Pimpin' the Buggy...

Something's been bothering me for some time now. Like Morpheus telling Neo in their first encounter in the Matrix that there is "...something wrong with the world... you don't know what it is, but it's there...like a splinter in your mind...driving you mad." I've tried to pick a suitable metaphor to begin to describe it, and am coming up with this. See what you think.

The "Givens": We engage a lot of churches here at GCC, so i know we're not alone in this. All of us are trying to "get it done" in some fashion. The "it" we're trying to get done includes such things as:

* We're all trying to bring Kingdom from Heaven to Earth.
* All trying to reach out to the lost, the hurting, the poverty-striken, the sick, the weak, the lonely, and those who cannot defend themselves or provide for themselves.
* We are all, in our various ways, attempting to be the people of God in our current generation. And we are all attempting to figure out the best way to accomplish that objective.

The Problem (as i see it): Many of us, however, aren't really sure "how far" we are supposed to go to straddle the increasing gap between what appears to be our culture and the faith that we hold. And we think that if we just "add a new program, a new 'edgy' staff guy, a cool new look, or a new service venue", that such will keep us current with our culture, but not require us to really change any fundamental paradigms around which we operate. We say, with great conviction (and consolation to ourselves), that "we're willing to change the method, but not the Message", and we charge ahead with making minor changes here and there that we think will keep us "in the game" with the world around us.

But it's starting to look a lot to me like what i'm now increasing calling "Pimping the Buggy". What would you say if you were sitting at a stop-light, and you heard the clip-clop of horses' hooves beside you. You look over and see a tricked out Amish buggy sitting there, complete with brand-new fiberglass "butterfly" doors, curb-feelers, ground-effects, a huge "whale tail" spoiler on the back, deeply tinted windows, 36" alloy rims and racing slick tires. The horses are decked out with titanium yoke and bridle systems, and each has blinders and accoutriments that match the flourescent pink (with yellow and green flame job) fuselage of the buggy itself. The guy driving the buggy bats the pair of green fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror once as he looks over at you, smiles, and then nods courteously to you. When the light turns green, he takes off like a shot from the lane, achieving a blistering 25 mph in a little over 8 seconds, leaving you to contemplate his vanity plate (it reads "HORSPWR") as you sit there awe-struck.

The Question: When we say that we want to be "relevant" and "innovative" in our culture, what really do we mean? Do we mean that really, we're willing to trick out what is fundamentally at its core an outdated, outmoded means of conveying Good News, or are we really willing to think and explore deeply about what it might mean to completely adopt a whole new model. I think we're all committed to the notion of "transportation" (i.e. Gospel, Jesus, personal transformation, etc), but it seems to me that as i engage people in our culture that much of what the Church attempts to do to gain audience to talk about things that are deeply spiritual looks little more to them than just an attempt to "pimp the buggy". We're scared to buy a car, but we're willing to try to look as much as we can like we have one. At what point are we better off either just a) acknowledging that we like buggies, and we have no intention of either pimping ours or buying a car, and if that means that we lose our relevance, so be it, or b) buy a car, with all of its frightening access to speed, freedom and the potential for much more lethal accidents? I think the way we answer that question will have a lot to do with "what the Church looks like" for the next generation in our culture.

Of course, this is a much bigger question than can be explored here in a single blog-post, but i'm pleased that i at least feel like we're trying to aggressively pursue the answer.

Of Weekends and Seminal "Mecha Anime"...

We watch a lot of Japanese Anime at our house. In fact, over the past five plus years, i'm fond of saying that we've probably consumed more animated entertainment from Japan than from anywhere else in the world, and could probably compete even with most Japanese people for our mastery of the relative plot-lines and universes associated with our favorite series titles. In Eastern Europe last November, i actually spent 90 minutes on a bus from Krakow to Auschwitz with a Japanese exchange student from Tokyo and, combined with my affection for martial arts and history, made him laugh at one point as he commented that i was "probably more Japanese than he was".
At any rate, if you watch much Anime, you can't go for long without engaging the series called Neon Genesis: Evangelion. It's your standard "mecha anime" and revolves around the notion that there are aliens (called "Angels") attacking Earth at regular intervals, and only a crack team of child-piloted giant robots (called Eva's - short for Evangelion) can save the earth from these extra-terrestrial monsters. The Eva's are gigantic, cybernetic creatures capable of their own thought and action (sort-of), and while the plot of the Anime isn't really that unique, it's still considered seminal to many that followed in the same vein.

