Stewarding The Good Life

“God’s first and best gift to humanity is culture.”--A n d y C r o u c h

Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

What Is Culture?

“Culture is what we make of the world.”– Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless

human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else… It always bears the stamp of our creativity, our God-given desire to make something more than we were given.

– After thousands of years of accumulating human culture, the world we must make something of is largely the world others before us have made. Culture, even more than nature, defines for us the horizons of possibility and impossibility. We live in the world that culture has made. (Andy Crouch)

“Culture always and only comes from particular human acts of cultivation and creativity.” (Ibid.)

Stewarding the Good LifeGenesis 1:26-28 (TNIV)

28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in

number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in

the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature

that moves on the ground."

Genesis 2 15 The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. Gen 1 = God’s creativity & our being like God Gen 2 = Cultivating and Creating!

God had already planted The Garden Not just tending it but creating too (2:19)!

“God’s first and best gift to humanity is culture, the realm in which human beings themselves will be the cultivators and creators, ultimately contributing to the cosmic purposes of the Cultivator and Creator of the natural world.” (Ibid.)

Our Typical Responses to Culture

• Condemn• Critique• Copy• Consume

“I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world

outside of our churches. Are we known as critics,

consumers, copiers, condemners of culture?

I’m afraid so…”

A r ti s t s & Gardeners• Both begin with a posture of CONTEMPLATION• After contemplation, the Artist and the Gardener

both adopt a posture of PURPOSEFUL WORK– Gardener tends what has gone before, making the

most of what is beautiful and weeding out what is distracting or useless

– Artist starts with blank canvas or block of stone and gradually brings out of it that which was never there before

Culture is what we make of the world.

• As stewards of God’s Good Life in Christ…– We are to start with what is, – Contemplate how God wants to improve it, – And then devote ourselves to the effort to make this real

• Some examples:– EBCLA’s vision to become a Faith Village

– Temple Tutoring, Family Promise, Youth Ministry

– My serving on secular drug agency’s board

– Chris Wong’s films, Palisoc’s charter schools

• How might Jesus be calling you to cultivate and create culture in your part of The Garden?