Immigrants and missionaries

In Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling author Andy Crouch demolishes the notion of a monolithic something called The Culture. As in "taking back The Culture" or "protecting our families from The Culture." And he manages to do it by the first two chapters, which is as far as I've gotten in this fascinating and engaging book. For one thing, culture is impossibly huge to speak of in such grandiose or absolute terms, and for another, culture is always plural. It's more fruitful to think and speak of culture(s) as circles of varying size and scale that constantly overlap and influence each other. Crouch supplies perceptive examples to illustrate this, including many "Aha!" moments, as when he speculates how the culture of an office building might overlap and influence that of a church. "Workers in the high-rise office building may prefer their church culture to be like their office's—pleasantly anonymous, professionally cleaned and well supplied with parking." (p. 44) Or how the culture of our families sets the horizons of the possible and impossible. I had to read this to Shannon since it describes to a t one of the differences between our respective families. "In one family's culture it is 'impossible' for people who love each other to argue with one another; in another family's culture it is 'impossible' for people who love each other not to argue with one another." (p. 46)

Crouch borrows from Ken Myers the notion that culture is fundamentally our attempt to make sense of the world and to make something of the world. This endeavor begins for each one of us at birth, something I've been witnessing with awe in our 2-month old. What a staggering experience it must be to wake up every morning in a world where everything is fresh and new! Culture is also a product of the choices we make, or someone else made for us. My "cultural world" -- city, neighborhood, job, church, hobbies, etc. -- was profoundly shaped by the surprising choice my father made when I was six years old to move his family from rural Indiana to South Florida. More and more this is the experience of us all as America (and the world) becomes more mobile and diverse, and of course, one can't speak of culture without tackling its ethnic component, which Crouch does to close chapter 2.

The diversity of a country like America is sustained by countless choices about which cultural world we will inhabit, where we will settle down to our world-making project. My choice to drive to the Gryphon Café [the coffee shop in Wayne, PA where Crouch wrote much of the book], to make something of (and make something within) the horizons it generates, reinforces certain cultures—the culture of the independently owned coffee shop, the culture of bourgeois bohemia, the culture of the automobile—and leaves other cultural spheres and scales untouched and untended. When my African American neighbor passes by the Italian American-owned barbershop in our town on his way to a black-owned barbershop six miles away, he is not just prudently calculating that the culture of Italian American barbering has no idea what to make of what the prophet Daniel called "hair like pure wool"—he is also reinforcing his link to a culture that could otherwise become distant and irrelevant.

So finding our place in the world as culture makers requires us to pay attention to culture's many dimensions. We will make something of the world in a particular ethnic tradition, in particular spheres, at particular scales. There is no such thing as "the Culture," and any attempt to talk about "the Culture," especially in terms of "transforming the Culture," is misled and misleading. Real culture making, not to mention cultural transformation, begins with a decision about which cultural world—or, better, worlds—we will attempt to make something of.

Some people choose a set of cultural ripples that was not originally their own. When they do so in pursuit of economic or political opportunities, we've traditionally called them "immigrants"; when they do so in pursuit of evangelistic or religious opportunities, we've called them "missionaries." But as the wheels within wheels overlap more and more in a mobile world, most of us have some choice about which cultures we will call our own. We are almost all immigrants now, and more of us than we may realize are missionaries too. (pp. 48-49)

I'm sure I'll be sharing more from Culture Making, on this my little attempt to make sense of the world, called a blog.