The "point" of bringing this up is that in each episode, the human EVA pilot must stay "in sync" with the gigantic cyborg he/she controls. At the headquarters of NERV (the covert organization that maintains and deploys the EVA units) a huge board displays a set of nerve and psychographic data for the pilot, and a similar set of nerve and neuro-motor data for the EVA. In order for the EVA to function properly, the pilot and EVA have to be in "perfect sync". Some of the most tense moments in the series occur when a young pilot, distracted or rendered unconscious for some reason, "loses sync" with the nimble creature she is controlling, leaving the immense and heavily armored beast absolutely vulnerable to the inevitable attacks by the assaulting Angels sent to destroy the earth. So... "it all depends on the 'sync'!" No matter how capable your EVA, without "good sync", it's just a pile of cybernetic trash waiting to be hammered by frothing waves of alien firepower.

I feel like this on weekends a lot. My family, when all of us are together, are an "immensely powerful organism capable of repelling even the most aggressive alien attack"! I believe it! We are good together. But our biggest problem often seems to be "maintaining sync" with one another. We all come from such radically different worlds on the weekends. Elijah is in a whole world of activities, relationships and challenges at school. I run like a freak for hours on end here at GCC, and operate in worlds ranging from Indiana to India. Sami and Peri staple down the home with all of its myriad errands and to-do lists. When we all come together for 48 hours on the weekends, there's so much "turbulence" as we all try to figure out each other's relative frequencies that by the time we actually manage to achieve some level of "sync" again, the weekend is over and we all rev up for our separate individual combat environments. I'm sure some families are way better at it than we are, but we're trying to spend some significant time analyzing why for people who love each other as much as we do, what the contributing factors for why we struggle to relax together may be. If anyone has any recommendations, i'd love to hear them.

Blogging... It's What's For Dinner...

Okay... so after one week of blogging, here are my initial "first blush" notes (except that zombies, ostensibly, don't "blush") on the experience:

1) It takes more discipline to stay current than i realized. Even at two posts per week, and i tried really hard to exceed that straight out of the shoot.

2) You really "put yourself out there" in a way that feels a little more personal than i can typically control. You kind of lose either way. You either guard everything and don't really say anything interesting, or you let your more personal self loose and then cringe at the thought of who might be reading... or taking you the wrong way when they do.

3) There are people much better at it than i am. Wise veterans who either know how to keep things concise, or are at least better writers who know how to keep things more interesting. I shall endeavor to study these masters and employ their skill as my own over time.

4) It's difficult to stay "thematic". I'm constantly asking the questions of "is this blog about stuff I think is cool, or stuff OTHER people will think is cool?" There's a difference, you know. I think Anime is cool. I'm the only person (except for Breanna Giles - Dawn's daughter) who thinks likewise other than my own family.

5) It's difficult to stay short enough to warrant people actually reading anything. If you know me, you know that i am notoriously "thorough"... which is also code for "long winded".

6) Smart Zombie is difficult for Google to index. Guess i'm not the only person who has picked up on the concept. That's good in a way, though... i guess i don't mind, but for future reference, i might ought to have put a little more thought into that before signing up the address.

And yet... i shall persevere. At least, i think so. Thanks for reading. -jack

On the Subject of Vegetarians...

During my most recent trip to India, i decided to try something new and "go vegetarian" for the bulk of the two weeks. To my surprise, i actually did really well with it. Plus, i felt better, had more energy, and in general, didn't have that weird "sluggish" feeling after most meals.

