CultureCare RDU

“Go and make disciples of all nations”  

- Jesus (Matt 28:19)

What does culture care have to do with Jesus’s last words?

Since I was teenager I wanted to be a missionary, to go to the nations and share the Gospel. I knew Christ was the creator and sustainer of all things good, true and beautiful. I saw how God was glorious and mighty in dark passages of my childhood through the verdant grace of the woods and the slow dance of the stars over the corn fields where I was raised. On Sunday mornings, the quiet performance of the Gospel in radiant jewel-toned stained glass of my country church said God was here and present, too. I loved practicing various arts but assumed it was ‘my thing’ like some play basketball. It wasn’t until I was in seminary and studying church history, theology and apologetics that I began to see that art was a way of invisible cultural formation, an earnest and felt liturgy.

Our music, literature, architecture, dance, etc., has a culture making (and culture desecrating) force that shapes our lives in powerful and often unrealized ways. It’s not by divine accident that Jesus lived and worked as a craftsman for most of his life. While we may think of Jesus’s three-year ministry separated from the rest of His life (or filling time until the real ministry occured), we should recall that God is the Prime Artist and Principle Architect.

God’s kingdom story advances Creation and acts as an imaginative matrix for seamless kingdom activity. In the Incarnation, we must wrestle with the pervasive false dichotomy that distinguishes Christ the Craftsman and Christ the Resurrection. This articulated vision of The Prime Artist as the Resurrection calls me to faithful image bearing in all practices of human activity.