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.

Life of the Dead

I've pretty much stopped writing.

It's a strange thing to say, given that I write almost every day for the twenty or so human beings who read this blog. But I used to write creatively, pitching out stories that burbled to the surface of my churning consciousness, yearning to be told. The last story I wrote was over a decade ago, and having failed to get it published, I've left it sitting out on the web as a reminder that I used to have some semblance of a creative spark.

It's still there, of course. I just don't give myself the time to play out the narratives that clamor to be put into print. One of my favorite unfulfilled tales isn't a book, but a screenplay concept that puts a different spin on one of the more interesting genres in moviemaking: the zombie flick.

Ever since the really-quite-amazing Night of the Living Dead, George Romero made zombie flicks something more than just horror. They are, in their own way, commentary about the human condition. Here's my twist on the genre: In my imaginary screenplay for Life of the Dead, zombies do not want to eat your brains. That never made a lick of sense anyway. Why not spleens? Why not hunger for toenails? It goes further, though. In my take, zombies not only don't want to use your brainpan as a snack tray, they have no desire whatsoever to hunt/eat/consume/harm anyone.

Instead, after the necessary terrible accidental release of a zombie-inducing biological agent, those who've been zombified just attempt to go about their lives. Being zombies, though, they are completely oblivious to one another, and to those few humans who haven't been infected. They are also really, really incompetent and aggressive, and being dead, don't really take their own mortality into consideration when going about their lives.

The narrative tension would come from the requisite rag-tag band of the unaffected, trying desperately to leave a major metropolitan area in which 95% of the human population has suddenly become undead. Easy? Imagine trying to cross a major highway on which zombies were commuting. Or the potential hazards posed by zombie airline pilots. Or avoiding zombie cops arresting whoever they could catch. Or zombie military personnel, randomly attacking everything in sight.

It's a bit like Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros, a deeply absurd and humorous/horrible fable about our radical selfishness and complete lack of caring for one another. Only you wouldn't tell anyone that, because it might seem too hoighty toighty.

Given my tendency to put a faith-spin on everything, I envision a particularly delightful sequence early on in which one of the protagonists takes refuge at her megachurch....only to find it filled with a throng of zombie Christians, while the undead pastor bellows and grunts incoherently at his swaying, slowly rotting flock. Some of the hands being held up during zombie praise might not even be attached.

I'm telling you, this thing's got legs, baby. 150 million gross, easy, and that's before it hits DVD/iTunes distribution. Have your people call my people.