So when i got home, i figured i would try to keep it up. I'm now, i suppose, officially operating as a "lacto-ovo vegetarian" (i.e. i still eat eggs and diary, but no chicken, fish, beef or pork). The following are my quick points of analysis:

* It's difficult to find cheap, relatively healthy veggie fast-food. Jimmy John's is my current favorite, sporting the hefty "Veggie" with fixin's (loaded to include cherry peppers).

* Sometimes it's just not possible to eat easily vegetarian. Meeting people at "The Rib Shack", for instance, turns into "No...um... i'll just sit here and drink water, thanks."

* I don't miss meat, really, at all. Except when it comes to Pepperoni Pizza.

* It's difficult to fix "parallel meals" at home. The rest of my family (particularly kids) is still largely omnivorous, so trying to either pick out meat or fix completely separate veggie meals is kind of a big hassle.

* Vegans are some freakin' WAY dedicated people. I simply can't imagine how much intentionality, time and money it would take to live that way!

So i think i'll continue along this route... except where it concerns my zombie sensibilities, of course, where my favorite vegetable will remain Couch Potatoes.

ONE Prayer... MANY Cool People...

A week from this past Friday, i spent the day with some really cool people. Seriously. The people in this photo have literally changed the face of the world, and while you've never seen their faces on a political ad (or "most wanted list"), these people are some of the Smartest Zombies i have ever had the privilege to meet.

We'll be working with each of them through the ONE Prayer movement to facilitate the goal of planting 500 churches in 4 countries, and each of them works with an organization that is handling the planting implementation in one of the key geographic focal points.

Let me tell you their stories quickly:

Bob Craft (New Generations) - left side, closest to camera - Bob has worked in SE Asia for nearly 10 years, and has done a variety of missions oriented church-planting initiatives for most of his adult life. Currently, working with New Generations, Bob coordinates planting and partnership development for most of SE Asia, including Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and beyond.

Waldemar Kurz - left side, closest to wall - Waldemar is one of those people that Indiana Jones describes as "you'll never find him... he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he'll blend in, fall through... with any luck, he's found the Ark already!" Working from the Ukraine and Russia all the way to China, Waldemar has literally been behind the scenes training, resourcing and networking local churches since before "the wall came down" and beyond.

Vicki Miles - right side, closest to wall - Vicki owns her own software development company, and has just returned with her husband from a stint in Portugal, resourcing a local church in that country and also working with ex-pats. Vicki has graciously volunteered her time to help us figure out all the complexity of the ONE Prayer movement and is helping us to put together (and track) our budgets, implementation strategies, and reporting.

Renata Kurz - right side, in the middle - Renata is married to Waldemar and operates a ministry called "Little Lambs" that focuses on resourcing orphans and other "forgotten" people in the former Soviet Union and beyond. She's intense, and you can't help but immediately be won over by her passion and determination to care for those who truly have fallen through the proverbial "cracks" of society.

Ron VanderGriend - right side, closest to camera - Most of us all already know Ron (aka "WorldMan") VanderGriend here at GCC. I liken Ron to the following analogy: "Let's say that you are pastoring a local church and you decide that you would like to have an IT Dept at your church. Then let's say that Bill Gates just happens to attend your church and says that he would like to help." Ron is "that guy". He has personally mentored, instructed and helped us to do all that we do at GCC from a missions point of view, and we are privileged to know him!

Between the 5 of them, they have been instrumental in planting over 50,000 local, indigenously pastored and led churches in over 50 countries in the last 30 years. And when i say "churches", i don't mean "we met for a Bible study one time", i mean "we meet regularly to engage in worship, service, community, discipleship and reaching out to our communities". Honestly, these people are the kinds of heroes behind the massive movements of the People of God in unreached and developing nations that you simply never see, and i was privileged to get to spend the day with them talking about what we'll be doing together through the ONE Prayer movement.

Smart Zombie: WWZD... What Would Zombies Drive?

One of the big issues surrounding how churches, businesses, NGO's and governments interact is the role of each. Everyone is working toward the same goal of transformation for marginalized communities, but collaboration between the various entities seems to be ineffective in most instances because none of us can figure out where we really "fit" within the goal. So i've started to think of collaboration in terms of your average car.

