Culture, Fluency, and Power

Andy Crouch's book Culture Making, animated an interesting idea.  Cultural fluency = Power.  He recounts his one and only trip to court (an experience I too can only relate to based on one encounter).  The baliff, judge, attorneys and other denizens of Courtlandia passed through its hallways and infrastructure with familiar ease.  But he (and I) found himself exhausted and powerless.  Cultural fluency makes some things possible and some things impossible just as language fluency empowers or frustrates.

As we seek to influence culture broadly speaking, our ability to speak and think with fluency into the details of culture will impact our power in that culture - our power to interpret and to contribute to the formation of that world.  I suspect that just like language, the development of fluency requires exertion and purpose.  We don't just wake up one morning speaking Tajik.  Nor do I wake up in the morning able to influence any of the myriad of arts that impact how my teenagers dress, what the listen to, and how they interpret the world.

So as I have been writing in these "pages" in the last few weeks, this idea of the Church engaging with culture is going to require us to choose with some wisdom what fluency to develop and then to concentrate our energies to develop the ability to exercise the power of that fluency toward an intentional change.  In other words, we are going to have to choose where and how to have power.  That is not typically a word used in Churchlandia.

We will not be able to make cultural impact from without.  We need to move in. We will need to find cultural guides to orient and train us.  But detached commentary - I hate what texting is doing to our teenagers' social skills - is as powerless as my untrained visit to the courtroom.  We must engage in the places where culture is is made.