I recently read Culture Making by Andy Crouch, which Eric Swanson already reviewed on this blog. I bumped into Andy at a conference and asked him a bit more about the book:
Andy, what motivated you to write Culture Making?
I became convinced that there was an opportunity to change our language and, by changing our language, change our division of what we’re doing in culture.
The opportunity came from dissatisfaction. I think Christians in America sense that something has gone wrong; something has gone dysfunctional in the way that we relate to the culture around us. We feel hostility coming back toward us from the culture, and we feel alternately ineffective in and threatened by the culture around us. I thought, let’s try to reframe this relationship in a more helpful way between Christians and their culture or really, their cultures -- the cultures that we inhabit as churches.
Where do you think this dysfunction in the way Christians relate to the culture around them is coming from?
The way I put it in the book is that the 20th century really saw Christians adopt a sequence of poor postures toward culture; none of which ultimately works that well; condemning culture, critiquing culture, copying culture, and consuming culture. Those have been the postures that have dominated what American Christianity especially the evangelical variety in the last hundred years. They are not the biblical vision of what human beings in general, and God’s people in particular, are to do.
The biblical vision is a people who cultivate culture, which is to say: They keep whatever is “good” in culture “good,” and they create culture. They actually reflect the image of God as created beings themselves and offer something mirror to the world.
Can you give me some examples of where we have lost the biblical vision of cultivating culture?
Think about our engagement with Hollywood over the past hundred years. The fundamentalists said,
“Don’t go to the movies.” Evangelicals go to the movies, but it’s always about critiquing them. Maybe they count curse words or, if you’re more sophisticated, you ask about the movie's worldview. Now the evangelical’s kids largely don’t do all of that critique; they just go to the movies.
None of these options involve creating movies. Why is it that Christians don’t see it as part of their basic calling to be engaged in creating great films that explore ultimate important questions in a way that is technically and artistically excellent? That’s been a very much of a minority position, and yet that should be our basic position.
Why should Christians, fundamentally, be culture makers?
There’s a strategic reason and there’s a more fundamental biblical reason. The strategic reason is if you believe as any thinking person must that there’s something broken or many things broken about our culture, the only way cultures change, I have become convinced, is when people create new culture. If you are not satisfied with the culture you see around, then merely condemning it, critiquing it, and consuming it – these are going to change it. The only way they’ll change it is by joining the fray and creating something new.
The more fundamental reason goes back to Genesis 1 and 2. Culture making is what human beings were created by God to do. We’re made in the image of a creative god. The essence of human beings is to be a creator, not just a critic or a consumer. Especially in recent decades, we’ve allowed consumer culture to convince us that the most human thing you can is purchase something and enjoy it. But, that’s not the most human thing. The most human thing is to take that risk of creativity and bring something new into the world that wasn’t there before.
Does it encourage you when you see an increasing number of churches that name something to do with creativity as one of their core values?
It does encourage me, for sure. My concern sometimes is if all of that creativity happens still within the orbit of church it’s obviously great for the church, and every church should be trying to foster all kinds of creativity among its people and in its life together, but it’s too easy for that to stay bounded by the walls of the church or the walls of the church property and neglect the fact that most people who are in your church on Sunday morning or whenever they come are spending most of the week outside of your church where their creativity is called for as well.
So it’s great for the church to model creativity, and it has done that at its best throughout history, but it shouldn’t stop there. We should actually be celebrating our people, not just when they’re creative in the service of our church, but when they’re creative in the service of our culture.
What kind of feedback have you gotten on the book? Where do you sense it’s having the greatest impact?
I think that the early adopters of the book, not too surprisingly, are artists -- people who very exclusively think of themselves as creators. That’s their calling. But they often feel very neglected by the church in that calling and they’re desperate for resources. So, a book about culture making comes along and they just immediately know it’s for them.
The group that I most encouraged about who are picking it up is families and people whose primary cultural vocation is at home. I actually think Culture Making is not just about artists or creative types. In the book I talk way more than I myself expected to when I started writing it about how crucial it is for us to think about what kind of culture we’re creating in our own homes; with our children, with our spouse, with our housemates if we’re not married, and in our neighborhoods.
The third group that its been really encouraging how much they picked up on is pastors, who I think want to start fostering this kind of creativity and encouragement, and are willing to take the risk, actually, of celebrating people whose primary creativity is expressed outside of the church, but in ways that really bless the wider world.
Why should someone read this book?
Every author thinks their book is for everyone. Indeed, all of us really do live in culture. So, if you want to understand how you’re shaped by culture and then what you yourself can offer to culture, then this book could be good for you.
The second way, I actually think that the most fun thing about the book is that it shows how the story of culture which we sometimes think is completely separate from the story of the church actually is completely bound up with and connected with the story of the gospel. The story of the gospel is a cultural story. So, we actually end up understanding the gospel better as we understand culture better.
Richard Niebuhr wrote a classic book, Christ and Culture. You don’t really interact with that because you’re probably posing a new model, correct?
Yes, I am proposing a new model. Halfway into the book I do get around to talking about Christ and Culture. The reason that I put it off is I think that Niebuhr’s categories, while it was a good faith effort, have really not been that helpful because the truth is Christ is not just against culture or just for culture. But he also wrote about culture's relationship to Christ, and my focus is more on the church and culture.
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Here's an Amazon link for the book.
My interest in Andy's book was triggered from an experience I had at a Leadership Network event called Exploring Off the Map, which led to a book called Culture Shift that I co-authored for Robert Lewis and Wayne Cordeiro. It's about identifying your church's culture, both where it's now and where it needs to be, and then leading an appropriate transition. Click here for a chapter-long excerpt, and here for more information on the book.
Warren Bird, Ph.D., is Research Director at Leadership Network, and co-author of 19 books on various aspects of church health and innovation.
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