Welcome back to Monday Matters, where we kick-off the work week with some brief thoughts about the God-given dignity of work and culture. Our organization is founded on the belief that all work is meaningful, and Christians have a role to play in helping their communities flourish.

Today, we return again to Culture Making by Andy Crouch. Last week, we read an excerpt challenging us to see the way all people are included in God’s mandate to create and cultivate–even if our vocations are not obviously “creative” in nature.

In this week’s text, Crouch highlights the Bible’s great emphasis on the idea of a future heavenly city. Often, when Christians imagine God’s creation or a future eternity in God’s presence, it is not a city that first comes to mind. And yet, the books of Isaiah and Revelation beautifully describe a future “New Jerusalem,” a city teeming with God’s presence and where God’s promises of redemption and reconciliation are fulfilled.

Crouch writes, “But just as we hope and expect to be bodily present, in bodies we cannot now imagine yet that we believe will be recognizably our own – just as the disciples met Jesus in a resurrected body that had unimaginable capabilities yet was recognizably his own – it seems clear from Isaiah 60 and from Revelation 21 that we will find the new creation furnished with culture. Cultural goods too will be transformed and redeemed, yet they will be recognizably what they were in the old creation – or perhaps more accurately, they will be what they always could have been. The new Jerusalem will be truly a city: a place suffused with culture, a place where culture has reached its full flourishing. It will be the place where God’s instruction to the first human beings is fulfilled, where all the latent potentialities of the world will be discovered and released by creative, cultivating people.”

Questions for reflection:

1. Think about the city where you live, whether CCF’s home-base of Indianapolis or somewhere else. Within that city, where do you see evidence of God at work?

2. What “cultural artifacts” have come from your community. (Music or art? Diversity? Food? Inventions or industries? Social services or goods?) How do they reflect God’s creativity, goodness, and/or redemption?

Share your ideas and responses below!