In “Cultural Worlds,” the second chapter of Culture Making, Andy Crouch further explains his understanding of the terms culture and culture making. Culture, he says, “requires a public.” (38) That is, for an artifact or a tangible good to become culture, it cannot remain a private product—it must be received by others. T. S. Eliot’s disillusioned poetic masterpiece, “The Waste Land” is therefore culture, whereas the overly metaphorical poem you wrote in the tenth grade raging against the conformity imposed by “the system” with which you meant to impress the girl across the room in geometry and then burned when she went to winter semi-formal dance with someone else, is not culture. “Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world.” (40)

Crouch helpfully describes cultures as having scales and spheres, that is, different cultures have limits and different sizes. The most basic and most powerful culture is the family unit. So if we are to change culture or make culture, we must know what sphere or scale of culture we address. The smaller the culture, the easier it is to make lasting change. To change the English language is difficult, whereas changing your family’s dinner rituals is much easier.

Because the way the world has changed with communication and transportation, most people are no longer born into one culture where they will likely remain. Instead, most people have become cultural immigrants, often “in pursuit of economic or political opportunities.” Christians who have become immigrants “in pursuit of evangelistic or religious opportunities” are called missionaries. “But as the wheels within culture overlap more and more in a mobile world, most of us have some choice about which cultures we will call our own. We are almost all immigrants now, and more of us than we may realize are missionaries too.” (48-49) I would argue that all Christians are missionaries.

My Reaction
The more Crouch teases out the meaning of culture, the more helpful this book becomes. Culture is large and fairly unwieldy, but we can address different aspects of it in discussion. I especially liked Crouch’s discussion of power in culture. (43-44) For Crouch, poverty is not just an economic issue, “it can also simply mean being cut off from the world. To be poor is to be unable to ‘make something of the world.’” That is, the more comfort, the more knowledge one has in a specific culture, often leads to a greater power to make sense of and change that culture.

Even though the following sentence was a minor example in the chapter, it has captured my attention: “Workers in the high-rise office building may prefer their church to be like their office’s—pleasantly anonymous, professionally cleaned and well supplied with parking.” (44) Do we try to change our churches’ cultures to be like the workplace or the mall so as to give ourselves greater power? When people enter a sanctuary to worship, how much power do they feel they possess? Perhaps we want our churches to resemble the workplace because at least we know what to expect of the workplace. I’m concerned when our churches look too much like the office or mall or political rally. In what ways can we empower people in our congregations?