T: A Culture of Community and Creativity

"We can make people (often) attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy's line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity 'latent'."
—C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (1945)

“We have not given enough attention to the ecology of culture.”
—T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (1939)


I.
Family and friends have recently passed along to me a small slew of articles describing, in sometimes rather sensationalist terms, a ‘coming collapse of Evangelicalism.’ The writers of these articles criticize the Evangelical movement for sundry shortcomings which seem to fall into two primary categories – one, failure to transmit to congregations a doctrinal and theological faith-foundation that can withstand secular influence; two, excessive devotion of resources to political activism as a poor (and, apparently, a losing) tactic in the so-called ‘culture war’. One writer summed up the relationship between these two shortcomings as, “We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than in a faith.”(1)

Reading, or hearing about, some who assert that the American Protestant church is ‘dying’ because of these two shortcomings (or variations thereon) recalls to me C.S. Lewis’ advice that everyone should read in a ratio of at least one old book to every three new books.(2) His reasoning was that every time period, including the current one, has an outlook and a blindness all its own. If you expose yourself solely to contemporary thought, you will only reinforce the same set of assumptions you have absorbed from childhood. Similarly, older works will reflect the assumptions of the era in which they were written, which will differ from your own; their errors may be more apparent (and therefore less dangerous) to a contemporary reader, and they may serve to reveal flaws in your contemporary thought that were hitherto invisible.

Friends have pointed out to me, and rightly so, that the Church has experienced cycles of drought and renewal throughout history. Heresies arise; the Body, after suffering a brief period of confusion, formulates doctrine to articulate the unspoken orthodoxy out of which Christianity was previously operating. Powerful new ideas grip the imagination of a culture; the beliefs of some are led astray for a time, until a biblical theological response can be asserted. Without this perspective, it could be easy to mistake the Evangelical Church’s present unsettling and re-settling for imminently-declining vital signs.(3)

This is not to say that there is no cause for alarm.(4) Evangelicalism’s problems, as summarized above, are serious, and should concern all who care about the life and health of the Body. It would be as foolish not to treat them with appropriate gravity, as it would to overestimate their probable impact. This is a subject where the reading of old books may provide us some insight.

II.
Firstly, what exactly is it that we're talking about? Evangelicals often refer to their organized political activity as engaging in a ‘culture war’, which is rather a misnomer. The Evangelical Church does not have a fundamentally different culture from the American mainstream, as Eliot describes the term in Christianity & Culture (two essays published together – The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture; difficult, but worth the effort). Rather, Evangelicals admit a filtered subset of American mainstream culture as their own. The more conservative or isolationist/separatist a given Evangelical group is, the finer the filter and the smaller the subset. Conversely, few unique contributions to culture originate from the Evangelical church as such. Consider what is meant by a ‘culture clash’ occurring between an immigrant culture and the American mainstream, or represented by disparate music cultures such as hip-hop and country, or caused by a counter-culture like that of goths entering the workforce, and it becomes clear that Evangelical culture is much more readily defined by what it refuses to accept from the mainstream than by what it offers in return. It further becomes clear that what is meant by the term ‘culture war’ is not a clash of cultures but a clash of values.

If Lewis’ assertion, quoted at the outset, can be taken as a prediction – and I think it can – then a glance at Evangelical enterprise in American culture is enough to show that we have not understood the full weight of his words. In fact, by expending so much time, money, and energy attempting to controvert American mainstream values via political activism, we have ironically set ourselves up – not only for diminishing our ability to influence those values, but for diminishing our ability to transmit a theological foundation of faith that enables Christians to withstand secular influence.

This is because a primary consequence of not having or seeking positions of influence within what is often called ‘pop’ or ‘mainstream’ culture – especially in music, movies, television, news, and books – is an ever-widening gap between the teachings of Scripture and the assumptions of people, and an ever-widening gap between our Sunday morning experience and our daily lives. As the distance between the practices and ideas of corporate worship and the practices and ideas of everyday people grows, it becomes harder and harder for individual Christians to see how their faith ought to connect with their lives. At the same time, Christianity becomes less and less accessible to those on the outside. Not only are we losing the ears of our neighbors, the ‘right to be heard,’ – we are losing our own. We are losing those who grew up churched but have turned away from its apparent ineffectiveness, as well as those who might have joined if their view from the periphery were not so bleak.

