, click through to see it.

If you buy the book through the Amazon link on this page, a portion of the proceeds will directly benefit the rural poor.

I was fortunate enough to receive a pre-release copy of Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People by Scott C. Sabin from Judson Press.

Sabin is the Executive Director of Plant with Purpose, a Christian relief and development agency.

Christians have a responsibility to love and care for our environment as part of God’s creation and Sabin gets that for sure, but that’s not the genius of the book.  The real beauty of this book comes in the author’s ability to explain to readers, with remarkable insight and simplicity, the inherent connection between caring for the environment and caring for the poor and oppressed. He does so by providing a relational framework for understanding the issues throughout the book.  Through first-hand stories and lessons learned from years of experience, Sabin unmasks the naivete and ignorance of the brand of evangelicals for whom creation care is auxiliary to (their version of) the gospel.  He suggests – at times more implicitly than explicitly, that all the challenges we face, as well as the solutions to those problems, are relational in nature

Throughout the book, the author tackles issues such as deforestation, sustainable agriculture, sanitation, grassroots enterprise, and climate change.  In each case, his aim is to point out how our engagement with these issues has everything to do with out concern for those who are most globally at-risk.

For Sabin,

…without God, all the development and environmental restoration in the world will not bring transformation.

At the same time, he is able to articulate that transformation is not something other than God-infused labors of development and environmental restoration.

As someone who believes that one of the hallmarks of the missional church is listening to voices from the margins, I was struck by this comment from the author.

The idea that stewardship and conservation are part of a liberal agenda seems ludicrous in much of the developing world.  I remember the shock on the face of our Dominican director when I tried to explain the suspicion with which many U.S. churches regarded the environmental aspects of our work.  It was a horrifying thought to him that American Christians would be less than enthusiastic about caring for the earth.  Many of our brothers and sisters in the developing world are way ahead of us in their understanding of stewardship, and there is much that we can learn from them.

For anyone wishing they could find a book that offers a global view of some of the most pressing environmental challenges without getting lost and confused in technical jargon, this book is an excellent resource. The book even features a discussion guide at the end for each chapter making it an excellent choice for groups interested in studying and talking about these issues together.  Through raising our awareness and offering practical suggestions, Sabin offers readers a hope for the future that is rooted not in our ability to affect change, but in God’s invitation to join him in his mission of the reconciliation of all things.

Amy and I had a great time at the Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne two weekends ago.

The theme of the weekend was,”Deeper Church.”  Essentially what that meant was having discussions about certain topics which surface when we stop thinking about church as a worship service with a host of corresponding programs and begin to embrace church as a way of life in which we are joining God in his mission of reconciliation and the restoration of all things.  Some may want to try and explain how these are really two ways of saying the same thing, but for the vast majority of people who have been involved in this conversation for any length of time, the differences are too real and too important to dismiss with semantic gymnastics.

On Friday night there were maybe 30 people in attendance to discuss Soong-chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity.  This conversation was continued as the topic of the final session on Saturday.  Both conversations were engaging and helpful.  While the book had clear shortcomings and oversights, it served as a springboard for us to ask the question, “Why are missional congregations so white?”  We see this as a problem because implicit in missional theology is the value for listening to voices from the margins of society – something which should be a no-brainer to those of us who regard Scripture (a book authored by those speaking from the margins of society!) as our guiding text.  Those who live on the margins of society have much to teach those of us who don’t and the longer our congregations remain socio-economically and culturally homogeneous, the more the Body of Christ, and by implication, the world to which we testify of an alternative reality, suffers.

In light of that, we had discussions about the practices of deeper churches, what sharing the gospel means and looks like for deeper churches, and whether or not these deeper churches should have paid staff.  This session was led by a 3-person panel: Matt Tebbe one of the pastors of Life on the Vine who is bi-vocational, JR Woodward, who raises all of his support, and Bob Havenor, who was advocating for an up-paid approach to church leadership.

Thanks to Ben Sternke who put the missional commons site together, you can find audio from all of the sessions here.

