No. 21
The Limits of an Incarnational Model of Mission: Reflections on Colin Gunton’s The One, The Three and the Many
Jonny Woodrow (February 2010)

Here’s the third and final instalment of the review of Andy Crouch’s

In his new book, Culture Making, Andy Crouch shows us how to use our cultural power to enable the powerless through the gospel. Crouch defines power as the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good. We all interact with the world and each other through cultural artefacts (language, technologies and customs). We shape the world and relationships by creating new cultural artefacts. Some people, by virtue of their social and organisational setting have the resources and connections to successfully propose new forms of cultural artefact. In other words some have more cultural power than others.

When God allowed Adam to name the animals he gave him cultural power to modify creation. Cultural power in itself is not a bad thing. It is a gift. Crouch shows that in God’s plan to redeem the world, he uses the culturally powerful in service of the culturally poor. Moses had tremendous cultural power. He had grown up in the palace of Pharaoh. He had connections that the enslaved Israelites did not have. God used Moses to free his powerless people to bring them into God’s project of creating a new society in a new land. Moses’ cultural power was used to release the powerless into the cultural power of God’s kingdom.

Jesus laid aside his cultural power, becoming despised and powerless on the cross to remake sinful people in his image for the renewed creation. The way he used his cultural power was to enable others to take part in his kingdom – the greatest project of cultural renewal ever! His death brings reconciliation and his resurrection is the beginnings of the new creation.

We enter into the work of cultural creativity … as participants in a story of new creation that comes just when our own power seems to have been extinguished. Culture making becomes … the astonished and grateful response of people who have been rescued from the worst that culture and nature can do. (227)

Jesus takes the powerless and makes them into ministers of reconciliation in the power of the resurrection. He lends us his cultural power and sends us into the world to make and cultivate in the power of his new creation project.

Cultural power can be used as an alternative saviour. It can become a Jesus-avoidance strategy. We spend it on recreating the world as we want it, for our kind of people, to create a name for ourselves. We attempt to strategise our way to ultimate cultural power over the world and others. The tower of Babel is an example of this drive. Its builders proposed it as a cultural artefact, using their brick-making skills as a way of enrolling the world into the project of conquering heaven.

The culturally powerful often band together, creating enclaves of security and cultural development that exclude the culturally poor. We rarely see asylum seekers invited into middle-class estates to contribute to the cultural life, or to town council meetings to redirect the cultural power of the city toward belonging for all.

How do we use our cultural power in line with Jesus’ new creation story? Crouch warns us that too often the church attempts to grab more cultural power. We attempt to strategize our way to influence in the community as if we were the agents of the new creation rather than Jesus. The church needs to submit its cultural power to Jesus, the true agent of the new creation. Crouch says we need to discipline our use of cultural power through service (stepping back from power grabbing for the good of others) and stewardship (using this gift to enable others).

Examples of using our cultural wealth to enable others include teaching English to asylum seekers or helping with form filling, mentoring young offenders or teenage mums. The call of Crouch’s book is for the church to spend its cultural power enabling others to cultivate and create culture in anticipation of the new creation.

Here’s the second instalment of the review of Andy Crouch’s

Too many churches stand outside culture looking in. Even churches that see themselves as culturally engaged are often merely responding to culture. Andy Crouch argues that we need to cultivate and produce cultural artefacts if we want to change culture.

Other people understand the relationship between culture creation and change. My local residents association campaigned for years to have a piece of scrub land turned into a park. Now we have a community-wide picnic in the park with games each year. We are hoping to use the space for a multicultural festival of food and music, celebrating the ethnic diversity of our community.

Those who show themselves to be proficient culture makers earn a voice in the public square. The leaders of my residents association are consulted on town planning issues. They are invited to take part in further culture creation. On the BBC’s current affairs discussion programme, Question Time, authors and comedians sit on the panel. Why? Because they have shown proficiency in taking up the world and handing it back to us in new cultural forms (literature, comedy, art) that open up new horizons. They stand out as people who understand the world because they can shape it through cultivation and creativity. Crouch’s book challenges the church to recover this calling.

Crouch shows how God’s plan for the redemption of the world includes a cultural agenda from beginning to end. The gospel is the story of a God who, in reconciling all things to himself through the blood of his Son, is putting creation back in order. The Garden of Eden finishes up as a garden city whose architect is God incorporating the wealth of the nations (Revelation 21:24).

In Crouch’s view the new creation will be populated with redeemed cultural artefacts. All culture is potentially God honouring, both Christian and non-Christian, because it echoes God’s nature as a creator and cultivator. So we don’t need to avoid partnering with secular agencies attempting neighbourhood renewal and we don’t need to tack on an evangelistic message to make culture-creation legitimate for Christians.

