May
24
2008
The Culturally Creative Church
As I mentioned the other day, Andy Crouch’s new book Culture Making comes out this fall. It promises to be a tour de force in the ongoing conversation regarding Christians and culture.
Infuze Magazine is an online journal of Christians and cultural creativity. Their editor Matt Conner interviewed Andy about a year and a half ago. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about culture-making and the church. In the course of this interview Andy speaks about some of the questions pastors need to be encouraging their people to consider as they “make culture” on a daily basis:
Every local church is full of culture makers, whether they realize it or not, because making culture (and cultivating culture–tending and preserving existing cultural artifacts) is what human beings do. So the first thing the pastors and leaders of a local church can do is simply start talking about what their congregation is doing with much of their waking hours: creating and cultivating culture in the workplace, in the home, on the sports field on weekends and in the pub after work, and of course in the church itself.
What are we making with our lives? What excellences are we pursuing? What skills are we developing? What good things are we affirming and tending in the culture around us? What cultural brokenness are we trying to repair in the many different cultural domains we pass through every day? It’s astonishing to me how little such topics come up in the week-to-week routine of sermons and small groups that most churches offer.