Serving Bread

How should Christians engage or relate to culture? Andy Crouch tackles this question in his book, Culture Making. In Part I, he explores the concept of culture, defining the term and giving some helpful insights on how culture thrives and how Christians have related to culture. You can follow the discussion over at the forum.

Lessons from Part I:

1. We have to learn to diagnose culture. Crouch provides a fantastic tool (5 questions) that empowers us to be better thinkers and ‘diagnosers’ of culture. We make far too many assumptions of how the world works and how culture works. These five questions will help us make sense of what culture and it’s implications. The questions are:
   1. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world is?
   2. What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world should be?
   3. What does this cultural artifact make possible?
   4. What does this cultural artifact make impossible?
   5. What new forms of culture are created in response to this artifact?
2. Christians traditionally mis-engage culture. What I mean here is that Christians tend to not know how to engage with various cultural artifacts. He identifies four ways that Christians can engage culture. First, we can condemn the artifact (remember the protests with the release of the Da Vinci Code?) Second, we can critique the culture. Third, we can copy culture (i.e. Christian music industry). Fourth, we can consume culture. Christians may condemn a cultural artifact which only brings more attention to it and might make Christians look idiotic in the process. Or we’ll create a parallel universe (like the Christian music industry) where we think we are engaging the larger culture, but we’re really not.
3. We need to be cultivators and creators of culture. We need to preserve the best of humanity and create (like artists) cultural artifacts that engage the best of humanity.

Crouch writes,

I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so. Why aren’t we known as cultivators–people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators–people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful? (97-98)

In essence, Crouch is calling for Christians to be sort of cultural anthropologists with the mission that we challenge and exhort cuture toward the purposes and intentions of God.