2. “God’s first and best gift to humanity is culture.” --Andy Crouch Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling StewardingThe Good Life

3. What Is Culture? “Culture is what we make of the world.” Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else… It always bears the stamp of our creativity, our God-given desire to make something more than we were given. After thousands of years of accumulating human culture, the world we must make something of is largely the world others before us have made. Culture, even more than nature, defines for us the horizons of possibility and impossibility. We live in the world that culture has made. (Andy Crouch)

4. “Culture always and only comes from particular human acts of cultivation and creativity.” (Ibid.)

5. Stewarding the Good LifeGenesis 1:26-28 (TNIV) 28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

6. Stewarding the Good LifeGenesis 1:29-30 (TNIV) 29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so. Before the Fall, we were all regular God didn’t just give us plants God gave us all responsibility

7. The Dual Cultural Mandate Steward GOD’S IMAGE God’s GLORY Multiply and Diversify! (next Sunday) Steward the GOOD LIFE God’s BLESSINGS Fill the earth and subdue it Rule over all creatures Cultivate & Create CULTURE

9. Gen 2 = Cultivating and Creating!

10. God had already planted The Garden

11. Not just tending it but creating too (2:19)!“God’s first and best gift to humanity is culture, the realm in which human beings themselves will be the cultivators and creators, ultimately contributing to the cosmic purposes of the Cultivator and Creator of the natural world.” (Ibid.)

12. Our Typical Responses to Culture Condemn Critique Copy Consume “I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside of our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so…”

13. Artists & Gardeners Both begin with a posture of CONTEMPLATION After contemplation, the Artist and the Gardener both adopt a posture of PURPOSEFUL WORK Gardener tends what has gone before, making the most of what is beautiful and weeding out what is distracting or useless Artist starts with blank canvas or block of stone and gradually brings out of it that which was never there before

14. Culture is what we make of the world. As stewards of God’s Good Life in Christ… We are to start with what is, Contemplate how God wants to improve it, And then devote ourselves to the effort to make this real Some examples: EBCLA’s vision to become a Faith Village Temple Tutoring, Family Promise, Youth Ministry My serving on secular drug agency’s board Chris Wong’s films, Palisoc’s charter schools How might Jesus be calling you to cultivate and create culture in your part of The Garden?