Earned My Ears

This morning I completed the Leadership class offered by the Disney Institute in Orlando.

Overall the course was a very positive experience.  And no, it was not a pretense meeting for having fun.  The classes lasted the better part of each day, leaving only the evenings for exploring Disney World.

What a whirlwind it was!  We covered an awful lot of ground in 3 and a half days.  In the reflection time, I was able to give serious thought to an exciting new direction I  am going to propose to move our church forward when I return.  The content was delivered by some of the best facilitators I have ever seen in a small group.

We sat in chairs and with restrictive rules completed a task in Duckburg (and, you guessed it, I was Goofy).  We put together a giant Mosaic poster of Mickey Mouse.  We built a monorail and lashed characters to the top of it (you've never lived until you tie a princess to the top of the train with a pipe cleaner and Tinker Bell is held on with a paper clip wrapped around her little fairy neck!)  We even got diplomas and mouse ears with tassels and a picture with Mickey in graduate garb.

I had a great opportunity to spend time and make new friends with some exceptional people who were also in the class.  The curriculum designer for the program was kind enough to sit with me at lunch one day and tell me about the hows and whys of the program.

I got to hear some unguarded comments from people that ministers often don't hear.  One of my classmates told me that he and his family hadn't joined the large church where they attended because they hadn't been able to figure out how to plug-in.  Someone else told me about the church decision she had made eschewing the one with the large beautiful sanctuary that seemed to always be asking for money for another where she felt that she was needed.  I also listened uncomfortably to another classmate who told about the last time in her life when she had visited a Baptist Church and left in tears after what she had heard.

We heard a lot of stories that were applications of the principles that we were learning.  My favorite was one that one of the leaders shared with me in a private conversation.  We were talking about the shadows of founders on an organization.

He told me that in the late 70's Disney began to struggle as a company after Walt's death.  He remembered a time when he was working the Jungle Cruise.  The ride was very busy and the line stretched out quite a distance.  The supervisor stopped the line and tried to correct a small mistake the operator had made.  In the course of his correction, he said, "We must ask ourselves what would Walt do?"  The captain in the boat behind heard the conversation, looked at the line of people waiting and said through the intercom, "Walt would put two more boats out here on the river!"

That supervisor may have been right about what Walt would have wanted from the pilot, but he had forgotten that there was a bigger picture and that Walt would have wanted something else from him.

It made me think about how many times we so concern ourselves with what really is small and unimportant and miss the big business of the Kingdom of God.