Crouch, Culture-Making

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Andy Crouch, Culture-Making: Recovering our Creative Calling. InterVarsity Press, 2008.

Referenced in: Missional Lifestyle, Discipleship, Spirituality – Spirituality and Life Calling

LifeandLeadership.com Summary

In the introduction, Crouch states his purpose is to “offer us a new vocabulary, a new story and a new set of questions.” In terms of vocabulary, Crouch says the ways we think about culture do not serve us well:

We talk about “the culture” even though culture is always cultures, plural: full of diversity, variety and history. We talk about culture as if it were primarily a set of ideas when it is primarily a set of tangible goods. We talk about “engaging,” “impacting” and “transforming the culture” when in fact the people who most carefully study culture tend to stress instead how much we are transformed by it. If we are to be at all responsible agents in the midst of culture, we need to learn new ways of speaking about what we are doing. (10)

By “story,” Crouch means the Christian story. He says:

Until recently, Christians seem to have forgotten how to tell the story of Scripture as a story that is both a genuine disclosure of God’s presence in the world and a deeply cultural artifact that intersects over and over with concrete historical realities. Liberal Christians, enamored with the historical-critical method, have done a fine job of dismantling the claims of Scripture in light of its cultural context, but evangelical Christians have often done a fine job of ignoring the cultural import of Scripture while defending its divine inspiration. (11)

As a corrective, Crouch suggests that

rediscovering the cultural context of the gospel does nothing to prevent it from being good news from above, before and beyond us, and is actually the key to it being fully good news for us. (11)

The “questions” have to do with “calling.”

What is it, exactly, that we are called to do in the world? Are we called to “transform culture” or to “change the world”? If we are to be culture makers, where in the world do we begin? How do we deal with power, that most difficult of all cultural realities, and its inescapably uneven distribution? (11)

What follows is a very engaging manifesto for Christians to “co-create” culture with God and in community with others. Crouch translates many of the concepts of culture-making into understandable terms.

From the Publisher

2009 Christianity Today Book Award winner Named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2008 (religion category)

It is not enough to condemn culture. Nor is it sufficient merely to critique culture or to copy culture. Most of the time, we just consume culture. But the only way to change culture is to create culture.

Andy Crouch unleashes a stirring manifesto calling Christians to be culture makers. For too long, Christians have had an insufficient view of culture and have waged misguided culture wars. But we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators that God designed us to be. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. By making chairs and omelets, languages and laws, we participate in the good work of culture making.

Crouch unpacks the complexities of how culture works and gives us tools for cultivating and creating culture. He navigates the dynamics of cultural change and probes the role and efficacy of our various cultural gestures and postures. Keen biblical exposition demonstrates that creating culture is central to the whole scriptural narrative, the ministry of Jesus and the call to the church. He guards against naive assumptions about changing the world, but points us to hopeful examples from church history and contemporary society of how culture is made and shaped. Ultimately, our culture making is done in partnership with God’s own making and transforming of culture.

A model of his premise, this landmark book is sure to be a rallying cry for a new generation of culturally creative Christians. Discover your calling and join the culture makers.

About the Author

Andy Crouch (M.Div., Boston University School of Theology) is editorial director of the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today International. He served as executive producer for the documentary films Where Faith and Culture Meet and Round Trip. He also sits on the editorial board for Books & Culture and has been a columnist for Christianity Today.

His writing has appeared in several editions of The Best Christian Writing and The Best Spiritual Writing. He was editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly and for ten years served as a campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Harvard University. He is a coauthor of The Church in Emerging Culture and a contributor to the Worship Team Handbook.

A classically trained musician who draws on pop, folk, rock, jazz and gospel, Crouch has also led musical worship for congregations of 5 to 20,000.

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