Do you read book reviews on any regular basis? I’d like to think I can label this blog entry a “book review,” but I’m afraid that implies something much more intellectual than what I’m cobbling together today. I’m a leetle bit ashamed to say that I’m more familiar with the way movie reviews read than those of books, but to be honest I would also normally prefer to read a fiction novel [or watch a movie] over non-fiction any day. So look with me on my inaugural review as a grand experiment and a step out of my creative comfort zone!

What I really want to do is simply share some quick thoughts on Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Rarely do I read a book that in one paragraph frustrates me to such an extent that I’m scribbling imprecations in the margins and in the next inspires me to more thoughtful service to Christ. Many people won’t have a problem with the way he makes certain statements, but I tend to get caught up fairly easily in language and the way concepts are defined.

With that said, most of my issues with Crouch’s book are more about preference than problem. I didn’t have to dig deep to find deep veins of precious metal stretching the length and width of this cultural endeavor. And that’s what I want to share with you in my own attempt at creativity.

scribbled margins

First, my preference: Every river needs two banks, otherwise you’d have a swamp instead of a flowing body of water. Likewise, every concept needs to be well defined or you run the risk of not being understood. Or, worse, of turning an idea that could lead to life and understanding into something stagnant.

But sometimes definitions can be too restrictive, restrictions that limit instead of give freedom. I think most of what Crouch says is spot on, and once you wrap your brain around his initially heady language and definitions the book is an easy read. He defines culture as the “name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.” Since culture is “what we make of the world,” culture making is “meaning-making.”

Then there are other places were Crouch takes his understanding of culture and extrapolates some concepts from Scripture that I’m not so comfortable with, such as his statement that “the creation of cultural goods is the very essence of our original calling as human beings.” Or that “[the book of] Acts is about culture.” Or that John in Revelation “almost certainly” intended his readers to imagine the streets of gold in his vision of heaven to have been reworked by a cultural process.

Perhaps Crouch is right, and he certainly is entitled to his beliefs. But I’m uncomfortable with such bald declarations of fact about something that’s not so baldly declared in Scripture. Or perhaps I should trust the reader’s discernment more than I’m wont. I’m just afraid statements such as these could limit our understanding of the way God works in the world and through His word instead of building a window into the massive truth and mysteriousness that is God.

bigger vision

But no cultural product created by a human is perfect, and now I’m afraid you won’t believe how inspired I’ve been in reading Culture Making! The “brilliant” far outweighs the “iffy,” so much so that before I sign off on this blog entry I’d like to share a nugget of gold I found just sitting there on the surface. It’s like he actually wanted me to discover it!

In one of the book’s final chapters, Crouch names three gifts “that tempt and challenge” every Christian: Money, sex, and power. He also states that each gift has a certain kind of discipline that will release any potential or harmful hold on us and unleash the gift in all its intended glory. For sex and money the disciplines are fairly straightforward: chastity and fidelity for sex, simplicity and generosity for money.

But what about power? Crouch names the discipline as service, but not service in the way we may normally think: “In our cultural context, service often implies condescension, not in the earlier sense of that word that meant the powerful treating all they met with dignity and respect, but in the sense of maintaining our sense of superiority even while we offer charity to those “less fortunate.”… [It] does not readily carry with it the idea that the very people we might serve are in fact people with their own untapped cultural capacities—people whom we might end up needing as much as they need us.”

One of my favorite quotes in Culture Making—and there are many—is about what that service should look like. “The way to spend cultural power is to open up for others the opportunity to create new cultural goods, adding our resources to theirs to increase their chance of moving the horizons of possibility for some community… When we put our power at their service, we unlock their creative capacity without in any way diminishing our own.”

There’s no way to give proper credit to Crouch’s cultural work in this [relatively] short blog, but those two statements are worth the entire read and are only a few of the gems he shares with us. As I dream about my own next steps in life and ministry, his words about opening up for others “the opportunity to create new culture goods” add flavor and even give depth to my understanding of Christ’s command to love our neighbors like ourselves, as well as Jesus’ words to Peter in John 21 to “Feed my sheep.”

Sometimes I forget that we’re all sheep together, so I’m glad to be reminded that loving the people God loves is not about gifting anyone with my presence but about walking alongside them. And maybe…just maybe…in the process I’ll find my own “horizons of possibility” increased!