If you are in the midwest and interested in the missional conversation, I hope you’ll consider joining us next year – details TBD.

Previous posts in this Series:

Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness

In my last post I tried to make a case for the necessity of theological education of missional leaders being rooted in missional community.  With this as a contextual prerequisite, I would further suggest that the ultimate aim of a missionally oriented process of leadership training is the formation of Christlike character.

It is too naive to suggest that Christendom was wholly uncritical of the character of Christian leaders.  It is more accurate to say that there’s an inherent assumption within Christendom that if we can only ensure that our leaders believe all the right things, their character will follow suit.  This has turned out to be a deeply lamentable mistake.

It may be necessary for me to reiterate at this point that I am no anti-intellectual.  You would never find me downplaying the importance of continuing study, exposure to new perspectives and ideas, or deep, thoughtful reflection.  Instead, I would suggest that a missional vision of theological education will only value intellectual dimensions of training inasmuch as they contribute to the formation of Christlike character in missional leaders.  Therefore, we might expect a missional vision of theological education to…

1) Train leaders how to think as opposed to telling them what to think.   This is only possible when we humbly buy into the reality that our systems of truth are all fallible and trust that encouraging leaders to follow Jesus is preferable to warning them of the dangers of venturing outside of a particular theological grid.  Thus, through books, articles, media, speakers, discussions, conferences, etc., we may freely (and wisely!) expose leaders to various biblical/theological traditions and perspectives.  Where the rubber meets the (missional) road, so to speak, is in the questions we encourage students to ask of what they are being exposed to.  I won’t go into them here,* but I submit that a missional vision of what it means to be the Body of Christ inclines us to ask different questions of all that we learn than that of Christendom.**

2) Conjoin all intellectual study with missional practice. Only given the assumptions of Christendom could we have divorced religious study from community based missional practice and witness.  A missional vision of the church and theological education is characteristically and relentlessly incarnational.  Missional theology is nothing if not that which we come to know about God as we participate in God’s mission in the world through the Body of Christ.  In this light, I would suggest that each and every aspect of intellectual study find its place within a structure of missional practice which includes both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines.

3) Develop a community based assessment of a leaders process of character development.  When character formation is the central issue in the equipping of missional leaders, time frames are perfunctory.  It’s not one’s ability to make it through a process that qualifies them as a leader, but the manner in which they participate and their holistic development from start to finish.  It takes a community to discern these things.  As valuable as having the commitment and support of a community is to a leader in training, their willingness to speak the truth in love regarding their development is every bit as essential.  Incorporating various means of mentorship and scheduling regular checkpoints between leaders and communities are key components of a missional vision of theological education.

What we know and what we can do as leaders isn’t just meaningless w/o Christlike character, it’s actually negative, destroying the very nature of what it means to follow Jesus and participate in God’s mission in the world.  As Jesus was only worth following inasmuch as he said and did as God said and did, so too are his disciples w/o power and authority if they are not leading out of this sort of Christlike character.

This is all relates to the subject of my next post, the shaping of convictions.  Hope to have some helpful dialogue before then though, so let’s have at it!

*You can find a very helpful article on this subject here.
**In proposing this I readily (and happily) admit that we will always be coming from a particular (hermeneutical) vantage point.  I will explore this further in a future post, but the notion of some completely objective posture in the formation of leaders is neither possible nor desirable.

Every now and then I do a little shoutout for Better World Books.

I love books, and I get excited whenever someone recommends a book they think I’d be interested in.  But I have to be honest, every time I see a book referenced with a link to Amazon, Google, or some other corporate giant that isn’t doing anything unique and creative for the good of others, I get a little sad.  So here’s my pitch for you to make Better World Books your Go-To place for shopping, referencing, selling, and checking out books.

They’re into recycling.

They buy books back from you.

They work for global literacy.

They are committed to social awareness and sustainability.

They never charge you shipping!

—————————————-

You can subscribe to their blog.

Follow them on twitter.

Connect on Facebook.

Check out their stuff on YouTube.

Grab a gift certificate for someone.

And if you get really inspired, you can get me something off my wishlist

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.