Why Your Pastor Should Be a Vampire

Halloween is just around the corner, which means it would be a great time for you to watch a marvelously entertaining recent vampire movie.

It's a comedy out of New Zealand entitled What We Do In the Shadows.

It's not technically horror, but a silly, surprisingly endearing comedy about a quartet of vampires living together in a shared house.  It's considerably bloodier and with two hundred and seventy five percent more death than most comedies, and I don't commend it for family movie night, but hey.  It is entirely worth a watch.

Among the many funny moments was a riff on a classic part of the vampire myth.  Unlike zombies, werewolves, and other monstrous critters, vampires can't get you unless you let them.  Meaning: they are constitutionally incapable of stepping over the threshold of your home unless you welcome them in.  If you say no, or just don't make the offer, they stay out.  They must stay out.

That vampire ethic resonated interestingly against one of my core principles as a pastor and follower of Jesus.

Because there are similiarities between myself and vampires.  I mean, what do I do?  What's my profession?  I roam the earth, trying to share the secret of eternal life that I received from the one who turned me.  I have an intense relationship with crosses, crucifixes, and holy water.  Once a month, I gather with others, and we hold this ceremony where we drink blood.

Admittedly, I neither catch on fire nor sparkle in the sun, but my pasty Celtic flesh does burn in the light of day, so that sort of counts.

The similarity goes deeper, because I share that peculiar vampire ethic about boundaries.

Because it matters to me that your response to faith is authentic, I won't kick down your door to give what I have to you.  If you don't invite me in, I'll stay out.

This confuses many Americans, who are used to quite the opposite.  The expectation, as of late, is that Christians are the ones who chase after you relentlessly, who come at you and come at you and come at you.  They pursue you, overwhelm you, and then eat your brains.

I'm not that kind of Christian.  Those folks are the zombie Christians.  There are hordes and hordes of them lately, I'll admit.  But they are nowhere near as cool, and tend to rot away to nothing in the heat of summer, or freeze solid when winter comes.

I need you to take the step of opening up before I share what I have been given.  I will encourage you, call out to you, and make the path as clear and as attractive as I can.  But I will not hunt you down, or kick in your door.

I just won't.  Because the form of eternal life we Jesus folk offer--one radically grounded in God's love and Christ's compassion--necessarily respects your boundaries, and honors your thresholds.  That's how love works.

You have to open up your door, and welcome it in.

The Zombie Church

Pastors all across America are looking at their sermon schedules, realizing that Sunday is All Hallows Eve, and having one of two responses.  For some, it'll be time for the annual sermon reminding parents to keep their kids safe from the pernicious influence of Satanism.  And neighbors.  And fun. 

For the pastors who aren't totally and utterly uncool, though, the question is this:  how can I work zombies into my sermon?

'Cause you just gotta have zombies.  Vampires?  Well, they're just meh.  Particularly those sorry sparkly ones. Zombies are hot.  They're everywhere in our culture, a seemingly endless font of hipster delight.

Over the last few years, it's not just that I've watched and enjoyed Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland.  I've heard bluegrass songs about zombies.  I've read bits and pieces of the bizarrely entertaining Jayne Eyre mashup  "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."  I've watched as one of the best games of 2010, the brilliant western-themed "Red Dead Redemption" offered up it's first expansion pack...in which you're not just a gunslinger in a western town.  You're a gunslinger in a western town...with zombies.  Like, awesome, dude.

There are zombie parties, and zombie walks, in which hundreds of folk get together to shamble down the street.

America is into zombies.   As a pastor, I'm particularly interested in zombies, because I understand congregations as living breathing organisms.  They should be.  But there are plenty of zombie churches.  What are the characteristics of a zombie church?  Here are three ways to identify a zombie church:

1)  It eats your brain.  A zombie church isn't really interested in you as a person.  Your identity as a unique child of god means nothing.  The ways you might bring your particular gifts and hopes into it mean nothing.  The thoughts in your cortex mean nothing to it.  You're just pew-filling meat and easily digestible neural tissue.  You are just this tasty thing that will keep it going as it shambles on to its next victim.  Depending on the damage that does, it will leave you either completely torn to pieces or, rarely, shambling alongside it in the search for more braaaains.

2)  It can't grow.  A zombie church doesn't ever change, outside of having pieces fall off now and again.  Living and dynamic congregations welcome change, welcome the new, growing and expanding as they acknowledge new gifts in the community.  But zombie churches just keep doing the same thing, long past the point that that thing had any life in it at all.  They repeat the same events, not as affirming ritual, but as mindless process.  They shamble through their life together, throwing one foot in front of another while animated only by a glazed hungry emptiness.

3)  It isn't really alive.  Zombie churches live for reasons that have nothing to do with the new life that comes with the indwelling of Christ's spirit.   They can be driven by hatred or group think or the hunger for material prosperity.  Those ones tend to be faster and more dangerous.  Then there are the slower, more classic Night of the Living Dead Zombie churches.  They tend to be sustained by endowments or pools of resources that let them keep doing the same things they've always done, even as they slowly rot away to nothing.   They're easier to avoid, as they tend to just gimp around in circles moaning to themselves.

So as you're out there, wandering through the desolate wasteland of American Christianity looking for a community of faith that might sustain you, just keep these things in mind.

And remember, cardio, cardio, cardio.