My interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
Trevin Wax: You warn your readers to “beware of world changers – they have not yet learned the true meaning of sin.” How does your view of sin chasten your expectations to “change the culture?”
Andy Crouch: Given my record of “transforming Andy,” I am very wary of grand talk about “transforming the culture.” Whenever I hear overheated rhetoric calling Christians to cultural transformation, I want to ask them: How is your project of personal transformation going? I don’t mean that in a snide or sarcastic way. When I consider my own growth in Christlikeness (especially if I consider what my wife would say about it!), I can only conclude that whatever halting progress I have made in becoming more Christlike is entirely attributable to God’s grace, not to any particularly impressive strategies I have pursued. Why should we expect anything different for the culture?
Whatever good may happen in our cultures, especially at the largest scales, is assuredly out of the grasp of any single human being or even any large and motivated group of human beings.
That does not mean, of course, that we stop seeking to cultivate and create good things in the world. It just means that the ultimate change or transformation that may come from our efforts is truly not our responsibility.
If we think that we have somehow gotten our hands on the levers of power and we are now set to “change the world,” we have not even begun to come to grips with how fragile our own capacities are to ensure that what we create does more harm than good.
Trevin Wax: What is the significance of Jesus’ resurrection for those who would seek to be culture-makers?
Andy Crouch: The resurrection of Jesus was and is the most culturally significant event in history. It has changed more than anything else before or since. I think that is not just a religious statement but an empirically verifiable one. If you don’t believe in the resurrection, substitute “whatever the heck happened just after the Passover in CE 33,” because *something* happened that year that changed the world—and that’s not a phrase I use lightly.
Having said that, there are some remarkable things about the resurrection that challenge many of our tacit assumptions. Its cultural effects were the very opposite of “impact.”
On Easter Monday, nothing had measurably changed in the surrounding culture, at all, in any way.
One hundred years later, reports of an obscure sect begin to show up in the memos of minor Roman functionaries, but that’s about it.
And yet by 350 perhaps half the Roman Empire are Christians. That is not “impact.” That’s what Jesus described as a mustard seed—starting off all but invisible, yet eventually growing into a tree where the birds can nest. (By the way, that would be one unusual mustard plant, but I think that was part of Jesus’ point. Not only does the Kingdom begin so small you would never notice it, it becomes larger and more hospitable than you ever would have imagined.)
Second, the resurrection was a response by God the Father to the passion of the Son. “Passion” means suffering. It is the opposite, in its Latin origins, of “action.” Jesus’ most significant cultural act was to entrust himself to God on the cross. Without that act of radical trust, it’s very likely that his teaching and healing would be of no more cultural significance than any other itinerant preacher’s collected sayings in first-century Judea.
This suggests to me that for all our proper focus on what we cultivate and create in the midst of our cultures, the most important thing, by far, that we will do as Christians in culture is to pursue a life of deeper and deeper faith in and faithfulness to God.
Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, we’ll conclude this interview with Andy Crouch by talking about the criticisms of his book that come from John Seel.
[...] love concise thougt. I’m not very good at it but I love to read it. This is part of an interview with Andy Crouch that I think is [...]
Pingback by One Ambition » Blog Archive » Beware of World Changers — January 8, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
“How is your project of personal transformation going?” I love it.
Reminds me of a pastor friend who was running out of his house to counsel a couple when his wife stopped him and said, “What do you have to offer?”
These interviews have been great, Trevin. Thanks so much for sharing. I look forward to the conclusion.
Comment by demianfarnworth — January 8, 2009 @ 1:18 pm
Being a leader in a movement whose official vision statement has the line “develop world changers” this was an interesting section of Culture Making. I loved the writing about humility and dependence on God–The Only World Changer. If we develop students into leaders who are humbly dependent and available to God to act boldly under Christ’s leadership in the power of the Holy Spirit it is then that we have attained our vision.
Eric Peterson
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Comment by Eric Peterson — January 8, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
“The resurrection of Jesus was and is the most culturally significant event in history.”
Are you sure? What part of culture really changed? What about Eve eating the apple and giving some to Adam? That made a pretty huge impact. Gunpowder and the atomic bomb have had a big impact on the world but culture didn’t really change much there either.
I don’t think culture really cares, sure Christianity has been the State religion in Rome and some other countries from time to time but so has Islam.
BTW – I like the “How is your project of personal transformation going?” I don’t think I’d ever ask anybody that question but it’s good.
God bless,
-jim
ke4juh.wordpress.com
Comment by ke4juh — January 8, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
[...] Trevin Wax of Kingdom People has been interviewing Any Crouch, who is a senior editor at Christianity Today International. I wanted to highlight the question where Andy talks about being wary of “world-changers.” I really like when Andy said, “..whatever halting progress I have made in becoming more Christlike is entirely attributable to God’s grace, not to any particularly impressive strategies I have pursued.” [...]
Pingback by Looking Back — January 10, 2009 @ 5:22 am
[...] Culture Making with Andy Crouch 5: Beware of World-Changers The final edition of Andy Crouch via Trevin Wax. [...]
Pingback by Culture Making with Andy Crouch 5: Beware of World-Changers « SoCal Theologica: Musings from the West Coast — January 14, 2009 @ 11:01 am