Culture Making

Book Review

Crouch, Andy. Culture Making. Recovering our creative calling. Inter Varsity Press. 2008.
A.C.- editorial director of the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today. Served as campus pastor minister with I.V.C.F. at Harvard.

Comment. Henry.
Andy has presented us with a resource that helps us first of all to understand what culture is and how culture and Christianity are related. Reading this book was a learning experience for me. I realized I was a part of ‘our culture’ but never gave any thought of how I or the church that I am a part of might impact that culture. Andy challenges Christians to ‘make culture’ rather than respond to it in a variety of ways, i.e. resist, attack, critique, etc.

“This book is an attempt to point my fellow Christians toward new and also very old, directions for understanding our calling in culture.” (10) “Culture is not finally about us, but about God.” (13)

“Culture is what we make of the world.” Ken Myers. It is inescapable from what we are. “Multiculturalism begins with the simple observation that the cumulative, creative process of human culture has happened in widely different places, with widely different results, throughout human history.” (41) There are different spheres and scales of culture. The most basic unit of culture is the family. Meaningful, beneficial change never happens suddenly, e.g. revolution, terrorist acts, etc. Cultural problems cannot be solved by technological solutions.

“The only way to change culture is to create more of it.” (67) It will not be changed by condemning it, by critiquing it, by copying it or by consuming it. Creating culture is preceded by cultivation arising out specific disciplines.

The theme of culture is traced through early history of man. I.e. Genesis the first eleven chapters. The choice of the nation Israel is the cultural embodiment of dependence on God. It is “creative solution” (126) to the cultural problem that culminated in the ‘Babel Project’. Israel became a showcase to the rest of the world because of its strategic location in the then known world.

“The resurrection shows us the pattern for culture making in the image of God.” (145) Pentecost was an event that had a significant cultural impact on people of different lands and languages (cultures). The ‘New Jerusalem’ is the culminating of cultures. “Culture is God’s original plan for humanity- and it is God’s original gift to humanity, both duty and grace.” (175)

The only way we can be world changers is to change that part of the world we are a part of and have influence in. “When God acts in culture, he uses both the powerful and the powerless alongside one another rather than using one against the other.” (209) e.g. the exodus and the resurrection. Stewardship is discussed in terms of cultural power. “All culture making is local.” (239) The numbers (grouping) 3, 12, 120, are given prominence in terms of developing and maintaining community.