YOU ARE PART OF A HOUSEHOLD...

'You are part of a household if there is someone who knows where you are today and who has at least some sense of how it feels to be where you are. You are part of a household if there is someone who moves more quietly because they know you are asleep. You are part of a household if someone would check on you if you did not awaken.

You are part of a household if people know things about you that you do not know about yourself, including things that if you did know you would seek to hide. You are part of a household if others are close enough to see you and know you as well as, or better than, you know yourself.

You are part of a household if your experience the conflict that is the inevitable companion of closeness - if someone else makes such demands on you that you fantasize about driving them out of your life. You are part of a household if you sometimes dream of running away, perhaps to a far country, so that you will not be so terribly well known. 

You are part of a household if you return from a long journey prompts a spontaneous celebration. You are part of a household if, when you avoid a party because of your anger, pride, guilt, or shame, someone notices and comes outside to plead with you to come in.'

This is the one thing we need more than any other: a community of recognition.'

Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For, p.153.

THE SORT OF COMMUNITY WE ALL NEED

'A household is a community of persons who may well take shelter under one roof but also and more fundamentally take shelter under one another's care and concern. They provide for one another, and they depend on one another. They mingle their assets and their liabilities, in such a way that it is hard to tell where one member's needs and another member's begins.

The household is the fundamental community of persons. Built on more than an isolated pair but encompassing few enough people that all can be deeply and persistently noticed and seen, the household is perfectly sized for the recognition we are all looking for the moment we were born.'

Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For, p.151. 

THE CASE FOR HOUSEHOLDS

'If you and I are heart-soul-mind-strength complexes designed for love, we need a place where we can exercise our fundamental capacities - a place where we can channel our emotions and longings, be known in our unique depth of self, contribute to understanding and interpreting the world, and apply our bodies' strength and agility to worthwhile work in all three planes of physical reality. Above all, we need a place where we can invest ourselves deeply in others, come to care about their flourishing, and give ourselves away in mutual service and sacrifice in ways that secure our own identities instead of erasing them.'

Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming relationship in a technological world, p.150.

ELEPHANTS AREN'T SEEKING TO SAVE HUMANITY

'In the whole known universe we are the only species that takes responsibility for the others; the only species that demonstrates the slightest interest in naming, tending, and conserving the others; that indeed is accountable for the stewardship of the others; and the only species that feels guilt (however fitfully and hypocritically) when its stewardship fails.' 

Andy Crouch in John G Stackhouse Jr., Why You're Here: Ethics for the Real World, p.23. 

POWER

'...the more powerful we become, the more we should seek our oppportunities for anonymity and invisibility. Just as the only real antidote to the temptations of money is lavish generosity, so the only real antitidote to the temptations of pwer is choosing to spend our power in the opposite of the way the world encourages us to spend it: not on getting closer to the sources of additional power or on securing our round-the-clock snese of comfort and control, but spend it on getting closer to the relatively powerless.'

Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.228.

CHANGE

'In the paradox of Jesus Christ - Yeshua from Nazareth, anointed One of history - the paradox of God's cultural agenda is summed up most perfectly and completely. God is for  the poor - the oppressed, the widow and the orphan - and he is for humanity in our collective poverty, our ultinate powerlessness in the face of sin and death. But he makes known his redemptive purposes for us through both the powerless and  the powerful, using both to accomplish his purposes. 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 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 grateful intervention into the human story.'

Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.209.

CHRISTIANITY & CULTURE

'I wonder what we Christians are know 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 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 done or thought before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?'

Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.97.

EVANGELICALISM

'...evangelicalism...still produces better art critics than artists...'

Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.87.

CHANGE

'...if we seek to change culture, we will have to create something new, something that will persuade our neighbours to set aside some existing set of cultural goods for our new proposal.'

Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.67.

WORLDVIEWS

'The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way that culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk of thinking "worldviewishly" is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyse it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosphers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers rather than artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which "worldview thinkers" are privilege while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside.

But culture is not changed simply by thinking.'
Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.64.

CHANGE

'...any change that will profoudly move the horizons of possibilty and impossibility will almost always, by definition, take lots of time. The bigger the change we hope for, the longer we must be willing to invest, work and wait for it.'

Andy Crouch, Culture Making, p.56.

CULTURE

'Culture is what we make of the world.'
Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Rediscovering Our Creative Calling, p.23.