The Five Culture Creators

In the apostles chapter Woodward nicknames apostles dream awakeners because the heart of an apostle is to awaken people and communities to join God in the renewal of all things. Apostles are sent by God to help create a discipleship ethos and to call people to participate in the advancement of God’s kingdom. They help people understand themselves as sent, for the sake of the world. Disciples make disciples. Ministries multiply and bless.

He locates that sending in Jesus. After the resurrection, the disciples had the door bolted. Jesus met them with peace, showed his wounds, and sent them as the Father had sent him. Woodward's summary is that apostles understand they are sent people, and in turn they send people. He tells two pictures of that life. Aby's father, a Brahmin man once broken by alcohol, was sent among the Untouchables. Thirty-five years later, Woodward reports, there were six thousand churches in northern India and surrounding countries. Tom Hawkes, who once threw Woodward into a dorm hallway, later helped establish communities of faith in Ukraine. Chris Backert, cofounder of Imago Dei in Richmond and of the Ecclesia Network, is the local and translocal portrait: a visionary who helps people find where their passions meet the world's needs, and who is still learning to balance the two geographies of his work.

The discipleship ethos is holistic. Woodward adapts an ancient pattern into a continuum he prints as a table: resister, skeptic, seeker, hearer, kneeler, faithful, worshiper. Making disciples, he says, is a process, and it takes place while people are engaged in God's mission. Apostles call out what the Spirit has already put in someone. They give practical assignments with deadlines. They walk through the valley with people. Training, in his line, takes place more in the living room and the streets than in the classroom and sanctuary. Apostles also catalyze. They want forward movement, new missional spaces, and a cultural web in which a congregation can thrive and multiply. He says many people are gifted in primary and secondary ways. The chapter ends with questions for discerning an apostle, from a discipleship ethos to equipping others to do the same.

Woodward calls prophets heart revealers because they reveal the heart of God and the hearts of those in the congregation. Their focal concern is pursuing God's shalom. Their destination is calling the church to God's new social order and standing with the poor and oppressed. He says prophets perceive reality when others are lost in illusion, and that when they come, hearts are laid bare. He reads Jesus this way in chapter 10. Anguish over Jerusalem led Jesus to confront fraud and hypocrisy, to challenge the purity code that decided insiders and outsiders, and to reveal God's heart while exposing the heart of the people he touched. The poor and marginalized in Galilee received that news as forgiveness and as new economic, social, and political realities.

The prophets chapter puts that calling in two places. One is Pentecost and the early community: a reversal of Babel, a people of one heart who held goods in common because they were already one family, a divine counter-society in the sense he takes from Gerhard Lohfink. The other is inclusion and the poor. At Kairos Hollywood a mother called because her son, badly deformed and hunched, felt welcomed by a number of people and still had not made good friends. Woodward says the call broke his heart and showed their need for more prophets and pastors who would help create a culture where all were truly included. He also says heart revealers remind the church that Jesus brought good news to the poor, and he gives them this proclamation: "if our gospel isn’t good news for the poor, then it is not the same good news that Jesus proclaimed."

His own turn toward that calling is dated. In October 2004, with about twenty people in his apartment, Bishop Kaaleng told them that some in the Turkana region of Kenya were eating one meal every three days. Woodward's first thought was that he already had enough on his plate. He sensed a rebuke, began what he calls a Kenya fast, and in about a year the Solis Foundation was giving microgrants for small businesses in Turkana. Maria Drews, in a mid-sized community at Kairos, is the local portrait: a vegetarian, mostly without a car, a neighborhood council representative, whose choices make him look again at his own heart. He adds that a local prophet is sometimes unseen, and he cites Jesus not being accepted in his hometown.

Woodward gives evangelists the nickname of story tellers. They help the congregation share God's story so that when people apart from Christ hear the good news and accept it, their life story is transformed for the glory of God and the good of the world. The focal concern is incarnating the good news. The destination marks are proclaiming that news by being witnesses, and being redemptive agents. He opens the chapter with East Hollywood, where he lives: over 52,000 people in 1.8 square miles, Little Armenia and Thai Town, many faiths, and percept studies he says showed 49 percent with no faith involvement, against a 35 percent national average. He asks what it means to incarnate the good news in a neighborhood that complex. That question, he says, is a focal concern of the evangelist.

Being a witness, as he reads Acts 1:8, comes before the doing and the saying. He wants a church where the poor find riches, the lonely find community, the sick find healing, and the broken find wholeness, so that words about Christ answer a question the life has already raised. He cites Graham Tomlin on evangelism that works as an answer to a question, and Bonhoeffer: the church is only the church when it exists for others. The story teller then asks the congregation four questions. What does it mean to be the church that lives under the reign of God? If God's reign were perfectly realized in this neighborhood, what would be different? What idols here need to be unmasked? How do we call others to receive the kingdom and join us in representing God's reign? In East Hollywood those questions became trees planted with neighbors, a lunch afterward, talks that set Scripture next to recent films, and Artist at the Fountain, which he and Daichi hosted so art and a gift to a justice project shared one night.

The second telos is redemptive agents. When he meets an actor in Hollywood, his first thought is their calling in the world. He uses Andy Crouch's language of culture makers: culture is what human beings make of the world, in spheres and at scales. He quotes Colossians 3 on working heartily as for the Lord, and he remembers the now and the not yet of the kingdom. Aaron Graham, whose primary gift he calls apostolic and whose secondary gift is evangelist, is the chapter's local picture at the District Church in Washington, D.C.