This past summer my family and I went on a trip of a lifetime to Walt Disney World with my parents. Beyond the heat, it truly was magical in every way. As a part of our trip we went to the Pixar Animations Studio where they had a “Short Film Festival” one afternoon. This little festival had a few modern short films and also short films dating back to the beginning of Pixar. This all-3D experience was quite entertaining all the way around. As we waited for the festival to begin, they were showing a brief film history of Pixar Animations. Early in their history, one of the key Pixar leaders had become a grandfather for the first time. He was sitting in his office with his grandson playing with some toys. As kids will do, they take inanimate objects and make them come alive. As he was watching him, he glanced over at his desk lamp and wondered what it would be like to make it come alive on a screen. And so, several animators in Pixar began working on the idea of a desk lamp jumping around and that is how they came up with the signature visual for Pixar that you see at the beginning of every single one of their films.
As I sat watching this short documentary about the origins of Pixar, I wondered how many things are right in front of our faces (like that desk lamp) that we aren’t paying attention to. The church in the United States has been in a period of seeking answers as to why the church has steadily declined in membership since the 1960s. We don’t have a lot of answers as to why, and even less of an understanding as to how to respond. I wonder how different the future church in the U.S. might be if we spent less time focusing on why we are not what we once were and instead imagining with fresh creativity about what we might become. What would our churches look like if we spent more of our energy looking at the desk lamps that are right in front of us and using our creativity to imagine the new ways of using them? Our problems will certainly not all go away, but perhaps new life can come from using creativity as a model. What would it mean for us to use our creativity in the Ohio Conference UCC? Perhaps there is a bright future church just waiting to be born if we just notice what is right in front of us.
Rev. Chad Abbot
Pastor, St. Paul’s UCC, Alexandria, KY