If I were to make a broad, sweeping criticism of the ‘cultural relevancy’ movement’s response to this problem – as dangerous and unfair as that may be – I would say that their answer could be seen as an attempt to make the Church appear less radical. The truth, however, is that God’s people are meant to be their culture’s anchor. It is not we who are growing more radical; it is the world, living out the Proverb that “the eyes of man are never satisfied.”(5) But if we are the anchor, we need to be very concerned about why our ship is drifting.

Eliot offers an analysis that, given our present circumstances, is rather chilling. He suggests that we “ask whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion, of a people are not different aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people,” for “what is part of our culture is also part of our lived religion,” in other words, in addition to our formal doctrinal affirmations, “behavior is also belief.”(6) If that is so, the time has come to ask why the culture of our American people has been penetrated so deeply by non- and anti-Christian ideas and values. We must even question the degree of influence those ideas and values have had in forming the instincts of the Body.

We are not unaware that our influence in America is slipping. We’ve noticed it particularly in the hydra-headed debates about sex,(7) education, and entertainment. Both sides have tended to frame the arguments for maximum emotional punch, such that the contested ground is America’s youth, and our response efforts have largely been political. Although political involvement in a government of, by, and for the people is critical, we should view it as merely tantamount. It would be absurd to expect our political efforts to bring about the kind of cultural change Lewis wrote of. A democratic country’s laws and freedoms only reflect and proceed from the pre-existing values of its people; they do not change them. Christ’s advent evidences that the long arm of legislation never reaches as far as the human heart.

I fear that we have often found it easier to be political than we have to be Christian. I do not say this to minimize political activism by Christians, which has averted many crises; but, lacking the greater effort to season, illuminate, preserve, and ennoble our culture, our battles on the political front will grow increasingly futile – Asgard versus the Frost Giants. We do not want our war for America’s soul to end in a heroic but inevitable tragedy that is slowly forgotten under a deepening winter. But if I contrast (in this context only) ‘being Christian’ with ‘being political’, what then do I mean by ‘being Christian’? What could it mean for us to ‘be Christian’ in such a way that biblical values and biblical theology are transmitted culturally? How might our “lived religion” be made to resemble increasingly our Christian religion?

To me, all these observations and questions imply that an unhealthy relationship between the Body of Christ and its temporal culture can lead and has led to an unhealthy Body. The Gospel is a “still more excellent way,”(8) a way fraught with honest hard work, cathartic suffering, lavish grace, and life endowed with meaning by a loving Father. When the Church is examined from within American mainstream culture, whether in passing or with rigor, the conclusions of that examination should be characterized not (or at least, not merely and not predominantly) by the absences of certain elements of mainstream culture, but by the presence of cultural elements unquestionably alien to the examiners. I intend the remainder of this article to champion the reintroduction of such an element.


III.
Our next step should be a little housecleaning. Some ‘emerging church’ thinkers have suggested that we should abandon the name ‘church’ because of its cultural connotations; it is my opinion that this suggestion is historically short-sighted – that the negative connotations our neighbors have come to associate with the word ‘church’ are due primarily to side effects of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist movements, and that the word can and should be redeemed by a change in our lifestyles, not abandoned.

As others have observed, Evangelical doctrine has often been incompletely or ineffectively expressed. We have preached salvation from hell so much that we’ve hardly had time to talk about salvation in life. What we’ve missed is wrapped up in two verses:

First, the Great Commission itself is to “go, make disciples of all nations”(9) – not “go, preach the gospel to all nations.”(10) Paul expresses the idea elegantly as “we were delighted to share with you, not just the gospel, but our very lives as well.”(11) In addition to giving people fish, we need to be about teaching them how to fish for themselves. This will likely mean that each of us invests more time per person with fewer people over the course of our ministry. It may result in less, and less volatile, numerical growth, especially in the short term, but it ought also to result in greater spiritual growth per believer, which will lead to greater and more sustained numerical growth in the long term.

