3 12 120

Rating 5/5

I’ve finished Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, and I’m still just as fascinated with it as the last time I blogged it. I’m always afraid about halfway through a book like this that it’ll end with me being entertained and enlightened, but having no earthly idea what in the world to do about it. Fortunately, Crouch doesn’t disappoint, moving from broad, sweeping propositions to the specifics of application.

Grace and vocation

My new favorite question for discerning call and vocation is Where do you experience grace - divine multiplication that far exceeds your efforts? Where is it that after toiling work and every effort, you still end with a sense of awe and gratitude at what was produced?

Finding grace is not a matter of taking an aptitude test, discovering our gifts, and happily restricting our activities only to those things we find pleasant. Rather, over and over in the lives of God’s people we see a pattern: abundance alongside suffering, growing fruit but also dying seeds, grace and the cross

This isn’t a one time event. You don’t take the test and be done. Though there is consistency in who you are and what God is doing in and through you, you will find that the specific incarnations of that will change. We are to spend our lives led by grace.

3, 12, 120

Fortunately, you will not be called to experience this grace alone. There is always a 3, a 12, and a 120 before any cultural artifact reaches and shapes the rest of the world.

Three is the perfect number. Three people can fit in a Mini Cooper (barely) with room for luggage. Three people can talk on a conference call, convene around a table in a meeting room, or chat online without anyone getting bored or distracted or feeling superfluous. Three people can sit in a single booth at a restaurant and hatch plans.

In culture making, size matters - in revers. Only a small group can sustain the attention, energy and perseverance to create something that genuinely moves the horizons of possibility - because to create that good requires an ability to suspend, at least for a time, the very horizons within which everyone else is operating. Such “suspension of impossibility” is tiring and taxing . . . To create a new cultural good, a small group is essential. And yet, the almost uncanny thing about culture making is that a small group is enough.

Jesus, of course, had a 3 (James, John, and Peter), a 12 (apostles), and a 120 (larger group of disciples). The same is true of almost every cultural innovation. After you’ve identified the places where you most experience grace, the next thing to do is to look around you and find others with whom you can partner in doing good. 2 is enough. I find this to be incredibly hopeful, especially for a new and small group of Jesus followers dreaming big things for the UofC. In the last 3 semesters Jef and I have proposed discipleship as a cultural artifact, and have watched BSM grow to the 12, and now, I hope, are moving towards the 120, as the 12 work hard to be and make disciples.

Shared power and a new world order

Power as the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good, and almost everyone knows someone with more and someone with less than they have. A sure sign of God’s work in the world, of Kingdom coming, is the cooperation of the powerful and powerless.

When God acts in culture, he uses both the powerful and the powerless alongside one another rather than using one against the other. To mobilize the powerless against the powerful would be revolution; to mobilize the powerful against the powerless would simply confirm “the way of the world.” But to bring them into partnership is the true sign of God’s paradoxical and graceful intervention into the human story.

If Jesus is Lord then we all come together, working with those who have more and less power than we do, to accomplish something good in the world, valuing one another regardless of the power we or others have.

Design

This short TED talk is a great example of someone who is obviously awed by the grace that has met his best efforts, and at the same time proves the power of a small contingent to change culture if they produce the very best artifact they possibly can. The existing power distribution is changed by this. Western companies had bought up eastern newspapers without making them good. He worked within one of these to produce something that both his small country and the rest of Europe agree is valuable.

Part one of the review is here.