Most of us long for that day when all things will be made new. John saw the first heaven and the first earth pass away in Revelation 21, replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. In the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, God says his dwelling will be with us. He will wipe the tears from our eyes, and death and pain will be gone. Those thoughts alone can send a chill down your spine or make your eyes misty.
In Culture Making—a must-read for any and all church leaders (and especially the artists among us)—author Andy Crouch looks forward to that day, and he is intent on illuminating our understanding of it. Crouch’s book is an exhortation to Christians to create and cultivate—to make culture—but many of us, even the artists among us, often think of culture as something that will eventually pass away. In this somewhat dualistic view (spiritual - good; physical - bad), creation and cultivation can be classified as distractions from lasting, spiritual pursuits. On the contrary, in the culmination of Culture Making’s study of creation and cultivation in the biblical narrative, Crouch examines the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the new Jerusalem in Isaiah 60 and finds evidence that challenges some traditional thinking.
In describing his vision, the prophet notes the presence of gold, silver, frankincense, manmade ships, the wealth of the nations, and timber in the Holy City. Yes, cultural goods survive the Apocalypse. Add to that the fact that we’re talking about a city in the first place and we can begin to infer that culture will ultimately be redeemed and purified rather than abolished or replaced. In the book Crouch observes, “The streets of Isaiah’s city ... are teeming with cultural goods—not just from Israel’s culture but from the nations that surrounded her.” Furthermore, Crouch points out God’s explanation that these things exist in the Holy City to “beautify the place of [His] sanctuary” (Is. 60:13).
These ideas demonstrate the depth and origin of the value the author ascribes to culture in the greater context of the human experience, in the world God made. As is plainly stated in Culture Making, “Culture is God’s original plan for humanity—and it is God’s original gift to humanity.” Crouch’s motivation stems from the reality that the Church is often confused about what culture is and why it’s important, as well as that the Church has tended to eschew creating and cultivating in favor of what Culture Making characterizes as condemning, copying, critiquing, or consuming culture. There’s no way I could do justice to the book in this space; you’ll have to read Culture Making for yourself. Instead, here are excerpts from my conversation with Andy Crouch a few hours before he addressed more than 12,000 church leaders at this year’s Catalyst Conference.
COLLIDE: Why did you write Culture Making?
ANDY CROUCH: In a way the two words in the title sum it up. I felt like we, as Christians, especially Evangelical Protestants, had a dysfunctional relationship with our culture. We were thinking about culture in some ways that were not helpful and that were misleading and misshaping our efforts to make a difference in our culture.
And then the second word is “making,” and the essential idea there is that the dysfunction, at its root, has been that we have not been culturally creative. We’ve been critics of culture, we’ve been imitators of culture, condemners of culture, and consumers of culture, but we haven’t been cultivators and creators of culture.
COLLIDE: As you say in the book, none of these approaches to culture—condemning, critiquing, copying and consuming—by themselves will have any affect on changing culture. If that’s the case, why do you think they’ve been popular strategies?
CROUCH: None of them, with the exception of copying, were really adopted with the intention of changing culture. I think that the Fundamentalists who condemned culture were not concerned about the culture at all. They had written it off, so they were concerned about the purity of the Church. I don’t want to be too harsh on them. They were just trying to make sense of their time. But, in retrospect, they had a narrow view of what matters. They thought that souls mattered, culture didn’t.
The critiquing that came out of the Evangelical world is often more about evangelism than attempting to bring cultural change. It’s more about understanding the culture. Francis Schaeffer really introduced this idea: “Let’s go to the movies, let’s go to art museums, let’s go to jazz concerts.” But Schaeffer, first of all, was an evangelist. He wanted to bring people in by being able to relate to them.
Consuming is not undertaking an attempt to change; its motto is, “It’s all good; just shovel it in.”
Now, copying is the interesting exception because this really came out of the Jesus music movement that later became called Contemporary Christian music. The idea was if we take the forms of culture and infuse them with Christian content, then it will be evangelistically effective, and it’ll eventually enter the mainstream. People will be able to hear the music they like, but with words that speak about the gospel.
