Culture Making: Bringing Grace and Cross to Every Nook and Cranny of Culture

Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it spring up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.
Mark 4:3-8

The religious or secular nature of our cultural creativity is simply the wrong question. The right question is whether, when we undertake the work we believe to be our vocation, we experience the joy and humility that come only when God multiplies our work so that it bears thirty, sixty and a hundredfold beyond what we could expect from our feeble inputs. Vocation--calling--becomes another word for a continual process of discernment, examining the fruits of our work to see whether they are producing that kind of fruit, and doing all we can to scatter the next round of seed in the most fruitful places.

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So where are we called to create culture? At the intersection of grace and cross. Where do we find our work and play bearing awe-inspiring fruit--and at the same time find ourselves able to identify with Christ on the cross? That intersection is where we are called to dig into the dirt, cultivate and create.

We are marvelously different enough from one another that the simple quest for each one's intersection of grace and cross will take us to every nook and cranny of culture.

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Frederick Buechner writes that your calling is found "where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

--Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, p.256, 262, 263