Here's what i mean. In order for a car to run safely on a given road to a specific destination, it needs some critical components: wheels & chassis, engine and drivetrain, components (like steering wheels, chairs, airbags, etc), and a well paved, safely governed roadway from starting point to finish. The same is true for the integration of relevant agencies. Here is what it looks like in my mind.

Churches/Faith Communities - Faith communities are the most "grass roots", prolific organization on the planet. They are embedded deeply in communities as a central "hub" around which activity is generated, and the pastors and leaders have the most intrinsic and vested interest in the health and transformation of their relative environments. They are therefore like the wheels and chassis of a car. They are the part of the car that is closest to the ground, and without which, you can't really go anywhere. By themselves, however, they are little more than "Flintstone" mobiles (run fast, push, and then hop on board for 20 feet... not exactly an ideal way to travel).

Business - Businesses are excellent at being driven by efficiency, focus and an absolute committment to producing a bottom line of profitability and power. They are excellent "engines", providing massive doses of drive, focus, efficiency and revenue to provide the power for any collaborative venture, but their transformative power is limited to its connection to a wheel/chassis organization like a faith community. Without that connection, the engine is "up on blocks", so to speak, cranking out tons of power, but not really "going anywhere".

NGO's/Non-Profs/Parachurch - For the last 100 years, "external" organizations have had to pick up all the slack on short-falls from both churches and governments. They've had to try to deliver the kinds of things that both have historically tried to do (healthcare, housing, education, etc.) and have had, as a result, become exceedingly efficient at it in targeted respects. Habitat for Humanity, for instance, is the world's largest housing provider. World Relief has the premiere HIV/AIDS curriculum. World Vision has unparalleled disaster response. But they are not the complete picture. Their dedication to a particular area of focus makes them ideal "components" to the car, but not the car itself. A steering wheel manufacturer, for instance, does not go to Ford and say, "your job is to make a car that will adequately support and showcase our steering wheel!". Rather, the job of the steering wheel manufacturer is to provide a good, service or component that helps the car get where it needs to go. NGO's, Non-profs and Parachurch organizations are similar. The job of the "car" is not to support them, and unfortunately, many organizations have forgotten that. Rather, it is their job to provide with excellence a particular point of hard-fought expertise to enable the rest of the car to succeed in a given environment.

Government -It's not really the responsibility of government at any level to actually implement transformation. It can't. It's not close enough to the people, and doesn't have, foster or facilitate the kinds of relationships necessary to provide for that kind of change. But what it DOES have is immense system-building capacity. It creates pathways and services, provides leadership, legislation and enforcement. In short, it's much like the roads and signs that are necessary for travel. The road makes transformational movement easier, more fluid, and better marked so that people know where they're going and how to get there. But it isn't the "car". It can't be.

Combined together, you get what i like to call a "Zoombie" (that's a Smart Zombie car... get it? Heheh!). It's a partnership where no one "trips over themselves" because they misunderstand their relative roles and responsibilities. It's a partnership where all the pieces fit where they are supposed to fit, and together, go farther than any one piece or system can go on its own. It's the kind of thing that Smart Zombies are trying to figure out... and that's the ONLY way to travel, baby!

Smart Zombie: Smart Mob in Action!

This is my friend LeRoy King. He rocks. Seriously. He's leading a group of people at our Monroe Circle Community Center (MC3) on a weekly basis called The Gathering. The Gathering meets on Tuesday nights and currently has about 50 members from the Monroe Circle Community plus volunteers from GCC and members of the One Spirit/One Body small group (another group that LeRoy leads that is dedicated to racial and ethnic diversity and reconciliation). To date,
The Gathering engages in worship and teaching garnered (and edited by LeRoy) from GCC weekend series services, and also facilitates relational community within the people who gather. The purpose of this community is mutual support, edification, advocacy, strength and awareness... all the great hallmarks of a budding Smart Zombie community.

