Children of grace

I approached Culture Making with some skepticism. Actually the only reason I read it was because it was recommended to me by someone who knows the author Andy Crouch. My thought was, "Do we really need another book on Christianity and culture? What more could be said that hasn't already." I half expected it was going to be another one of those flavor-of-the-week, must-read books that turn out to be more trendy than lasting. Boy was I wrong! Matter of fact it turned out to be one of those rare books that permanently alter the way I think about almost everything. Hopefully those new ways of thinking will translate into new ways of acting, since thinking about culture (a favorite evangelical preoccupation that I plead guilty to) is no substitute for creating it! Given enough time this book may have the lasting influence of H. Richard Niebuhr's classic work Christ and Culture, which Crouch respectfully critiques. Niebuhr's categories have become ingrained among evangelical Christians and are ripe for reassesment.

What I most appreciated was the gospel-centeredness of Crouch's approach to his vast subject. I don't mean that the gospel is presented in an explicit in-your-face manner, but it's implicitly weaved throughout what feels like a narrative even though this is a work of non-fiction. Incidentally, Crouch has a very enjoyable style--this book was a pleasure to read. Culture Making was certainly not written for a parochial audience. Crouch draws from the work of a wide spectrum of thinkers, and I can imagine readers from a wide variety of beliefs enjoying this book. However, as a believer who embraces the Reformed stream of Christianity I found this to be a deeply congenial way of looking at the world and making something of it a/k/a creating culture.

The book's presentation of sin, grace, and man's limited ability to "change the world" is refreshingly realistic in its criticism of grandiose transformationalist dreams, and refreshingly gracious in seeking to transcend the "culture wars" of recent history. Crouch gets the counterintuitive way grace slowly works to transform human hearts and human cultures. After all, we serve a God who uses what is small and despised in the world's eyes to accomplish his great ends.

During his years as a campus minister at Harvard Crouch witnessed three types of students. First there were the strivers. They were the kids with grim faces and bulging backpacks. Like Reese Witherspoon's character in the film Election they are "up late and up early." The second group were the "legacies". Children of privilege and power who "carried themselves with a serene sense of entitlement." Neither group saw much of a need for God. "The strivers tended to be too busy for faith; the legacies had a hard time seeing the need for it."

There was a third and smaller group though, one that Crouch came to think of as children of grace. These kids felt lucky just to be there, and they hadn't lost the enjoyment of being able to study at an elite institution of learning. They had a lightness of spirit absent from the others. Paradoxically they were the ones that flourished academically and spiritually. The strivers and legacies were children of grace too, but tragically they didn't have eyes to see it. Do we?

The way to genuine cultural creativity starts with the recognition that we woke up this morning in our right mind, with the use and activity of our limbs—and that every other creative capacity we have has likewise arrived as a gift we did not earn and to which we were not entitled. And once we are awake and thankful, our most important cultural contribution will very likely come from doing whatever keeps us precisely in the center of delight and surprise. (p. 252)

So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another's lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors.

And then, together, make something of the world. (p. 263)