Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Andy Crouch has presented a true masterwork in Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Culture Making uses the idea of culture as a meta-narrative or
meta-thesis to understanding God’s Story and our calling and purpose in
life.  Culture is traced from the garden through God’s Story and toward
the hoped for New Jersusalem, the city where culture reaches its
climax. Crouch interprets the whole Bible through the lens of culture, presenting a brilliantly constructed thesis that we are created to create within a larger culture.

Crouch, unlike most contemporary Christian theologians and leaders, approaches culture from a welcoming and not oppositional perspective, seeing cultures as a God given institutions that allow humans to live fully within God’s ever-written Story. Culture should be embraced because only through culture and creativity does God’s Story weave itself into our own lives and we leave our own fingerprints on society. Crouch presents an optimistic Christ-centered vision for the possibilities of culture:

"Christ and Culture does not do justice to culture at its best,
which is to say culture in the hands of Christ: the sheer delight and
joy that comes when Jesus takes the most basic stuff of the world,
breaks it, blesses it and offers it back to us, made whole and made
new….Only when culture gives us that kind of joy will it be fully
transformed—and when it is transformed that way, in fulfillment of
the whole sweep of the story from beginning to end, it will indeed be
Christ who deserves the glory, honor and praise." (183) 

Most Christian theologians and leaders are champions of not culture but worldview.  Worldview is a response and not a catalyst—it is by definition diagnostic and detached from culture.  It is static and passive.  It critiques culture.  It sees culture as something static and under a microscope.  Andt Crouch argues that Christians must move beyond worldview critique because culture makers see culture as dynamic, something that needs to be cultivated, made, and changed. He writes,

"The danger of reducing culture to worldview is that we may miss the
most distinctive thing about culture, which is that cultural goods have
a life of their own.  They reshape the world in upredictable ways.  The
interstate highway system was certainly based on a worldview
(assumptions about the way the world is and ought to be), and it did
have many of the effects that its proponents predicted.  But it also
had other effects that were qually if not more significant, effects
that were unpredicted and unpredictable.  The interstate highway system
was not just the result of worldview, it was the source of a new way of
viewing the world." (63-64) 

As participants in culture we are to always be diagnosing culture: ask how artifacts make sense of the world and add to (or take away from) our lives, then go and add more to our’s and others’ lives. Crouch calls us to be creative and to do instead of critique. More importantly, Christians are called into creativity that is not the stereotypical "artist locked in the studio only to resurface eight months later with a piece of art" type of creativity but instead takes a Trinitarian approach to culture and creativity as a work of community: "Christian culture making grows through networks, but it is not a matter of networking.  It is a matter of community—a relatively small group of people whose common life is ordered by love" (248).

In my opinion, this is one of the best books I have read in a very long time and one of the most transformative.  It has caused a huge paradigm shift in how I think and approach the world, something that reminds me of how I was transformed when N.T. Wright opened up the beauty of God’s Story for the "now" to me. Crouch gives us the license to move beyond our opposite to culture and our bastardized forms of Christian copycat-isms and to be real, authentic culture makers in the beauty of Christian community.

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
Andy Crouch
IVP Press
$13.60 (Amazon)