People aren’t really interested in us.

We’ve mastered an attitude toward culture that hasn’t really helped.

• Condeming
• Critiquing
• Copying – We took forms that culture had already created and created Christian versions of them (shows a t-shirt with an easy button labeled Jesus – it’s just that easy).
• Consuming

What we should do:

• Cultivating – About what’s taking it already good and keeping it good. Taking not just what’s in nature and preserving it’s goodness.
  Are we known as custodians of what is already good in our culture? Maybe not as much as we should be.
• Create
  Every culture has it’s glory and honor, the best things it has made. Sometimes you hear this idea that only souls will survive, but revelation says that the glory and honor of the nations will fill the new Jerusalem.

Why have we done these four ineffective things and not the two things we were asked to do?
Those four are easy. It’s not that hard to condemn, to just poke holes in things. Critiquing, looking at culture, is much easier than creating. Copying is obviously easy. Consuming definitely doesn’t change culture. These are ineffective because they are easy.

Cultivating and creating are effective because they are hard. Culture only changes when you make more of it.

Here’s the most important thing about creating culture, we have to do it together. One of the unbreakable laws of culture is that it’s always created together. Every act of cultural creativity begins with a small group of people, usually 3, sometimes 2 or 4, but never 1.

Why couldn’t it be 30 or 300 people?
Whenever culture changes, it moves the horizions of the possible, but this also means that culture tells us what is impossible, what cannot be imagined.

Only a small group can maintain the suspension of impossibility.

You then expand to 12 or 15. They bring depth and excellence.
You then move to about 120. They bring breadth and spread it into the world.

Here’s the good news, all of us have a “three.” And all of us can be part of a 12 or 120.

There is something that our little circles can create that no one else could.

You’re here because you’re creating something that has to be created by your little circle, but remember that the people that you serve aren’t doing it in the confines of their little Christian circle but are doing it out in the world. Celebrate when they are creating things well in the world.

3 Questions

What are you cultivating? What is here that you are keeping good?
What are you creating?
Who is in your creative circle?

If we answer those three questions, we will be doing what we were made to do. We will be in the game.

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