Andy Crouch drove me up an unfamiliar road to one of those scenic overlooks where we got out and gazed at culture spread out small below. We looked out over work and war, art and history, academics and entertainment from a promontory I hadn't visited before, at least not since Francis Schaeffer took me up to a nearby place 35 years ago. As I read, my alter egos piled out of the car for a look. CitizenMe, ArtistMe, ParentMe, PreacherMe all peeking out from behind me and pestering, "What is it? What do you see?"

Crouch's book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (IVP, 2008) was named the 2009 Christianity Today Book of the Year in the Christianity and Culture category. One judge described it as "an astonishing work that moves from sociological analysis to biblical theology (in story form) to their practical implications." I read it because I think preachers need to read important books like this. It was a good decision.

As a preacher, I tend to focus on the Christian's inner life, the way the Bible's stethoscope monitors the pulses of our souls and our church. I shy away from sermons about culture and society. It sounds strange, I know, but those subjects never seem very practical to me. By taking me up to his cultural overlook, Andy Crouch helped me think better as a Christian leader, helped me to see from an angle I would have surely missed without him.

We evangelicals talk a lot about culture. How corrupt it is, how we need to transform worldviews, how Christians can change our world. "Not so fast!" he kept saying as I read. "Are you sure you've thought about this?" Crouch made me see that culture is much bigger and more complex than I usually treat it. He says that changing worldviews doesn't guarantee changed culture. "Culture is not changed simply by thinking," he says. He warns that critiquing culture all the time (as we are prone to do) doesn't actually change it. "To this day," he writes on page 87, "evangelicalism, so deeply influenced by the Schaeffers and their many protégés, still produces better art critics than artists." I had sensed that, but hadn't seen it till I read it there.

This man knows his Bible! He helped me step back from the details of my weekly exegesis of a few verses to see the broad biblical outlines of how God works to make good culture in this rebellious Babel-like world. He shows how the central events of the Old and New Testaments—the exodus and the death and resurrection of Christ—utterly remade the world's culture. My pulse rate actually rose as I read his thrilling summary of God's work over the ages through Christ and his people.

Preaching about culture making

Andy Crouch isn't a preacher—at least not an every-Sunday-do-it-again preacher. He only occasionally alludes to preaching in this book, and then he may lob a potshot. Like when he says that people who grew up in or near fundamentalist Christianity "remember plenty of sermons about the danger of the world, but none about the delights of the world" (p. 85). Or on page 226, "while it is likely that you have heard at least one sermon on how to think in a Christian way about sex and … money … , chances are you have never heard a sermon on how to be stewards of cultural power." Well, okay, probably not in so many words, I guess.

I'd like to ask him what texts he would have me preach on. Not topics and themes—texts. I'm an expositor, and I work best when I can focus on one passage at a time. He's thought more about this than I have, after all. Is there one section of Scripture he'd focus on? I suspect he'd point to Genesis 2 to have us explore the creation of mankind in God's image and the dominion God gives us over creation. But what others would he suggest?

As I read his book, I noodled on a sermon series about good work. Something from Genesis 2, to begin with, followed maybe by some kingdom parables (he mentions the sower and seed), and then a big finish with the Christian's hope of everlasting fruitfulness in the new heaven and new earth. I also remembered a series I did about Christianity and the arts that I titled, My Heart Is Stirred by a Noble Theme. I think he would like that one. But I think we ought to invite this insightful brother to a preaching conference and work this out with him.

I forget sometimes that among the preacher's tasks is providing a kind of civics class for Christians—the biblical foundations for our roles as citizens of God's kingdom in this fallen world. Crouch reoriented me to that.

Preaching as culture making

At the price of giving away Crouch's big ending, he eventually points to three Christian principles that really do make new culture in a uniquely Christian way: power (as in resurrection power), Christian community, and God's grace in Christ. Power, community, grace.

My book is all marked up and notated (a tribute to its quality), but perhaps my favorite quote is from page 214: "Our creativity will be called for and we will find a divine wind at our back whenever we discover a place where the current horizons deprive people of their full humanity." It dawned on me, that is what good preaching does. Good preaching is culture making. I plug away at it every Sunday!

As I study each week I do a kind of reverse engineering from the text before me. What in this text is not what my fellow believers regularly experience or practice? What about this passage is counterintuitive? To put it in Andy Crouch's language, what does this passage tell me about current horizons of my flock that deprive them of their full humanity? Then I bring the potency and genius of God's Word to that need. And indeed, I do find "creativity is called for and a divine wind is at my back" when I speak into that need.

Read this book. Not for sermon ideas, so much, but so that your own PreacherMe can think better when he goes back to pick up those 12 verses you have before you next Sunday.

Lee Eclov recently retired after 40 years of local pastoral ministry and now focuses on ministry among pastors. He writes a weekly devotional for preachers on Preaching Today.