Second, at the beginning of Ephesians 2 there is a passage that basically says this – that Christ showed us grace once, at the cross, so that in the ages to come He might lavish us with grace upon grace.(12) After reading that, Evangelical laymen – possibly the majority of protestant churchgoers in the U.S. – might be puzzled by this question: what is all that additional grace for?

One essential function of grace is enabling relationships. Grace enables us to live in relationship with God; it also enables us to live in relationship with other people. Grace is like oil: it permits us to join together and do work without sacrificing so much energy to heat and friction. And if we are to revolutionize our position in culture and regain the influence we need in order to be salt and light, it is to God’s lavish, relationship-enabling grace we must turn.

The cultural element I mentioned reintroducing at the end of the last section represents what I believe to be the foremost need of our generations, both within the Body and without. It is an element that the Body should never have forgotten, and one that is being actively sought by many today; it is usually described by the word community, and has been written of and spoken about increasingly. Good progress has been made, but we live in such an individualistically-minded culture that much of it has amounted to feeling our way forward in the dark.

Hear this now: from beginning to end, the Bible assumes community for God’s people. Scripture addressed to the individual is the exception; scripture addressed to a corporate Body is the rule. Every aspect of the Christian life works better when lived out in authentic, effective community with God and with other believers. From the first chapters of Genesis onward it’s clear that God made us not just for Himself, but for each other also; and that we are meant to bear His image not just to those outside the faith, but also to those within it. The author of Hebrews urges “let us not neglect meeting together, but instead consider how to provoke one another towards love and good deeds.”(13)

Community is a determination, made by the individual, to live in continuous acknowledgment of interdependence on the fellowship of one’s true family in Christ. It is a choice made personally but acted out mutually. It simultaneously resolves that although “each will carry his own load,” nevertheless each should “bear one another’s burdens,”(14) keeping both in continual balance. It is shared life, shared faith, shared insight, shared love. It manifests as a small group of believers (but may include non-believers) who meet regularly in order to engage in that sharing. It strives for continual vulnerability, transparency, of people coming “into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that their deeds have been wrought in God.”(15) It is a time and a place to rightly ascribe our sin to ourselves, now covered by grace, and our righteousness to God, as motive for praise. It arises at and pervades the intersection of a triune relationship between God, ourselves, and others. It is iron sharpening iron in the presence of holy fire; it is a cord of three strands, not lightly broken.

The Body and the world are both starving for community. Since the beginning of the modern era, most (if not all) people in the developed world have been afflicted with anomie and the sense of alienation and isolation which are its results. There is no place more obvious where we ought to find a haven from anomie – which means ‘no law’ or ‘no norms’ – than among those who claim to follow the teachings of the Bible.

Community is the basic unit of our faith – not the nuclear family unit,(16) certainly not the individual. But because we have allowed ourselves to be so pervaded by mainstream individualism, we have brought the Body to its knees. Is there anyone who doubts that one powerful appeal of Mormonism, indeed of any cult that has risen in the last hundred years, is in the sense of belonging they provide? Meanwhile we practice, even teach, a weakened faith that often feels like a Christian-flavored self-help program.

How did this happen?

A defining value of American culture is personal convenience. Americans care deeply about, and are fiercely protective of, personal convenience. This is just as true for Christians as it is for anybody; we don’t speak against valuing personal convenience because, on its own, there is nothing wrong or sinful about personal convenience. The trouble is that mainstream America bases the rest of its culture on this value. Personal convenience funds our technological development, is simultaneously the cause of our political apathy towards some issues and our political lobbying for others, and subliminally guides our moral decisions: Marriage is inconvenient, so we declare love free and divorces faultless. The consequences of sex are inconvenient, so we normalize contraceptives, legalize abortion, and deny the claims of intimacy. The possibility of God is inconvenient, so rather than admit the limitations of science, we require irrational myths about origin theory to be taught as accepted truth in schools and universities. All to mask our pursuit of convenience.