So, the copying is really the only one where I think that there was a sense of strategy, but it was misplaced because it’s underpinnings were, theologically, too thin. The idea was a song is not a valid Christian song unless Jesus is named, or there’s some reference [to him]. Well, that’s too narrow a view of what music is supposed to be, and it also happens to be music that makes no sense to the people you ostensibly want to reach. It was built on a shaky, thin theology that then generated thin music.
COLLIDE: In talking about copying in Culture Making, you mention a couple of examples of copying for liturgical use—the Wesleys with popular tunes, church architecture, etc.—and how those have been important things in the life of the Church. How do we discern copying for copying’s sake as opposed to redeeming something for liturgical use? That seems like it takes discernment.
CROUCH: It does, and there are probably a couple of different layers to answer that. The basic idea is, of course, that in order to worship God and join the biblical story and the Church’s story, we’re going to have to borrow from cultural forms, so there’s nothing wrong with that.
There are two questions—there’s an outward facing question and an inward facing question. The outward facing question that we have to be careful of is, “Are we borrowing these forms in order to create a safe place for Christians to be that they will never have to leave?” In other words, is that at the surface of what CCM ended up being though no one exactly intended it, which is a culture that’s cut off, often out of fear?
With the book being out, I’m doing a lot of Christian radio interviews and what is most striking to me is how much fear there is of the outside culture on Christian radio. Now, I don’t necessarily think that per se Christian radio is wrong. I wrote a Christian book. It’s not going to be reviewed in The New Yorker; it’s mostly going to be read by Christians. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the question is, “What’s the motive?” Is the motive to write Christian books so we never have to read un-Christian books? Or is it to read Christian books and have Christian music in our churches so that we’re prepared and equipped to be the body of Christ in the world? So, that’s the first question: “What’s the motive?”
Now, there’s the inward facing question. What is the affect that adopting cultural forms has on the life of Christians themselves? So, I have to show you this. (Crouch pulls his laptop out of his bag and shows me a picture of a Christian T-shirt he found online.)
COLLIDE: For the record, this is the Jesus button, “It’s just that easy” T-shirt (a play on Staples’ Easy Button marketing campaign).
CROUCH: Jesus is actually Staples. So, what’s really wrong with that? It’s that we’re taking this cultural form, and we’re thinking that it’s neutral. “Oh, it’s just another slogan.” They have another one that’s a Hershey’s bar, and instead of Hershey’s, it’s “He Saves.” And we’re just slapping Jesus on it. But the fact is it totally, completely distorts the message of what the gospel is, which is not “easy.” First of all, it cost Jesus everything. It’s incredibly disrespectful to speak of the gift of grace as easy. Secondly, even when Jesus talks about things being easy, he talks about his yoke and his burden. And yes, it’s a paradox. His yoke is easy; his burden is light. But it is also a yoke, and it leads us to a cross—not a button.
So, you can’t just think that every cultural form is equally neutral, equally amenable to being imported into the life of the Church and used to explicate our Christian convictions.
COLLIDE: Along those lines, what do you think about video venues and Internet campuses? These are available tools that churches are starting to embrace.
CROUCH: We use this word “tool,” but it’s a slightly misleading word because there’s a difference between a tool and a device. The tool still requires skill, but the device doesn’t. That’s why it’s not quite right to say, “In an era of technology, we just have more tools.” As though people used to have fewer tools, we’re gonna now have more tools. It’s not really quite right. Devices are something new in human history. We never had these before the rise of the technological age.
The problem with bringing these technologies of mass communication into our churches is—I can’t bring myself to be just flatly against all of them because I think that’s usually not the most helpful—we have got to really, really dwell on what kind of human beings this technology forms.
This last statement embodies the Culture Making way of thinking—dwelling on our role in creating and cultivating culture and doing our best to understand what kind of human beings our creating and cultivating will form. As church leaders, the importance of us understanding culture, along with its various manifestations and ramifications, can’t be understated. As Crouch pointed out to me, renowned literary critic Terry Eagleton says culture is among the most complex words in the English language. The fact that Culture Making succeeds in peeling back the complexity of culture and describes the Christian’s role therein makes the book an invaluable resource in, as the book’s subtitle suggests, “recovering our creative calling.”
To find out more about Andy Crouch and Culture Making visit www.culture-making.com.