Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, Post Two

In the chapter “Teardowns, Technology, and Change”, Crouch draws parrelels from Brand’s book How Buildings Learn. Brand identifies six layers in a building, from the inside out: Stuff, Space, Plan, Services, Skin, Structure, and Site. Brand argues that change is easiers at the inner layers and harder toward the outside.

Brand wrote another book, The Clock of the Long Now, in which he applies the same model to culture as a whole. He coined the following layers: Fashion, Commerce, Infrastructure, and Governance.

Crouch observes, “Brand’s most important insight is that there is an inverse relationship between a cultural layer’s speed of change and its longevity of impact.

So children’s pastors should be aware of fads and fashions. They are a way to identify with the population we serve. But we shouldn’t place much hope guessing which movie or book to co-opt for ministry purposes. (I know, I know– I spent a lot of energy with that Harry Potter outreach a few years back. The greatest benefit of that ministry what how it educated our church in how Grace would take risks and do whatever it took to reach the lost. The impact on the children was, at best, minimal. The culture change wasn’t the broad evangelism of the un-churched children. The culture change was internal. It was one event, in a long series of events, that help make and keep Grace pliable and willing to adapt to meet necessary changes.)