Faith Works 10-2-21

Faith Works 10-2-21

Jeff Gill

Disney World and the Church

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On October 1, 1971 a new attraction opened in Florida.

It's not as if people didn't already have reasons, fifty years ago, to go to that sunny peninsula. Sandy beaches, Daytona's hard sands and later stock car track; Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach where Tony the astronaut lived with Jeannie, Miami on south and Key West on along US 1 to the very not-so-bitter end.

Travis McGee had been warning us for years about some of the pressures already weighing down the Everglades and the Intracoastal Waterway; retirees had been fleeing south to Fort Lauderdale and beyond for a century, though The Villages were a few more years in the future.

But Walt Disney had a very different vision for central Florida, and a vision that he'd started with a couple decades earlier in southern California, but couldn't quite execute in full with control of the real estate around Disneyland.

So he quietly started buying up orange groves and swampland, and perhaps a few politicians while he was at it, established the Reedy Creek Improvement District which surely deserves a book all its own, and began to lay out his dream for a Walt Disney World.

EPCOT, too. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow never quite came together as Walt imagined, and today's Epcot is a decade younger and a faint shadow of what its designer had hoped for.

Because Walt Disney died in December of 1966, a date I recall as a child, first worrying that his Wonderful World would no longer be on TV Sunday nights, but my mother assured me that, while it was sad that he had died, his show would continue.

As has often been the case, she was right. Walt died, but his brother Roy made sure that "The Florida Project" continued (he barely outlived the grand opening fifty years ago this week himself), and the Magic Kingdom opened to great fanfare, including special coverage on "The Wonderful World of Disney" which I saw not long after our house made the dramatic shift into color television. It was amazing. 

For those who've been there more recently, I have to note that at opening, Disney World admission was $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for kids under 18, and children under twelve were a buck. Yeah, times have changed.

Why am I talking about this anniversary in a column normally about matters of faith? Or am I trying to suggest that a kingdom rooted in magic has anything to tell us about divine will?

Fair questions, all. But I'm going to leave Tinker Bell and Pinocchio and princesses for another day. What I'm recalling is that first year, and how I had a classmate whose family went to spend Christmas, yes, the Christmas holiday itself, at the Magic Kingdom, staying in the Contemporary Resort (the one the monorail goes right through). All of us in sixth grade were suitably impressed, but I also remember thinking "that would be so weird, to not be at home, with your own tree, and relatives dropping by, and falling asleep in the pile of wrapping paper on your own floor that evening." That was 1971.

Today, I'm not sure a kid, let alone a parent, would be so quick to have those thoughts. And would probably leap at the idea of getting to do Dec. 25th in shorts and sandals roaming around the foot of Cinderella's castle.

Disney World is an institution, with a history, and multiple resorts, with Epcot followed by Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom and who knows what all they've got down there. They are a tradition for families, and people return again and again with rituals and expectations all their own.

Before 1971, it was a swamp, and not a really interesting one (forgive me, wildlife biologists). There was nothing there except some sheds and marginal farmland, now parking lots and access roads to lagoons created by dredging, to pull up soil piled to build the islands atop which the theme parks are built.

Once it was nothing. Now, it's something. A something with deep meaningfulness to many, many people all over the world. Is that just an economic transaction, or is there something more at work there? Is the Reedy Creek Improvement District just a profit center (and it is that, to be sure), or is there something more at work there?

How does a faith community come to be? We've seen long-standing churches torn down recently, with more to come. That's one sort of story, but I'm curious about the opposite narrative. How does a new church come to be where once there was none?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; as you can tell, he's not done with this subject. Tell him what he should do with it at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.