a drop of water

Andy Crouch in his book, Culture Making, discusses a relational model where creativity creates.  Many successful companies and other sources of things created are led by a group of three, that is to say a small small, tight knit group of like minded creators, working together for a common goal.  Often I try to create things on my own, but that only goes so far.  When I involve too many people, the vision gets construed and pulled in so many directions, theres nothing left after everyones had their say.  Crouch goes on to say beyond that intimate group where creativity creates, are two, farther removed layers of input.  A group of 12 and a group of 120, similar to a board of directors and a group of team managers if this model is to be liked to a business model.  The group of 12 has more input and authority than the group of 120, but less than the group of 3, yet each tier plays an important role and contributes towards the end result.

“The essential insight of 3 : 12 : 120 is that every cultural innovation, no matter how far-reaching its consequences, is based on personal relationships and personal commitment.  Culture making is hard.  It simply doesn’t happen without the investment of absolutely and relatively small groups of people.  In culture making, size matters–in reverse.  Only a small group can sustain the attention, energy and perseverance to create something that genuinely moves the horizons of possibility–because to create that good requires an ability to suspend, at least for a time, the very horizons within which everyone else is operating.  Such “suspension of impossibility” is tiring and taxing.  The only thing strong enough to sustain it is a community of people.  To create a new cultural good, a small group is essential.”  p. 243

Prayerfully I will find that small group of people that I can make culture with and together we can cross the obstacles that stand in the way of personal relationships and personal commitment that sustains the energy and perseverance required to create something that “genuinely moves the horizons of possibility.”  I want to find significance in what I do with my friends.  When I was in grade school, I always had a dream of starting a company with my friends.  Each of us had different skills and talents and it made sense to bring our relationships into the sphere of work for efficiency and productivity.  There is something refreshingly redeeming about Crouch’s advocacy of “measuring our significane not by our access to power, people and institutions, but by how faithful we remain [in our small groups], to the cultural goods we seek to cultivate and create!”

I’m nearing the end of Culture Making (book, website), by Andy Crouch and ideas keep continue to build and inspire.  I love how a lot of ideas presented are redemptive and life giving.  For example, Crouch talks about the three human desires, namely sex, money and power.  He notes that the first two are redeemed by chastity and fidelity, and simplicity and generosity and then goes on in detail about the two redeeming aspects of power: service and stewardship.

On service, he noted that “service often implies condescension [...] in the sense of maintaining our sense of superiority even while we offer charity to those ‘less fortunate.”  But Crouch challenges his readers with a different perspective where those we serve, are “in fact the people with their own untapped cultural capacities–people whom we might end up needing as much as they need us.”  He continues to encourage us that if we “put our power at their service, we unlock their creative capacity without in any way diminishing our own.”  I think that serving someone as if you are the one in need, is dignifying and empowering of those you serve!

On stewardship, Crouch notes that it is different from charity, which is “simply the transfer of assets from rich to poor,” and instead much more like an investment, where the investor “expects  their own resources to grow alongside the success of the enterprises they invest in.”  He concludes it with the statement that “stewards are simply those who invest with resources they know are not their own, in places where they will only be a return on investment if God is indeed at loose and at work in the world.”  I think that the idea of stewardship, especially the idea of investing with the resources we have been given (and are not actually our own, but God’s) is empowering!

(selected quotes taken from pages 229-233)

…there is an unsettling asymmetry between the Princess and the Mother.  I dare say that precisely no readers of this book ever could, in any possible scenario, take Princess Diana’s place–either her royal station, her worldwide celebrity or her magnetic grip on every nearby camera.  Leaving aside the fact that most of us are not subjects of the British Crown, you and I are simply not cut out for the job.  Princess Diana’s singular life was just that, singular.  There will be, in our lifetime an absolutely tiny number of women (or men) who will charm the cameras and manipulate the celebrity press so effectively that they  reach her level of fame.  For the rest of us to chase that kind of popularity and visibility would be both foolish and futile…

…and yet there is nothing–absolutely nothing–stopping us from taking Mother Teresa’s place.  None of the intrinsic barriers to taking up the life of a celebrity princess apply to those who might wanted to take up the life of a servant to the poor.  As I write there are hundreds of people volunteering at the Missionaries of Charity’s home for the dying in Calcutta.  Some have been there for a day or two; others have stayed for years or decades.  They obviously will not necessarily achieve Mother’s worldwide recognition, but they are living, in every material respect, the life she lived.  At the end Mother Teresa was a wizened old woman whose face bore a crease for every year of her life.  With all the plastic surgery money could buy, you or I will never look like Princess Diana in her prime–but for absolutely no cost except a life of love, we could all look like Mother Teresa.

