Andy Crouch had a fascinating article in the last Catalyst ezine entitled The Horizons of the Possible: Why Changing Culture Requires Courage.
Culture, according to Andy, is a concrete entity.
Culture is not just beliefs, values, ideas, or images. It’s actual, concrete stuff-material, corporeal, physical. It is the very tangible product of human activity. . . culture is “what we make of the world.” . . . culture is indeed an expression of our beliefs and values, [but] the way we express those values is to make particular things.
Andy argues that culture thus defines the “horizons of the possible and the impossible in very concrete, tangible ways.” Fortunately, culture is not static; the horizons are movable, moldable. But whenever we attempt to change culture, we assault the impossible; we challenge the very horizons of the possible and the impossible. Everything outside of the horizons is, for the moment and for most people, impossible to imagine, let alone accomplish. Yet those horizons may move. Or they may not. And movement often depends upon “culture-creating, culture-changing” leaders—movement leaders who dare to push against the outer edges, who dare to discover how resistant those horizons are to change.
As we’ve discussed in previous posts, the biblical understanding of movements is much more aligned with a sociological framework than with an organizational one. Movements are more about “culture change” than organizational measure like the numbers of churches or small groups or ministries. At the heart of a “gospel” movement, according to Tim Keller and others, is an ideology of the gospel which pursues the twin goals of changing people and renewing culture.
So when William Wilberforce confronted the “slave-trade culture” at the heart of the British economy, the cultural horizons seemed resistant to change. Renewing the culture must have seemed impossible for Wilberforce and other abolitionists to imagine, let alone accomplish. Nothing is harder than creating new culture out of the “actual, concrete, physical” injustices that have resulted from what we have made of the world. Yet, Wilberforce and his Clapham community of saints pushed at the horizons of the impossible and “brought the world around a corner.”
Andy’s article suggests two ingredients for culture change–both illustrated beautifully in Wilberforce’s courageous pursuit of justice in the company of his friends. They are two ingredients needed for missional team leaders as well; without them, we can have no movements.
Courage
Courage is the willingness to risk failure. Without it, no one can change culture; no one can create something that will move the horizons of possibility and impossibility.
Without courage, we won’t be far out of the comfortable valley of currently realized possibilities before we turn around and head right back home. It is ever so much safer to simply live within the constraints of what is already possible. . . It works the other way, too: it is much safer to live within the constraints of what is already impossible. If “things” are impossible, after all, we’re off the hook. Only courage will equip us to ask the question.
Community
The reality is, however, that we only find courage together, in community. Andy reminds us that “culture is simply never created in isolation. No one gets to move the horizons alone.”
Every cultural change worth making spreads through a network of people who know and trust one another. Indeed, the horizons are so powerful that only a relatively small, tight-knit group can sustain the belief that the horizons could one day move. That is why every . . . movement . . . begins with a small group of believers who are willing to set out on a journey together to the edge of the current horizons-to create something together and then offer it to the wider world.
Lots of misplaced horizons and broken cultures confront us. Everywhere we look, the least, the last and the lost long for leaders embolden by their “friends” to risk failure over and over again to move the horizons of the impossible, “to dare to make something new in the midst of the world.”
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