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I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I'm afraid so. Why aren't we known as cultivators—people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why aren't we known as creators—people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?

The simple truth is that in the mainstream of culture, cultivation and creativity are the postures that confer legitimacy for the other gestures. People who consider themselves stewards of culture, guardians of what is best in a neighborhood, an institution, or a field of cultural practice gain the respect of their peers. Even more so, those who go beyond being mere custodians to creating new cultural goods are the ones who have the world's attention. Indeed, those who have cultivated and created are precisely the ones who have the legitimacy to condemn—whose denunciations, rare and carefully chosen, carry outsize weight. Cultivators and creators are the ones who are invited to critique and whose critiques are often the most telling and fruitful.

Cultivators and creators can even copy without becoming mere imitators, drawing on the work of others yet extending it in new and exciting ways—think of the best of hip-hop's culture of sampling, which does not settle for merely reproducing the legends of jazz and R & B but places their work in new sonic contexts. And when they consume, cultivators and creators do so without becoming mere consumers. They do not derive their identity from what they consume but from what they create.

If there is a constructive way forward for Christians in the midst of our broken but also beautiful cultures, it will require us to recover these two biblical postures of cultivation and creation. And that recovery will involve revisiting the biblical story itself, where we discover that God is more intimately and eternally concerned with culture than we have yet come to believe.

Andy Crouch is editorial director of the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today International. This article is adapted from Culture Making by Andy Crouch. Copyright ©2008 by Andy Crouch. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Culture Making is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

Crouch spoke with CT about culture making on a local scale.

David Neff wrote more about Crouch's views on Christianity and culture in September's "Inside CT".

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September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9