For nearly all of us, becoming a celebrity is completely, categorically impossible.  For all of us, becoming a saint is completely, categorically possible.

pp. 218-219, Culture Making by Andy Crouch

NOTE: Andy Crouch will be speaking at EWC in San Diego on October 21st at UCSD.  RSVP online here.

I have about a hundred pages left to go in the book, but here are some selected quotes from Culture Making, by Andy Crouch that I want to remember.  I like how this book is filled with sentences packed with so much thought, that other books could focus on the ideas that briefly mentioned.  The thoughts are not completely flushed out, but they lend themselves to the readers own imagination, interpretation and thought maturation.

“Poverty is not just a matter of lacking financial resources; it can also simply mean being cut off from cultural power.  To be poor is to be unable to ‘make something of the world.’” p.43

This helped me realize that poverty is not as simple as just being poor.  Its the (real and/or perceived) inability to make a difference in your own life, or in the lives of others.  This is a life bringing idea in the face of the overwhelming task of meeting the poor’s financial need.  I do not have enough money to give to all the poor, but I do have the ability to do my best and help them realize they can make a difference in their own life and in the lives of others.  I’m not down playing the importance of meeting financial needs, just realizing that its one side of the solution.

“Family is culture at its smallest–and its most powerful.” p. 46

Crouch was saying that our family is where creating and cultivating culture begins.  I find myself wanting to change the world from the top down.  But the point is, my family is where I have the most impact.  If I begin cultivating and creating culture in my family, then anything of worth will hopefully trickle out and effect part of the world from the ground up.

“The only way to change culture is to create more of it.” p. 67

“Creativity is the only viable source of change.” p.73

This is a natural progression of the last point.  I find myself wanting to change something by critiquing and condemning it, pointing out where it falls short, where its wrong, and where it fails without providing an alternative.  The problem with that is, if I can not provide a better method or solution to something that I feel is wrong, there is no reason to stop the current method, because despite its short comings, there is no alternative.  Being creative is hard.  It takes patience, time, failure and dependence on God.

“To ‘engage’ the culture became, and is still today, a near-synonym for thinking about the culture.” p. 87

This is Crouch’s observation that when we say we want to “engage” culture, we end up just thinking about culture.  We like theorize and postulate, but we do very little real engaging of culture.

“The most important things in our life are learned by trust, not by deduction from experiment.” p. 120

Especially for people who have a predisposition towards science, experiments and tests are part of how we interact with our world.  We make decisions based on past experiences (our own and others).  We try to minimize risk, calculate all the variables, and deduce the end result before we’ve even started.  But that is not the kind of life that God has called us to.  He has called us to learn about Him by trusting Him in the unknown.  Guess I have some re-evaluating to do in how much I am trusting God with my life.

“Our word spirit has acquired connotations of bodilessness, leaving modern Christians with the impression that the Spirit is some vague and largely psychological phenomenon.  But both the Hebrew word ruach and the Greek word pneuma meant “wind” and “breath” much more than they meant “ghost.”  As Jesus told Nicodemus, the wind is in some ways ineffable and unpredictable–but when the wind blows, branches bend, grass ripples and waves rise.” p. 158

Just an encouraging reminder.

I’ve started reading Andy Crouch‘s new book, Culture Making.  I’m only about 100 pages in, which can be read for free (Chapters 1-2 and Chapters 3-5).  Andy Crouch will be speaking in San Diego at UCSD in October (more info about that event can be found at this link).

Andy describes the idea of gestures and postures in Chapter 5 of his book.

“Our posture is our learned but unconscious default position our natural stance.  It is the position our body assumes when we aren’t paying attention, the basic attitude we carry through life.” p. 90

Crouch defines gestures as the wide variety of occasional action and response towards particular opportunities and challenges.  He connects the two in that

“Over time, certain gestures may become habit–that is, become part of our posture.” p. 90

Four gestures toward culture that Crouch analyzes include, condemning culture (like condemning the Nazism), critiquing culture (like critiquing the fine arts), consuming culture (like enjoying a piece of bread or tea “in there ephemeral goodness”), and copying culture (“like borrowing the form of mainstream culture and infusing them with Christian content” p. 92).

Instead of trying to summarize Crouch’s conclusion myself, let me just quote him once more,

“The problem is not with any of these gestures–condemning, critiquing, consuming, copying.  All of them can be appropriate responses to particular cultural goods.  Indeed each of them may be the only appropriate response to a particular good.  But the problem comes when these gestures become too familiar, become the only way we know how to respond to culture, become etched into our unconscious stance toward the world and become postures.” p. 93

So what is a valid biblical posture from which to engage our world?  Crouch suggests two biblical postures of artist and gardener; creator and cultivator.  This insight is really exciting, refreshing, renewing, and life bringing. Expect more quotes from this book in later posts.