By failing to behaviorally reject the value of personal convenience where our relationships with other people are concerned, Christians have accepted the underlying premise that exerts the most influence over mainstream morality. We are bark with no bite; we can point to nothing in our own lives and say, “See, this is how we treat other people. Now do you understand where we are coming from on this or that moral issue?”

This is what I mean: our objections to living in community are cultural. We point back to the early Church of Acts and claim we’d like to be that, but it’s impossible to recreate: we have too much going on in our lives, we live too far away from each other, we don’t worship at the same church buildings our neighbors do, our congregations are the wrong size. In expressing this, in excusing those who do so, we are really admitting and permitting selfishness towards one’s fellow man, reinforcing the illusion that the Christian life can be lived alone, and validating a collective shirking of responsibility towards our divine adoptive family. These attitudes and actions directly oppose the life and teaching of Christ.

We should not be trying to be the early Church; we should be trying to be today’s Church. And if we desire to be the kind of people who have the ears of our neighbors – a people who, as Christ says in John 13:35 & 17:21, will prove themselves to be His followers and prove Him to be from the Father by their love and by their unity – then the time has come to focus our efforts away from arguing in-your-face theology in the public forum and start living inescapable community. What our faith has to offer is nothing less than humanity's deepest, truest desire – the means to worship God as a full-blooded member of His family. Dostoyevsky wrote that the unfulfilled craving for communal worship “is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.”(17)

In the beginning, God declares, “it is not good for man to be alone,”(18) and the Psalmist rejoins “behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity!”(19)

Do we really believe this? Enough to make it a part of our “lived religion”?

A loving and loyal community which has made Christ its identity becomes spiritually seductive. It cannot keep from overflowing with grace and light, with living water, to the people its members spend time among. Christ promised the woman at the well that she would never thirst, and we – world and Church alike – are tired of being thirsty. We must seek to know what community is and how it should work today. Community is nothing less than the provision of God for this troubled age.

IV.
The practice of community will renew the Body both spiritually and culturally, transforming what we offer mainstream America in our ongoing cultural exchange (for God's sake, let's stop calling it a 'war'. We may as well be calling it a 'crusade' for all the goodwill it inspires towards us). The work of Christian artists and artisans will be greatly affected, and it is to them that this section is particularly addressed.

“Let not many of you become teachers,” James advises, “knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.”(20) But we are teachers – all of us are. We all exert some influence; we instruct, both passively and actively, the other people in our lives. The scope of our direct influence is different from person to person, of course, but the ‘ripple effect’ of our indirect influence is immeasurable. James’ caution is that we, by the grace of God, direct unrelentingly the course of what we say, so that we do not “from the same mouth” bless the Creator and curse His creatures.(21) I believe that we will be accountable for what we say – not just for the words we speak, but for what we say with our lives, our appearance, our way of conducting business, our use of resources like time and money and the natural world, and our creative efforts. In Christ’s parable, the third steward is criticized not for squandering the talent entrusted to him, but for doing nothing productive with it (if he had used it to aid his Master’s enemies, he would be a traitor, not a steward, and could not have been judged as a steward).(22)

As the Body moves away towards a contemporary biblical communalism, it falls to the Church’s artists and artisans to work on getting God’s ideas about life out into our culture in a way it can handle. We have the light; we must shine it at peoples’ feet, rather than in their faces or on their backs. It’s a tricky thing to accomplish – incorporating our God-given insights into our creativity – but we have been equipped for it. Our task is to package, disguise, entertain, render palatable, make accessible, enchant, delight, move to tears, and inspire – all without compromising whatever pieces of God’s message our works hold. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in his essay On Fairy-Stories, “We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”(23)

Creativity therefore is, or can be, an expression of worship: imitation as a sincere form of glory – not flattery, which seeks to gain something from its object; rather glory, which attributes to Him what is due (Psalm 29), merely because it is His due. God is a writer, a historian, and a poet, perfectly insightful into the nature of man; He works with colors and clay, with blank emptiness and uncanvassed worlds; He invents elegant mathematics to describe the complex and elemental mechanisms of His creation. All that we learn, we learn about Him; we explore in His wake, and struggle to comprehend even that which is splashed aside by His footsteps. As ‘teachers,’ as artists and artisans, it is our privilege, our calling, and our joy to share experiences of Him with others. We will strive to steward our talents wisely, and to use our gifts to flavor, preserve, enlighten, and ennoble our culture; and if, at the end, all we have gained is the interest as from a savings account, we still will have our Master’s praise. Money in the bank is still strengthening the economy, so to speak. Money under the mattress helps no-one.

