Culture isn’t simply something we experience. It’s something we were created to do. In his book, Culture Making, Andy Crouch explores the very first command God gives humanity: to “rule and subdue the earth” (Genesis 1:28).
But how do we practically do that? How do we effectively change the world?
The truth is that change requires action. “Unless we offer an alternative, the show will go on.”1 Like weeds that overwhelm a neglected garden, the effects of our fallen world will continue to erode at the morals of our culture unless we actively work toward redemption, tilling the soil and planting good seeds. Or as Crouch puts it, “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”2
WE DO NOT Create IN VAIN
Our story begins in the Garden but it doesn’t end there. Revelation 21:2 says, “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” This isn’t a return to The Garden. This is the reign of God’s city, of a redeemed culture.
If The Kingdom of Heaven includes not only humans but the collective culture of redeemed humanity, what will we find behind those pearly gates? Perhaps we will still make beautiful paintings, bake cinnamon rolls, and play baseball in heaven? Perhaps some of the things we have worked so hard to create on this earth will stand the test of time? Perhaps we will keep our knowledge of crocheting and piano playing? Crouch thinks so.
Culture is “what we make of the world”. And what we make of it has eternal implications. As we set out to “change the world” we must “carefully distinguish what belongs to God’s good creation and what is a product of sin.”3
Everything we do, everything we create has intended and unintended consequences. We forge tools to work the fields and those same tools can be used as murder weapons. We give doctors medical degrees and have them pledge to do no harm, and those same doctors use their degrees to abort innocent children in the name of choice. Whether it’s a pick axe, a doctorate degree, or the United States currency, anything we create can be used for or against God’s redemptive glory. The question is… whose glory are we working toward? Sin has a way of warping our efforts into a pursuit of our own prestige and power.
POWER DOESN’T CHANGE THE WORLD
But does power really change the world? I don’t think so. Changing the world isn’t a power struggle like Marxist theology would like us to believe. It isn’t about liberation or oppression. In Scriptures, God uses both the powerful and the powerless. “To mobilize the powerless against the powerful would be revolution; to mobilize the powerful against the powerless would simply confirm the way of the world. But to bring them into partnership is the true sign of God’s paradoxical and graceful intervention into the human story,”4 Crouch writes.
The call to redemption is no longer about positions of power but about the One who has all the power.
Resurrection power is available to everyone who calls on the name of Jesus, to everyone who becomes poor in spirit – not focused on accumulating power but sharing it. When we surrender our power to Christ, we realize it is Christ alone who transforms culture. Not us. It is only God who can change the world. It is only God who wields the power. We are not called to be world changers but culture makers, right here. Right where we are.
BEGIN WHERE YOU ARE
As an expectant mother due with our third child this summer, that’s exactly what I like about this book – the opportunity and the invitation to make something of this world, not on a grand scale but in our small spheres of influence. Culture making begins, not in the stage lights of Hollywood or the chambers of the legislators but in the walls of your home. You may be called to those spaces, but the calling begins today right where you are. Your family can be the very seed you plant that grows into something beautiful. Your children can be arrows being shot into the world, not in an aimless direction but in the direction of redemption. Your cultural impact isn’t out there but right here, in your sphere and scale of influence. That’s how we change the world. As a Christian, our life’s work is not measured by historians or sociologists. It is measured in the Kingdom language of sacrificial love, grace, and redemption.
1 Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL; InterVarsity Press, 2008.), 38
2 Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL; InterVarsity Press, 2008.), 48
3 Michael E. Whittmer, Heaven is a Place on Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004.), 198.
