The Stew

I enjoy these moments when different sorts of ingredients come together and I can somehow manage a connection.  It's probably why I like to cook, and why I like to preach.  Here are my ingredients for today:

1. A visit to the dentist's office, where I had my teeth cleaned, whilst being watched carefully by Shiva and Ganesh, not to mention Buddha, as well as several oriental paintings.  Not surprising given that my Dentist is a Hindu and an Indian, but the weird thing was the Christmas music being played over the PA system, it was decidedly religious: O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and several pieces from Handel's Messiah, no Rockin' around the Christmas Tree, thanks be to God.
2. This rather lengthy post-mortem of the Mars Hill / Mark Driscoll implosion.
3. Research from the seemingly tireless folks at the Barna group about just how un-churched, de-churched and otherwise practically heathen this "Christian" nation actually is.

What sort of conclusion do I draw from all of these ingredients?
Primarily that our world, when it comes to religion, largely resembles my Dentist's office.  I thought about it from an anthropological perspective.  What would some future scientist make of my Dentist's office?  There is all manner of medical paraphernalia, some of it pretty high tech, there are computers and records of a large number of people and their teeth.  There are several small operating theaters, there are representations of several major and largely contradictory religious systems: Hindu/Buddhist, Christian, Shinto/Taoist, Confucian, Judaic, if you count the Old Testament of the several Gideon's Bibles in the waiting room, no Muslim stuff, but maybe I just didn't spot that.
In my head, I began writing the sort of unsupported but truthy sort of "scientific" explanation one often hears on those History channel documentaries.

In the early twenty-first century, in what became known as the post-modern period, Americans, elevated their obsession with dental hygiene to an unprecedented level.  Dentist's offices resembled shrines, where people of all persuasions put aside the differences that formerly divided them, in the hope that a winning smile would be the key to everlasting happiness and enlightenment.  All the old exclusive claims to ultimate truth vanished like tartar and coffee stains, as Shiva triumphantly admired the patients' flossing technique (especially since they mostly had only two arms), while Pavarotti sang of the birth of Jesus the Christ.

Until my hygienist asked me to stop laughing because it was making her job difficult.
What do we do with a world like this?
Well, it's pretty obvious that the same old stuff is not going to work anymore, but neither is the sort of Amazon.com overhaul that Driscoll was working on out on the left coast.  It would seem to me that number/business model driven churches are doomed to eventual failure.  Probably because, as a wise man once said, "you can't serve two masters."
The Barna research seems to tell us that something is not working, and it's not necessarily that people don't care about God.  The fact that well over half of the "un-churched" consider themselves Christian, was absolutely not news to me.  If you added in agnostic and vaguely religious people you would have an even more impressive majority.
The world is not becoming godless, it has just become confused.  I felt that confusion as I looked at Shiva while hearing a choir sing "hallelujah, hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth!"
It is my belief that Christianity has the answer to this confusion, but the forms in which we choose to incarnate that answer are often misguided.  We seek a triumphal answer, we still, even after all this time, expect the same messiah that Scribes and Pharisees expected, and which they crucified Jesus for not being.
We still look for proof of God's covenant faithfulness in the sort of "frontline" missionality that fueled the Mars Hill boom and eventually led to the collapse.  We, and I admit frequent culpability in this attitude, have no patience for the slow and painstaking work of the Kingdom.  Discipleship is too hard and too difficult to sell, the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, we've got serious business model problems here people!
So, apparently, does every other religion.
It occurs to me that it's much easier to just put an interesting hanging of Ganesh on the wall, and a Gideon's Bible on the table (after all they just give those away), and keep your fingers crossed that somewhere in the stew, everything just works out.