I have had the privilege, over the past year, of meeting a few men at a pub every so often to discuss the works produced by a single community who, during the early-middle part of the twentieth century, did exactly what I am describing: the Inklings. Though neither comprised exclusively of Christians, nor for any explicitly Christian purpose, the Inklings community formed around C. S. Lewis in pursuit of excellence in discourse and writing; and the works of those Christians (such as Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams) who were part of it not only impacted their culture, but continue to play powerful and formative roles in modern cultures today, ours included. Their symbiotic prioritization of one another in community and of their work as scholars, theologians, and novelists was the wellspring of their enduring legacy.

And so we are come full-circle: what we want is not particularly more books about Christianity, or more Christian political movements per se, but more Christians expressing their "lived religion" from every corner of culture.

V.
What I am getting at is a two-pronged effort to engage the mainstream. I urge all of us, both for our own sakes and for those around us, to pursue Christian community. I urge all with God-given creative talent to place that talent fully at God’s disposal. We have gifts in order to become gifts, and as our experience of God deepens and grows in richness because of Christian community, we must allow it to overflow into our relationships and our creativity.

As we all influence our culture to seek out God, we want to be sure that when they encounter us, His testimonies and priests, they find a Body worth joining. Let it be that their decision is acceptance or rejection of God in us, not acceptance or rejection of us. Finally, let the Devil’s work to compound the rebellious condition of mankind through the worldwide propagation of American culture be frustrated and undone by our blessed hands. Amen.





1 Spenser, Michael, “The Coming Evangelical Collapse.” Christian Science Monitor Online (March 10, 2009).

2 Lewis, C.S., God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 201-202

3 I am using the term ‘Evangelical’ in agreement with Michael Cromartie’s attempt to describe the movement within its historical context, as published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute – Cromartie, Michael, “Evangelical Protestantism,” First Principles Journal Online, (May 30, 2008).

4 Nor is it to say that the term ‘Evangelical’ will remain in current use – already the social cost to most newer, younger believers and/or congregations seems to be greater than the benefits of adopting that label.

5 Proverbs 27:20

6 T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 100-105

7 And its associated topics – foreplay, extramarital sex, teen pregnancy, marriage, commitment, pornography, fashion, self-image, sexual deviancy, abortion, homosexuality, valid structures for the family unit. All of these are, in some sense, just variations on a theme – and if that theme is morally neutral, as our culture has come increasingly to believe, than so are its variations. This may be logically unsound, but humans are not primarily logical beings. We often settle for the first explanation that satisfies our desires while requiring minimal active thought.

8 1 Corinthians 12:31

9 Matthew 28:18-20

10 However, properly understood, ‘preaching the gospel’ neither begins nor ends with sharing a simple gospel message. Our understanding of ‘preaching the gospel’ has been diminished to the point where rhetorically contrasting ‘preaching the gospel’ with ‘disciplemaking’ is warranted, but the terms should be much more closely related in popular meaning.

11 Read 1 Thessalonians 2 for the full richness of the evangelism/discipleship relationship Paul discusses.

12 Ephesians 2:1-7

13 Hebrews 10:24-25

14 Galatians 6:1-5

15 John 3:18-21

16 N.B. that ideally the nuclear family is a community, and that community ideally encompasses nuclear family. However, the nuclear earthly family should not exist in spiritual isolation or independence from its spiritual family.

17 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamzov, (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 230

18 Genesis 2:18

19 Psalm 133

20 James 3:1

21 James 3:8-9

22 Matthew 25:14-30

23 Tolkien, J.R.R., The Tolkien Reader, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), 55