Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling QUOTES

1 " If progress is not the right word for buildings or poems, what is the right way to evaluate cultural change? I suggest integrity. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

2 " So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another's lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together, make something of the world. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

3 " What was missing, I've come to believe, were the two postures that are most characteristically biblical -- the two postures that have been least explored by Christians in the last century. They are found at the very beginning of the human story, according to Genesis: like our first parents, we are to be creators and cultivators. Or to put it more poetically, we are artists and gardeners. ... after the contemplation, the artist and the gardener both adopt a posture of purposeful work. They bring their creativity and effort to their calling. ... They are acting in the image of One who spoke a world into being and stooped down to form creatures from the dust. They are creaturely creators, tending and shaping the world that original Creator made. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

4 " In this world, this life, "flow" [the times when our work or play so absorbs and attunes our energies that we lose track of time] comes to an end. The canvas is dry, the fugue is complete, the band plays the tag one more time and then resolves on the final chord. And, too, the book is finished, the service is over, the lights go up in the darkened theater and we emerge blinking into the bright lights of the "real world." But what if the timeless, creative world we had glimpsed is really the real world -- and it is precisely its reality that gave it such power to captivate us for a while? What if our ultimate destiny is that moment of enjoyment and engagement we glimpse in the artist's studio? "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

5 " The language of worldview tends to imply...that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking "worldviewishly" is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which "worldview thinkers" are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.
But culture is not changed simply by thinking. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

6 " I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so. Why aren’t we known as cultivators—people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren’t we known as creators—people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful? "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

7 " The bigger the change we hope for, the longer we must be willing to invest, work for, and wait for it. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

8 " If we are known mostly for our ability to poke holes in every human project, we will probably not be known as people who bear the hope and mercy of God. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

9 " Stewardship means to consciously take up our cultural power, investing it intentionally among the seemingly powerless, putting our power at their disposal to enable them to cultivate and create. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

10 " If there is a constructive way forward for Christians in the midst of our broken but also beautiful cultures, it will require us to recover these two biblical postures of cultivation and creation. And that recovery will involve revisiting the biblical story itself, where we discover that God is more intimately and eternally concerned with culture than we have yet come to believe. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

11 " To be Christian is to stake our lives on this belief: the only cultural goods that ultimately matter are the ones that love creates. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

12 " The biblical record suggests that we need to rest not just one day a week but for longer times at longer intervals, up to the forty-nine-year cycle called the “jubilee” that allowed both land and farmers to be rejuvenated. But if the work of creating consistently leaves us depressed or drained, it is likely that we have somehow missed the path. Creation, even on a human scale, is meant to end with the glad exclamation, “It is very good. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

13 " Grace is not an exemption from failure. It is, however, what makes it possible to sustain hope in the midst of failure. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

14 " The followers of Jesus will begin to demonstrate a new set of horizons for human life to their neighbors and even to their enemies—the horizons of shalom, the horizons of true humanity living in dependence on God. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

15 " What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly—who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

16 " Disciplines are small and by themselves inconsequential (like the scales that professional musicians play every day), attracting no notice and deserving no prize, humbling us in advance of the occasions when our work will be recognized and applauded. Disciplines are difficult, revealing all too clearly our laziness and foolishness, preparing us for the times when fruit seems to burst from our smallest efforts. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

17 " The biggest cultural mistake we can indulge in is to yearn for technological solutions to our deepest cultural problems. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

18 " The beginning of culture and the beginning of humanity are one and the same because culture is what we were made to do. There is no withdrawing from culture. Culture is inescapable. And that’s a good thing. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

19 " Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the New Jerusalem? Will the cultural goods we devote our lives to - the food we cook and consume; the music we purchase and practice; the movies we watch and make; the enterprises we earn our paychecks from and invest our wealth in - be identified as the glory and honor of our cultural tradition? Or will they be remembered as mediocrities at best, dead-ends at worst? This is not the same as asking whether we are making "christian" culture. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

20 " if the work of creating consistently leaves us depressed or drained, it is likely that we have somehow missed the path. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling