Culture makers without a vision
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve been waiting for the book resulting from last year’s Transforming Culture Symposium. (Peterson, Crouch, Begbie, … how could this not be on my wish list?) It seems I’ll have to be patient a bit longer. But, in the meantime here’s an interesting quote from the introduction posted on David Taylor’s Diary of an Art’s Pastor:
But my point—my confession—is this. As a pastor of an arts ministry, I defaulted to an experientialist and shrunken traditionalistic approach because I lacked a larger vision. Evangelical Protestantism handed me neither a big picture (a theology) nor a sense of how art and the church ought to hold together (a tradition).
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Many of us, in fact, feel the lack of a comprehensive, systematic, integrating and grounding vision.
It seems to me that this can be a problem in so many areas of cultural interaction — we have neither a sufficiently robust theology nor a guiding tradition. As a result, though we believe our faith should affect every area of life, we are missing a clear understanding of what we are actually supposed to do. Without a guiding vision/story, we end up following the culture around, never really being sure if we are supposed to be transforming or renewing or borrowing or …
Taking this more widely, the same can be true for Christians who are thinking about working life. Without a comprehensive vision of how work fits into the Christian story, we are left following the default models already embedded in the surrounding culture.
There are signs that this is changing. I hope we can begin to draw a more satisfying picture of how our whole lives fit with God’s story.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...