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.’

Now does this mean that we’re not supposed to get right into the middle of the broken places in culture and try to bring change? No, it just means I think we should let go of this ‘world’ language. Or even changing “the” culture.  I think it’s above, well, not to quote Obama from this past weekend, but it’s above our pay grade. That’s beyond our capacity, to change the world. Its a kind of hyperbolic rhetoric that obscures what we’re trying to do, which is to be present in local cultural situations and to see opportunities to create something in those places. If we pay too much attention to the ‘world,’ (similar to the problem of the bumper sticker, “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand") we’re probably going to miss the most important opportunities God has given us, which tend to be very specific.

BETHANY: If this is true, that we can’t “change” the world,” then how do you avoid creating a mass of previously eager activists resigning in deflated hope? How do you keep issues from feeling so complicated that people end up doing nothing at all? Or to be more specific, when someone sincerely expresses “I want to see slavery end in my lifetime,” what guidance would you give?

ANDY: It’s tricky. I don’t want to discourage that, but I would say a couple things. First, it is absolutely right to pray to the Lord of history that slavery be ended, because that is God’s will.  We should be praying for Him to work in such a way that slavery is ended and all injustice is ended. That being said, I really think the most effective thing to do is probably not going to be a global abolition campaign.  And here’s why: The causes and channels and conduits of what we label slavery are so different in different cultures that is very difficult to address that problem on that global level.  And, not only are the causes of slavery diverse in different areas, also the remedies will also look different. 

It’s a little too easy or it’s just misleading to say let’s end it in “the world,” because we’re really going to have to think about, “What does slavery look like in India? And maybe when we look in South India it’ll be different from North India.  And then its going to look really different again in Sudan, and that’s going to look very different from slavery that’s happening in Atlanta, and in New Jersey.  So we’re going to have to pick a specific place in which to become culturally-fluent, to try to understand the causes of injustice and what creative intervention might lead to change.  That’s why IJM’s model is so good—It involves mobilizing people who are culturally-adept, in the different countries where [IJM] works, because the legal systems are so different. 

I always would try to push people to think locally and think about a specific place. And frankly we’re going to find that at the end of the day it still feels like it’s too big for us in some way! And I actually think that’s really good—it means we’re not just people imposing our vision on the world. We really are people who are really in the midst of suffering, asking for God to work.  And we’re putting all of our energies that we can into being part of His work. Even just thinking about one little district of one country—even then, you’re going to realize “This is too big, God we need you here.” And that’s exactly how Christians need to be.

...The language of changing the world is not nearly as helpful as asking, “What cultural good are you called to create and who are you called to create it with?” Because that gets us to really specific questions that happen at the scale where we can actually participate.

Some of us may feel frustrated and think, “Well I don’t know.  I don’t think there’s anything I can do to really make a difference.” But the truth us, if there’s one category of prayer that that I think God almost always answers, it’s “God, show me a risk that you want to me take for the sake of the Gospel.” I’m not aware of many people who have prayed that prayer, who have opened themselves up who haven’t had that answered in relatively short order.  It’s a matter of saying, “God, what local [as in specific vs. global, not necessarily domestic] place do you have for me? What calling, career, or cultural skill do You want me to develop?” God has a good track record of answering those prayers.