Eleanor Mumford reviews ‘Culture Making’ by Andy Crouch.

Have you come acrosss Andy Crouch and his excellent book ‘Culture Making’? John and I recently went to a marvellous conference where Andy was speaking, hosted by New Frontiers in the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in Westminster.  (It coincided with the big protest march so we turned left out of the station while all the rest of the world turned right!) Andy Crouch is a journalist by training, a musician by choice and a brilliant communicator. He has studied widely the whole subject of culture and the different postures Christians assume towards it . . . do we condemn or critique, conform or consume, capitulate or cower before? His thesis is that as “image-bearers” we should be at the forefront of our communities creating and cultivating culture. The book is a far better presentation than any précis of mine might suggest, and well worth reading and mulling over.

The blurb from his book says:

Crouch unpacks the complexities of how culture works and gives us tools for cultivating and creating culture. He navigates the dynamics of cultural change and probes the role and efficacy of our various cultural gestures and postures. Keen biblical exposition demonstrates that creating culture is central to the whole scriptural narrative, the ministry of Jesus and the call to the church. He guards against naive assumptions about “changing the world,” but points us to hopeful examples from church history and contemporary society of how culture is made and shaped. Ultimately, our culture making is done in partnership with God’s own making and transforming of culture.

As we heard from David Stroud at our National Leaders’ Conference, the process of creating culture is key to church growth and so with this in mind we would highly recommend both this book by Andy and then also David’s talk from the 2012 National Leaders’ Conference.

You can buy this book from Vineyard Records UK by clicking here.