But a week ago, something particularly "Smart" occured, and i am anxious to to explain. During one of the last meetings, one of the community member's car was vandalized by a group of community teen agers. The damage to the vehicle totalled about $200, and is beyond the realm of what the owner could conjur immediately to repair. She asked if GCC's liability insurance would cover the damage, and our current rider does not allow for such. Undeterred, however, LeRoy turned the opportunity into a lesson in Leadership 101 and at the next meeting, explained to The Gathering what had happened. He then gave the community (keep in mind that the average annual income at Monroe Circle is $9,600) an opportunity to contribute anonymously to the damage. Not sure what to expect, The Gathering members started to come forward. "I kept expecting the clink of coins," LeRoy explained later, laughing, "but none came. It was all bills. In handfulls." By the end of the evening, nearly $90 had been raised, and LeRoy was able to present it to the member whose car had been damaged. "She was absolutely dumbfounded," LeRoy said, "she had never experienced anything like that before!"

It's that kind of self-resourcing community that can truly become the heart of what it means to be a Smart Zombie. We look forward to seeing how The Gathering continues to mobilize!

Vegetarian Vampires? Where's the Fun in THAT?!

I'm typically suspicious of vampire novels. I like the malevolent evil creatures too much (see explanation here) to see them portrayed poorly in campy film or literature, so have a natural predisposition to "keeping to the classics" of traditional lore or literature rather than trendy re-creations when looking for entertainment.

Still, having said such, I'm usually game to give something a shot if it's highly recommended or looks interesting, and so when one of Jeanna Tripp's friends recommended the new Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, did some checking to see what it was about. I walked away with the initial first blush reactions:
* Hmmm... it's written for teen aged girls. I'm a 34 year old guy... do the math.
* It features "vegetarian" vampires. Vegetarian? Where's the fun in THAT?
* It's been labeled, as one of my friends put it, "Chick flick meets vampire drama".
Still, hoping for the best, i dove into the first book (Twilight) with considerable curiosity but not very high expectations. My analysis upon finishing was "Hmmm... not a very unique plot line..." (by her own admission, Stephanie Meyer gives regular homage to classic works of literature, and each of her books follows a traditional plot from, say, Romeo and Juliet, Sense and Sensibility, Midsummer Night's Dream, etc.)... but something in it perked my curiosity enough to read the second one. So i dove into New Moon (the second of the series), feeling a little odd about how eager i was to see what happened, and then by the third book (Eclipse) i was beginning to feel a little odd about the unfamiliar pangs of what i can only describe as what must be addiction gnawing at my subconscious. "What's wrong with me?" I would wonder amidst waves of anxious panic as the events unfolded, or tears welled in my eyes at particularly salient points in the plot. By Breaking Dawn, i was a complete mess. By that point, i needed certain things to happen. I needed for certain people to "win", certain people to "lose", certain things to "work out", and certain things to be "taken care of". Greedily downloading it for my Kindle the very minute after midnight that it became available, i read it without interruption on my way back from India. It was such an emotionally involved experience that i collapsed in exhaustion after finishing, and then promptly slept for the better part of 2 days (of course, 15 days in India and 48 hours of straight travel didn't have ANYTHING to do with it, i'm sure). When i finally managed to achieve my normal level of composure again, i mused to Sami that i still was surprised at how the series grabbed me... and... when all is said and done... that apparently, i have the emotional maturity of a 19 year old girl.

Smart Zombie: Thirsty

Okay, so I'm willing to acknowledget that there's "complexity" in any environment that should prevent first-blush judgmentalism. I mean, you don't really know all the details of what affects a person or situation until you spend the time to really understand the environment, relationships and circumstances that cause things to be the way that they are, and people have done a lot of damage over the years by making summary judgments and recommending "solutions" based on a one-sided worldview that is not in full possession of the facts or scenarios in play.

But this particular circumstance REALLY bothers me. See this large concrete basin? It's actually a well. It services a community of about 75 families in a small village in Tamilnadu, Southern India. The water in the well is absolutely disgusting, as you might imagine. The reason for this is that as a water source, it is totally uncovered, and everything from livestock to wild birds and animals use it, garbage finds its way into it, and the standard "stagnation" that occurs with any standing water source occurs here as well. As a result, the village has high infant mortality rates, recurrent sickness in the forms of Typhoid and other water-borne illnesses, and has to ration the water usage of each family on a daily basis. But as tragic as all this is, that's not what really angers me.



