Doing Church in the Inventive Age

My best friend and I had an apartment together right after we graduated from college. And that was when I really learned how to cook.  Pam was a great cook; me, not so much. So I took every opportunity to learn from the master.

One day, I asked her what I could do to help get dinner going.  She said, "Why don't you wash off the tomatoes and cut them up?"  And so I proceeded to do just that. So I got out the carton of salt and took it over to the sink, added a little water to the tomatoes, and started scrubbing.

"What are you doing?!"

"I'm washing off the tomatoes, like you asked."

"You don't have to use salt to wash tomatoes."

"You don't?"

No, you don't.  But I didn't know that.  I was washing off tomatoes like my mother had shown me to do, like her mother had shown her to do.  My grandmother was kind of a germophobe, and all I can guess is that she was using salt as an abrasive to get all the cooties off the surface of the tomato. Now I know that plain old tap water will do the trick - but it still took me a while to drop the habit that I'd learned from my mother and grandmother.  They did it that way for the needs of a previous time, but in the late 20th century it was no longer necessary.

I thought about those tomatoes this morning when The Sharons and I heard Doug Pagitt at the Presbyterian Foundation breakfast. Doug is the pastor of one of those emergent churches called Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis, and he has a good friend you might have heard recently named Phyllis Tickle.  He makes a very good argument for the case that humanity has move from the Agrarian age through the Industrial Age to the Information Age, and now, to the Inventive Age.

The Inventive Age has a lot  of good news for the church of Jesus Christ.  The warp-speed version of what he said is this:  we have moved from "What can I grow" to "what can I make" to "what can I know" to, now, "what can I be" or "what can I contribute."  But one of the lessons for us as the church is that we are going to have to be more nimble than we have ever been in order to keep up.

He noted that, as we all know, necessity is the mother of invention - but it can also be that invention is the mother of necessity.  As times change, when we can't do a lot about those changes, we have to come up with new ways of addressing them. And that in a nutshell is what the Inventive Age is all about.

Doug has a lot of books available on Amazon, some of which I intend to get reading. For now, though, he's got me wondering: what is it in our church life that we are still scrubbing off with salt, which we don't need to do anymore? There might be a whole lot more things on that list than we might be comfortable admitting.  Doug says that churches need to spend a whole lot more time telling their histories, in order to understand why it is that we used to salt those tomatoes. If we find that it's still necessary to do so, that's okay. But at least we will have made an intentional choice to do so. And if we find that we can set that salt shaker aside, well, then we will have more time and energy to invite people to contribute those newer gifts they have to bring.

Scary?  Yeah, a little.  More than that, though, I think it's exciting.