Andy Crouch, Christian author, musician and former Acton University plenary speaker, reviews For the Life of the World, a new curriculum series produced by the Acton Institute. In the newest edition of Christianity Today, Crouch discusses how this series takes the Dutch Reformed theology of Abraham Kuyper and “pops” it in a whole new direction. The result, Crouch says, is inventive, profound and rewarding.
With the intention of attempting to “articulate core concepts of oikonomia (stewardship), anamnesis (remembering), and prolepsis (anticipation)” for a modern audience, Crouch says much of the reason the series works so well is because of Evan Koons, who acts as guide, questioner, and scribe.
You would surely never guess that our protagonist is a manically expressive 20-something named Evan (Evan Koons, who cowrote the script). Evan lives in a house filled with retro bric-a-brac, furnished circa 1940, and undisturbed by any technology invented since 1983. He is given to playing the ukulele, declaiming poetry, drinking lemonade from Mason jars—and to breaking the fourth wall, freezing the frame, and scrambling narrative sequence, using every trick of the postmodern visual storyteller.
When we meet him, Evan is in the throes of a quarter-life crisis. He’s sure that if faith means anything, it must have implications for everything, but finds little guidance from the church toward a viable calling in a pluralistic world. Evan begins the series, and ends every episode, handwriting a letter to his fellow Christians: “Dear Everybody.” The question that Evan finds most worrying is, “What is our salvation for?”
In the search for answers, Evan encounters everything from marionettes to manure to hockey and a hoe-down. Rather than a mash-up of eye candy, Crouch says the whole thing works…well.
My teenagers loved the series unreservedly, but they laughed at its hipster bona fides. If you are a Gen Xer who insists on a side dish of irony at every meal, you may want to steer clear. Then again, Evan and his friends might be the tonic you need to recall just how wondrous, serious, and joyous the Christian story is and can be.