What angers me is the small hut you can barely see in the background. This small hut is a diesel-generator powered well with clean water for the crops owned by the wealthy land-owner adjacent to the small village. This one man and his family maintain the well for their own usage and the usage of their crops, but defend the water supply against the 75 families who suffer only 100 yards from his propoerty. When i asked why and how this happens, the people in the village explained, "Well, you see, he only operates it at times when he knows we won't be available to use it, or he threatens us if we try. He is afraid that if he shares the water with us, the water table will drop, and he won't have enough for his crops." So... the village continues to suffer. Their crops don't grow. Their children die. They continue to struggle with disease and water-related rationing. But this guy is fine. He's got his water... who cares about the rest?

So we're going to try to fix this, at least pragmatically, for the 75 families in the village. Through a newly designed, low-tech water-filtration system manufactured by Hydraid, GCC teams, in conjunction with local, indigenous Indian church planters sourced through the Life Mission International network, will install an individual filter for each family that will supply up to 60 gallons of purified, clean water for up to 15 years with only minimal (and easy) manual maintenance.

It still doesn't solve the "heart issue" of the wealthy landowner and his lack of care for the fact that 75 families less than 100 yards from his home suffer from preventable plight... but i'm confident that a group of Jesus-loving Smart Zombies can form a mob to persuade him about that next.

ONE Prayer Movement

Many of you already know that we here at GCC are deeply involved in the ONE Prayer movement. Around about this past May, the team at Life Church dared to ask what would happen if churches around the world got together as One Body for the purpose of sharing teaching, worship and mission for four weeks. The project was called ONE Prayer, and ended up being something HUGE! As churches began to stack in from all over the globe, the "end number" of those participating numbered just over 1,700 from as far away as India and China to as near as the church on the corner of your street, and GCC participated as well, hearing from Wayne Cadero (at New Hope Fellowship), Craig Groeschel (LifeChurch.tv) and our own Mark Beeson.

As part of this initiative, we were asked by the team at Life Church to run the "Mission" component for the entire campaign. Due to our long history in India and the relative level of success we've had there in partnering with grass-roots networks of indigenous Smart Zombies (aka "church planters"), we pitched an idea to see if the ONE Prayer network might partner in 4 geographies to plant a total of 500 churches. The 4 target geographies are Sudan, India, Cambodia and China, and at last count, over $740,000 has been raised through the network to ensure that such will be possible.

I'm excited to say that to date, our partners in India (Life Mission International) have already begun training the first batch of 150 planters, and Cambodia, China and Sudan have also begun their initiatives as well. You can track the progress of the entire movement by clicking here, and we'll be posting regularly with both video, "hard metric" and "blog-style" posts on a weekly basis.

Smart Zombie: Sunitha

This is my new friend Sunitha. She is a wife, mother, and worker in one of the garment factories that surrounds her little village in Tamilnadu, Southern India. She is an amazing woman, a Christ-follower, and a member of one of the churches currently pastored by one of our "Super Pastors". She is a hard worker, and can manufacture nearly 300 pairs of shoes or similar garments in a single workday.

From her, we learned about the plight of women in this particular industrialized community. In each factory, the men and the women are separated into facilities where they have no contact with one another. In the women's areas, all the supervisors are men. In virtually all of the factories in the community, if you are a young woman and you want a job to support your family, you are required to have sex with your supervisor or foreman. If you do, you get to keep your job. If you don't, you are labeled a "poor producer" and dismissed. You could, of course, try to get a job at another factory, but you would find the same situation facing you there. "It's the same in all the factories," Sunitha told us, "and if you keep moving around, you are viewed with increasing suspicion as a worker who will not 'submit' to the demands of the supervisors, and therefore not hired." Most of these women, then, daily have to balance the tension between remaining faithful to their husbands and children and providing food and basic wages for those same relationships.

