The Wonderful Church of Disney

On a recent trip to Orlando with 320 high school music students I spent three out of four days at Disney theme parks. On day 1 we were at Animal Kingdom from the moment it opened until 4:00 when we “park hopped” over to Epcot staying until it closed. The next day we spent 13 hours at the Magic Kingdom. Two days after that we spent the day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park, again from open until close. I spent much of that time with another chaperon who, like me, was content to see a few attractions but also spend significant amounts of time sitting on a bench watching people and thinking about what the world’s number-one-tourist-destination says about our culture and how similar it is to the Christian church in America.

If you have ever been to Disney you probably noticed the magnificent landscaping and attention to detail on every ride and in every show. What you might have missed were the things you didn’t see. You never see a full garbage can. You won’t find old gum stuck to the pavement. You don’t ever enter dirty restrooms.  Occasionally you will see an employee in a themed costume quietly picking up after park guests but they are so unobtrusive that it’s easy to overlook them. And you never see one of the park employees (referred to as “cast members”) lose their temper, break character or even roll their eyes.

Disney is meant to be a place to escape the difficulties of the real world and live in “The happiest place on earth” for a few hours or days. To achieve this illusion you spend your day on the biggest stage production in the world. You get to walk and ride on an elaborate “set” intended to make you feel like a child and to believe that dreams do come true. Unless you are looking for it, you don’t see the massive behind-the-scenes effort to deal with the ugly and dirty side of hosting tens of thousands of people every day. You don’t see the technology behind the magic. You don’t see the logistics of moving tons of food into the park and tons of garbage out every day. You don’t see the management headaches of dealing with the over 60,000 employees on the Disney Orlando properties.

What is it about our culture and our lives that makes us want to escape so badly that we spend almost a month’s salary to take a family for a week of make believe? Why do we want to hide the dirty and raw parts of life behind a veneer of happiness? Why do accept the notion that people who serve us are playing roles, and aren’t real people at all?

Disney has tapped into the heart of our culture, a culture where we want everything tidy and neat, with almost no effort on our part, and for which we are willing to pay almost anything. And if we can’t have this life now, Disney was certain (like many in the 1950’s & 60’s) that it was going to be found in the not-to-distant future. While those “promising future” attractions still exist as historical traditions, the new attractions seem to be based on entertaining people. Hope is being replaced by distraction.

Sometimes it feels like this is the direction that the Christian church is heading. It’s not that the church wants to go there, but it feels to me like it is being dragged by our culture into a Disneyesque form of existence. For an hour or more every week people can come and escape the difficulties of life and hear the promise of a bright and happy future. But more and more this message of a bright, eternal future is wrapped in engaging sermons, multi-media presentations and musical stage shows. From the church’s point of view, this isn’t done for the sake of entertainment but simply to keep people’s attention.

But Marshall McLuhan was right when he said, “the medium is the message.” In many of our churches today the message that is being put in front of people is that faith is entertaining and meant to distract us from the difficulties of life. (Admittedly this is no better or worse than those churches that present faith as a dry, doctrinal, three-point lecture that needs to be applied to one’s life.) So how is the church of today supposed to speak to a culture that prefers to escape and ignore the ugly and painful parts of life?

I believe the church needs to live in the dynamic tension between escaping the troubles of the of this life and entering fully into the ugly and painful parts of life. Jesus escaped to the mountains or the seaside at times but also intentionally walked into places where people were sick, suffering and even dying. Faith isn’t found only in the happy, smiling faces of congregants but in the deep worry lines and sunken, tired eyes of those same people. We need to be able to go “backstage” and let others come with us to be honest about the entirety of life. 

I don’t know if the church can do this. I don’t know if people will allow the church to do this. Perhaps it is too ingrained in our culture. But individuals can do this. Individuals can let others behind-the-scenes to face the hard parts of life together. And this can’t be done to prop up the façade of fantasy, but to be real about what life is all about. When we open up our lives we run the risk of others leaving, or worse, taking advantage of us, because they only want the happy places. But we also create the opportunity that someone else will open their lives to us and we will blessed by the fullness of life, both good and bad.

Disney can continue to distract and entertain because that is their business. The church cannot because we are supposed to be committed to the wholeness of life. The question is; which church are we building? Which church are you hoping to be a part of?