Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Christian culture making grows through networks, but it is not a matter of networking. It is a matter of community—a relatively small group of people whose common life is ordered by love. Love is a fragile thing that does not scale well. It seems small beside the towers of Babel and Babylon. It is like a mustard seed, tiny and seemingly vulnerable.

I have become convinced that little good comes from straining to “change the culture.” To do so is indeed, as the sociologists would say, to grant human beings too much agency. We will end our efforts to change the world exhausted and spent, less sure of ourselves and less sure of God—or,

And then, after contemplation, the artist and the gardener both adopt a posture of purposeful work. They bring their creativity and effort to their calling. The gardener tends what has gone before, making the most of what is beautiful and weeding out what is distracting or useless. The artist can be more daring: she starts with a blank canvas or a

As small and seemingly insignificant as they are, disciplines can have powerful cultural effects. If I make dinner tonight for my family, nothing much will change in my family’s culture. But if I make dinner tonight, tomorrow night, next Tuesday and for the next fifteen years of our children’s lives, seeking to do so with creativity, skill and grac

And it seems certain that every cultural artifact will have to undergo a radical transformation of some sort—just as gold, translucent when beaten, will become capable of transparency. The best parallel, it seems, may be what Scripture instructs us to expect for our own bodies. We too, after all, will have to undergo a humbling and a judgment, and

We should ask the same question about our own cultural creativity and cultivating. Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the new Jerusalem? Will the cultural goods we devote our lives to—the food we cook and consume, the music we purchase and practice, the movies we watch and make, the enterprises we earn our paych

Frederick Buechner writes that your calling is found “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Consider this a parable of cultural change, illustrating this fundamental rule: The only way to change culture is to create more of it.

Culture, then, is the furniture of heaven.