In December, GCC Justice Teams will be travelling to help women just like Sunitha through micro-enterprise training, community organizing and legal education. According to Sunitha, "if i had $250 to buy a sewing machine of my own, i could multiple my income by a factor of 7 and avoid the harassment in the factories." Micro-enterprise and loans through partners like Growing Opportunity, Int'l, will help with capital equipment loans, and we will be training GCC teams to help with forming basic power structures like unions and collectives. We will also seek to educate women about existing Indian government legislation preventing sexual harassment and "outraging a woman's modesty" (a penalty which, if proven, carries prison sentence and/or fine).

Helping people like Sunitha is the essence of what being a Smart Zombie is all about. If 2,000 women suddenly rise up against the oppression of their dehumanizing employers by refusing to work, organizing power and developing alternate means of income-generation, they starve the industries subjugating them. In return, they gain their own power, and begin to exert influence over the structure itself. Many say it's a long shot or a pipe-dream to long for such things. But then... they don't understand Hunger the way Smart Zombies do.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

So I was in our weekly Missions Dept/Communications Dept meeting on Wednesday morning, and Kem Meyer piped up toward the end and grabbed a copy of Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind from the top of her book shelf. She asked if i was familiar with Pink, and while i hadn't read New Mind, i had heard his name before from discussions with Ron Martoia. Then she told me that Pink had won an award that landed him a stint in Japan studying Manga (it's basically "print Anime"... but don't call it a comic book), and had produced his next work as a treatise on business survival and market leadership, but using the Japanese traditional graphic representation of it for effect. The end result is a fun-looking new book called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. There's a hilarious trailer for the book on Amazon.com, but the general jist is that the protagonist (Johnny Bunko) finds himself in a dead-end job with the Boggs Company and little prospects of advancement or satisfaction. During his time there, he discovers (through his interaction with an attractive "career counselor" named Diana), the 6 critical lessons necessary to understand to survive:

* There is no plan.
* Think strengths, not weaknesses.
* It's not about you.
* Persistence trumps talent.
* Make excellent mistakes.
* Leave an imprint.

I'll be downloading the book for my Kindle tomorrow, and will comment here on my thoughts after finishing it (hopefully) this weekend.

The concept, interestingly, reminds me of an actual Japanese manga/anime called Salaryman Kintaro, which has enjoyed considerably popularity in Japan, and is available for viewing (with English subtitles) here in the States via Netflix (if you're a subscriber). In the series, Kintaro is a former gang leader who decides to join a local corporation after losing his wife. In the corporation, he uses his "street smarts" to challenge long-held corporate protocols, and manages to best most of the corporate moguls in the process by blending his savage "gangsta" tactics with simple nobility and a refusal to do the dishonorable. The series provides interesting social commentary into the Japanese psyche and the tensions often held between the underlying morality of the Bushido-based culture and the bottom-line-driven bloodthirstiness of most corporations.

Smart Zombie: Defined

I’m a sucker for a scary story. That fascination is perhaps most notable in my penchant for the series of Of the Dead films produced by writer/director George Romero over the past 30 years. Both an artist and a social scientist, Romero has always intended the slowly-moving, cannibalistic, reanimated corpses of his films to provide social commentary in representing some identified marginalized “outsider” group of people whom the “living” (i.e. the wealthy, the privileged, the elite) would rather not engage, and further fear will come to “get them”, consume them, and take away their “life” and privilege if they get too close. Zombies look human, but are not treated as such by those still living, and the tendencies of the walking dead to hunger for the flesh of the living does not make them desirable company. As a result, the living exist in ever-shrinking and more sophisticated fortresses while roving hordes of ghoulish dead stare in from the outside, hungry for what they see and yet find themselves unable to attain.

