Once in a while, the Introduction of a book has me shouting “yes” right from the start. Such is the case with Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. This paragraph in particular stated some things I have been thinking for a long time:
We talk about ‘the culture’ even though culture is always cultures, plural: full of diversity, variety and history. We talk about ‘engaging,’ ‘impacting’ and ‘transforming the culture’ when in fact the people who most carefully study culture tend to stress instead how much we are transformed by it. If we are to be at all responsible agents in the midst of culture, we need to learn new ways of speaking about what we are doing.
Yes!! When I hear or read about “the culture,” it is like nails on a blackboard to me. We don’t inhabit “the culture”; we constitute and are part of many varied cultures, even within the seemingly homogenous world of middle class America. My friend who is a graduate student, another friend who is a contractor, another who is a doctor, and myself as a law professor, all are white (or maybe white, Asian, African-American, and other) middle class guys in suburbia, all worship at similar kinds of churches, but all participate in diverse cultures relating to our different family and professional experiences.
Crouch continues:
The worst thing we could do is follow that familiar advice to ‘pray as if it all depended on God, and work as if it all depended on you.’ Rather, we need to become people who work as if it all depends on God — because it does, and because that is the best possible news. We work for, indeed work in the life and power of, a gracious and infinitely resourceful Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. And we know ourselves well enough that the thought that it might in fact all depend on us would drive us straight to fasting and trembling prayer.
Yes again! I’m looking forward to chewing over this one.