Part 2 of my conversation with Andy Crouch last week. Here Andy addresses his claim that “we can’t change the world.” My question to him - where’s the hope in that? How do we then move forward to bring true transformation?
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BETHANY: Throughout all different sectors of society today we hear much talk about “changing the world.” What are we to make of this? How do you think we are to go about changing the world?
ANDY: Whenever you make culture, if by the grace of God you’re successful, it leads to transformation and change in the world. That being said, I think that we get carried away sometimes… There are hundreds of books with the subtitle: “How such-and-such changed the world.” But it’s much harder in the midst of history or culture [as opposed to looking in retrospect] to be at all sure that what you do is going to have a transformative effect. If you’re in it, if you’re in the cultural project, to strategically bring a change, and that’s your goal, I think you run the risk basically of pride and of overreaching, of trying to strategize your way into enough cultural power to achieve your goal. The problem is that no one [person] has enough cultural power to achieve the kind of change they want to happen in the world, and so we can easily burn out on ‘changing the world.’