For my part, I grew up very much in the world of the “living”. The son of two attorneys, one a Prosecutor, City Attorney and Judge, the other a clerk for two Federal Judges, I never considered that there might be another side to the world. And yet, through my own curiosity and ever-deepening forays into the world of the “dead” through short-term mission ventures in 18 countries, inner-city dwelling, and advocacy and community development work, i found myself one day awakening to the notion that whether bitten or bidden, I had become “dead” myself. In the last ten years, I have scrubbed toilets as a janitor and thrown papers for a local newspaper to augment full-time jobs while still feeling the creeping desperation of teetering on the brink of regular financial ruin at the end of each month. My wife and I have served discarded, pregnant, teen-aged girls in Michiana as full time “house parents” for a local teen maternity home, and witnessed the ripple-effects of abandonment and social stigma on each of the young women’s lives. I have worked to engineer holistic systems of care with Granger Community Church to help men, women and children who are locked in the bonds of generational poverty to acquire faith, food, vocational training, medical help, high school equivalency and positive relationships within their community. I have walked for the past 6 years alongside Indian men and women planting churches in remote contexts where people sell their lives and their families to bonded slave owners for the cost of a few dollars, and, because of the oppressiveness of the reinforced caste-system, have little hope of changing their plight. I have done all these things and more with an ever-growing sense of powerlessness at my inability to help overturn the systems and structures that have prompted such bonds, and find that I am now unable to see the injustice and disparity between the “living” and the “dead” without myself beginning to feel… hungry.

Hungry for Awareness. Whether in government (local or national), corporations (domestic or multi-national) or community-based organizations and initiatives (churches, faith communities, NGO’s, etc), the oppressed people I engage every day are simply not aware of how best to navigate their own transformation to the land of the living. In addition, continual marginalization (overtly or covertly) by the “living” keeps the mob just out of view enough to prevent true efforts at bridge-building, advocacy, and grass-roots motivated change.

Hungry for Organization. In both the US or environments like India, I have been continually frustrated by the lack of concentrated or coordinated efforts between businesses, NGO’s, government and community organizations to help the “dead”. Few initiatives are backed by memoranda or contracts with specific and measurable metrics (what I call “relationships with teeth”), and program isolation and lack of coordination prevents sustainable change from happening. The result of both is that the “dead” stay dead, and all for what is, in many instances, a simple lack of adequate organization, contractual understanding, accountability and defined deliverables between organization types.

Hungry for Justice. Whether in bonded slave, sex trafficking or sweatshop environments in India or the red tape surrounding the working poor, ex-offender and welfare states of the “dead” that I have engaged in South Bend and Chicago, the simple reality is that most of the “dead” do not know what rights they have, or how to access them. In addition, the gap between legislation and enforcement is daunting at a government level (India, for instance, has anti-slavery legislation, but enforcement is lax if not totally nonexistent), and in the instance of corporations that are willing to be socially responsible, there is often too little concern or knowledge about the holistic concerns that govern the poor and marginalized to truly help them to be healthy or deliver to their potential.

And so I seek the ability to combat those barriers which I have identified in my work to help the “dead” thus far. I may now be one of the “dead” myself, but I walk forward not with the same mob mindlessness that is typical of those staggering corpses in Romero’s works. Rather, I remember “life”. I still remember what is possible, and have not yet succumbed to the numbness that layers of poverty and injustice can heap upon one until they forget their humanity altogether. I wish to add an element of focused intellect and skill to the horde… a “smarter zombie” of sorts, capable of rallying the mob and giving to it a direction and machination that will begin to build its return to the land of the “living” while simultaneously working with the “living” themselves to become aware of their privilege, and willingly and generously begin to open the gates of their walled privileges and embrace those standing and staring hungrily from the outside.

Through all of this, achieving any skill for myself is of little value if I do not further disseminate the benefits of that skill to those others in the mob, and facilitate the continual increasing, investing and slowly building of their momentum. In the end, I suppose, that my hope is that mob itself can become “smart”. And once we are “smart”, we will no longer be easily dismissed by the shrinking numbers of “living” in the world. Further, our flesh will no longer rot, our stagger no longer be plagued with mindlessness, our hunger no longer focused on violently consuming that which we see around us because we will have access to the same tangible and intangible benefits shared by the “living”. Our rage will subside as we are treated not as a faceless and undesirable mob ever encroaching from the outside, but rather as respected equals in the land of the “living”, with a full and equitable place in the world around us.