Most mothers in this part of the world, if not all, nag (although mine doesn’t, glory to God, hallelujah). One of the things I frequently hear mothers nag over is the fact that their lazy children are too much of slugs to source for more nutritious food other than instant noodles; for some, it’s a daily diet (both the noodles and the nagging). Thus the oft-heard line: “Don’t keep on eating instant noodles! It’s not good for your health, you know! Can get cancer, you know!”, followed by the rattling off of a story of a young man in a distant land feeding on instant noodles every day and his consequential sudden demise.

I don’t know the science of instant noodles and how dangerous they may be. But there are two things I know about instant noodles: 1) They are fast to cook, which makes people keep opting for instant noodles when they have neither the patience nor the motivation to whip up a good meal; and 2) They are good to eat, which makes people keep wanting to eat them. And as we appetise ourselves over a bowl of instant noodles, the last thing on our minds is how detrimental each pack of these noodles may be for our health. As the Chinese community here often says (translated), “Eat first, consider later”.

Instant noodles are a quick fix for a hungry appetite. And on the same token, I’m afraid we have many such quick fixes in our Christian communities today. We have a quick way of fixing our church institutional mechanisms through the host of church models available in the Christian market today. If you have the model franchised and the numbers to prove it, you’ll be a millionaire. If you’re the pastor of the church and that franchise belongs to you, you’ll become an international household name who needs no salary from your church anymore.

We have a quick way of fixing our discipleship. We have the different training programmes in our churches which “produce disciples” through mere two- or three-hour training classes or weekend training camps.

We have a quick way of fixing our broken spirituality. We have professional live bands “leading worship” in the church which arouse the emotions to the fullest of their abilities, making us feel more spiritual than before we began singing and waving our hands in the air. This also leaves us wondering when the effect might start wearing off before we may need new doses of spiritual morphine again.

We have a quick way of fixing our inabilities to do theological reflection. We have rhetorically competent preachers (or at least preachers who try to be so) giving us very concise and clear instructions on how we should live our lives in a way that “pleases God”, drawing black and white to the very precise boundaries of their margins. They’re so precise and sure in their instructions, the listeners practically do not need to think any further.

And amidst all this frenzy over “instant noodle spirituality”, we’re still going about looking for quicker ways to be quick, so that we might be quicker than those who are already quick. One of the pressures of being a leader of a Christian community is that of reckoning with what the people want, and most often, they want instant noodles. And we give it to them because we need people in the church. Well, thus says the wisdom of the mothers:

“Don’t keep on eating instant noodles! It’s not good for your health, you know! Can get cancer, you know!”