Our church has tried to take Crouch’s call seriously through food. God’s future is a meal in the new creation. That meal is prefigured in the meals of Jesus and the cultural life of the church in the world. Cooking and meal times are cultural events for celebrating and sustaining life. They bring people together. We have Christians and non-Christians swapping recipes with friends from different nations and teaching each other to cook. On Sundays there is often food provided by Christians and non Christians from different cultural backgrounds. A Pakistani friend teaches people to cook pakoras. A Kurdish friend brings lentil soup.

By celebrating food, the church has opened up a new set of relationships and the potential for further cultural development. It has brought people into contact with God’s gospel agenda for culture and creation. In the context of those relationships we get to share the gospel. Where there is no united community into which to plant churches, we are attempting to create one through simple, everyday, culture creation with gospel intentionality.

This is the first in a short series of posts in which Jonny Woodrow, an NTI tutor, reviews

Discussion about how the gospel is relevant to culture tends to assume that churches stand outside of culture looking in. So says Andy Crouch in his book, Culture Making. This, says Crouch, has left the church with four ways to approach culture; we critique, condemn, copy or consume. Some churches enjoy cultural analysis and want to critique ‘worldviews’. Others want to withdraw from culture, condemning it as ungodly. Others produce their own version of mainstream culture. Finally, some churches throw themselves into secular culture, uncritically consuming it. When one or more of these four stances define our relationship to culture, we have misunderstood the relationship between creation, culture and our calling to be image bearers.

Crouch commends two alternative postures toward culture, derived from a biblical understanding of cultural artefacts and our relationship to them. He calls us back to creativity (making new) and cultivation (managing creation). He illustrates with an omelette.

Making an omelette is a moment when God’s creation (eggs and heat) is taken up and ordered into something useful. The ingredients in omelettes include not only eggs and mushrooms, but technologies (cookers and pans) and social practices (cookery and meal times). An omelette is one way we order the creation through cultivation and creativity. So the humble omelette opens up all sorts of new cultural possibilities. You can have cheese omelettes, Spanish omelettes, bacon omelettes. You can create new combinations – a chocolate omelette perhaps. In one cook book on my shelf thin omelettes make it possible for dieters to have a chicken wrap using eggs instead of a tortilla. Omelettes, like the pizza, allow new forms of creativity. They add new realities to the world: from faster meal times to increased heart disease! Cultural artefacts, like omelettes, hold our world in order in ways that channel relationships and open up new possibilities for interacting with creation.

Culture is all about making the creation usable and meaningful. For Crouch it is essential to our image bearing nature. Humans are made in the image of God who creates and sustains. In a similar way, we are to create and cultivate the world. God gave Adam the task of cultivating a Garden already filled with rich resources for cultural shaping. Crouch says that at the moment when Adam names the animals, God steps back and lets his image bearer add to, and develop, creation. Names, like all cultural artefacts, mediate our relationship to creation, making it meaningful. Creating and cultivating are the two ways in which we shape our world as we produce cultural artefacts.

Culture is the process in which technologies and social practices come together with creation to make a small part of the world usable. Culture can’t be reduced to a ‘worldview’ that we can opt in or out of, or a set of products that we avoid, copy, critique or consume. We continually and unavoidably inhabit a creation shaped by cultural processes that operate through cultural artefacts and activity. Culture is something we all do all of the time. When a mother potty trains her children, she is engaged in cultural activity, bringing order, nurturing and releasing children into new possibilities and new assumptions about the world. Meal times, table manners and cutlery all shape and order our interaction with each other and the creation.

So our proper posture, as Crouch calls it, towards culture should be as cultivators and creators. The gospel calls us back to our image bearing identity as the people of God. The missional church should be on the forefront of creativity and cultivation in our contexts, modelling restored humanity. On the right occasion critique, condemnation, consumption and copying all have their place as gestures within culture, but only in the context of our efforts to cultivate and create. They can’t become our defining posture. Where they have done, we have shown the world a God who is separate from culture through a church that is separate from culture. In so doing we fail to show God’s design for creation, culture and humanity.

No. 20
Jonathan Skipper (January 2009)
Diversity and Translation in Christian Mission: Andrew Walls on Contextualisation
The gospel is not fixed to one cultural form, but is to be translated into every culture, re-orientating each one Godwards… the Christian faith is ‘infinitely translatable’ and its history is a history of diffusion across cultural boundaries and its appropriation by new cultures… Cultural diversity is an implication of the Lordship of Christ… Christ’s Great Commission is to disciple the nations, not to make some disciples in each nation.

