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The first year of the Christian Vision Project concludes with this essay by project editor Andy Crouch. In answering the series' initial question—"How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?"—Crouch has invited response from a variety of perspectives: a Reformed professor in Southern California, an Anglican bishop in Uganda, an ethicist and evangelical feminist at Duke Divinity School, a multiethnic ministry coach in the leafy Chicago suburb of Oak Park, and others. Such diversity fits Crouch well—how many writers and editors can cover topics of science, popular culture, and the virtue of shaving with a double-edged razor (see "The Best a Man Can Get," Books & Culture, March/April 2006) with equal verve?

But Crouch is not one to rock the boat merely for effect. Rather, his aim, and the aim of the entire cvp project—audacious as it may be—is to redirect the good ship evangelicalism, pointing us toward what Billy Graham has called "a vision of the future [that's] greater than the vision of the past."

In this piece, he writes, the question of evangelical cultural engagement begins not with a how, but a who. We need a hero, and Crouch has a nominee in mind.

The Christian Vision Project begins each year with a big question. In 2006, we asked, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?

We knew from the start that any set of articles, no matter how compelling, would provide an inadequate answer. Every how eventually has to be lived out by a who. Making sense of our moment in history, in other words, requires us to make a wise choice of heroes. Fortunately, over the course of 2006, we found one.

I'm not thinking primarily of the Christian leaders who contributed articles to these pages, nor of the remarkable artists, activists, churches, and families who allowed us to peek into their lives for the five films on our intersect|culture DVD. I'm thinking rather of a character from one of the shorter books in the Hebrew Bible, a book you can easily miss among the monumental histories, prayers, and prophecies.

Christians have always chosen biblical models for engaging the culture, and Scripture offers plenty of options. African Americans have emphasized Moses, leading his people out of bondage into the Promised Land. For many white evangelicals, though, Moses' story seems distant—or perhaps it comes uncomfortably close to likening our American ancestors to slave-holding Pharaoh. Some of us gravitate toward David and the other "good kings" in Israel's history, who fought for theocratic power amidst the threat of godless foreigners and the decay of a formerly faithful establishment. Others, especially those formed by the Anabaptist tradition, choose Jesus of Nazareth: nonviolent, alternately apolitical and subversive, diffident at best toward Jerusalem (let alone Rome), and at home among the poor.

Yet a different hero emerged during countless hours of conversation, writing, filming, and editing. I found myself talking with Sam Andreades, pastor of the Village Church, a small congregation whose size belies its significance as a fertile community for Christian artists and performers in lower Manhattan. "We see our model as Daniel," he told me. "When Daniel goes to Babylon, what do we find? He becomes more Babylonian than the Babylonians. He becomes the model Babylonian, while being no less a model for the people of God."

Canadian pastor Mark Buchanan wrote for CT's sister publication Leadership about the challenges of being a counterculture for the common good in the charged arena of sexual ethics. He observed that Daniel, "like Esther, lived in a time of exile—Babylonian, then Persian. … He had to sort out his place within that culture: What could he, without violating his conscience, say yes to? What must he, regardless of the personal risk, say no to?"

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December 2006, Vol. 50, No. 12