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No. 19
James Williams (December 2008)
The sovereignty of God and pastoral care
‘The pastoral role or office in Scripture is not primarily one of counsel, emotional support or friendship. The shepherds of God’s people were the kings and leaders of the community …the kind of care for fellow Christians that naturally comes to mind when we hear the phrase ‘pastoral care’ is actually something that each believer should be eager to offer to others in the body of Christ… The Holy Spirit can and will work a continuous miracle even in my hard heart because not even Satan can resist his will… Whether the decision is big or small, an essential piece of the framework for making it is the sovereignty of God. His kingly sovereignty limits our choices …and his metaphysical sovereignty frees us up to act in confidence…We can encourage one another to take risks …because we know that faithfulness to God’s revealed will is what counts and that God will take care of tomorrow… Alternative understandings of God’s sovereignty give no comfort whatsoever to the afflicted… I know that in the midst of the deepest melancholy, when all motivation has vanished and a cold fear physically grips the chest – or in the midst of the anxiety when the head knows what the heart refuses to rest content in – that ‘doctrines’ and
clear, logical conversations are not much comfort. On the other hand, what helps us to pull through the troughs if not the underlying conviction that God is in control?… One basic problem with doubts over assurance is that they are inward-looking rather than Godward. When things are teased out it is rare that the person struggling with assurance actually believes God to be bad and thus against them; it is something subjective that they lack. Even to come to the point of diagnosing the lack of assurance in oneself is something of an inward process… While our concern for others must make us patient as we try to correct and train for righteousness, a high view of God’s sovereignty frees us from the burden of final persuasion… The kingly sovereignty of God flows through church discipline and is a legitimate part of the very minds and corporate decisions of the leaders who have to excommunicate someone. The metaphysical sovereignty of God cannot in any way be arrogated to the church but instead grounds the confidence of church leaders that God will deal justly with the excommunicant, bringing them to repentance or protecting the church from their malign influence…’
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No. 18
Jonny Woodrow (July 2008)
Being human in modernity and postmodernity

‘Reality might be a virtual reality generated by your brain… Essentially the human has become a subjective observer of a ‘world-out-there’, knowing the world through pictures or representations but not first hand.. Therefore the new ‘modern’ way to be human is to be autonomous, disconnected and sovereignly looking onto the world… The self has become an identikit self. The aspiration of our culture to evolve out of any restrictions that may be placed upon it is clear in the realm of sexuality and gender…Our souls have been replaced by observable subjectivity: attitudes, personality, motivation, memory, perception, emotion, reaction times, social skills and so on.’
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No. 17
Christopher de la Hoyde (May 2008)
Calvin and the spirit of modern capitalism

‘Wherever in Europe Calvinism was to be found, there also was capitalism hot on its heels… in commerce, in trade and in manufacturing, hard work and the acquisition of capital became the highest good and the most worthy way of serving one’s maker … to refuse to take opportunities in this realm was to deny God… Calvin’s… recognition of the realities of contemporary life –interest, injecting capital into emerging industries, the possession of property and the division of labour – were all conducive to the growth of capitalism… Weber’s assertion that it is primarily in one’s engagement with the world in terms of business that one’s good works are performed must be called into question… wealth is no longer an end in itself. Rather, for Calvin, it is a means of service to others… Calvin’s theology provides a radical and extremely balanced approach to wealth to help the 16th Century Christian engage with his culture while retaining a critical distance from it… Calvin’s theology is entirely at odds with modern-day capitalism and the exploitation of poor… Calvin’s work ethic is truly radical and world-changing … as it is applied by the Spirit of God, to bring about a church… able to engage with the world in every sphere yet without ceding to the values of the world.’

No 16
Jonathan Skipper (April 2008)
The Decalogue in Old Testament Missiology

‘Mission is not a sub-theme that only a few key texts address, but the theme of the whole Bible… There is to be single-mindedness in their devotion to God: they are not to worship the gods of the other nations…They are to be ethically distinctive and not follow the detestable practices of the other nations… Throughout the Old Testament these two themes of idolatry and ethics are repeatedly related to mission…the polemic against idolatry and the ethical imperative… are applied in the Old Testament itself in the context of Israel’s mission in the world…the exclusivity of devotion demanded of Israel is to demonstrate both to Israel and to the nations that the Lord is God and there is no other…’

No. 15
Christopher de la Hoyde (March 2008)
Jonathan Edwards and The End for Which God Created the World

‘God’s aim in creation is… to enjoy himself by his creatures enjoying and participating in him… for ever… there is no external scale of virtue or happiness by which the purpose of the universe can be judged… all virtue and happiness are to be found in the creator himself… The goal of our pastoral care as a whole will always be God’s glory through his people delighting in him, and not people’s recovery in itself… Edwards’ God-centred theology offers… hope for change now, because God’s own glory is tied to our growth in knowledge of him: in our being conformed to him and in our finding our happiness in him.’