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The Celebration Chronicles

Page 30

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

An early Honeysuckle potluck gathering. (Photo: Jonathan Hayt)

  Each of the several parties I attended had its own flavor, where hosts would invite their own friends from other parts of town. One event in late summer took the form of an elaborate hayride to the North Village. Attendance varied. There were regulars and not-so-regulars. To be sure, there were some on the block who found the monthly regimen to be a little more sociability than they cared for, and the Honeysuckle model, while much admired from a distance, had set a pace that no other block in town tried to match. In some ways, it represented the tolerable upper limit of community bonding in Celebration.

  There were many blocks in town where neighbors, lacking willingly active organizers, preferred to socialize informally or loosely attach themselves to the party circuit of an adjoining block. If anything, the pace of community building that had been set here had resulted in partial burnout. Several pioneers acknowledged there was too little time for their own families. Religious leaders, partially in competition with the community professionals at Town Hall and the Foundation, expressed concern that overcommitment to community activity was in danger of producing dysfunctional families. In Celebration, there was such a thing as a little too much community.

  Besides, block solidarity was an uneasy feature of social life in a town where Town Hall encouraged residents to identify with the whole of Celebration. In his newsletter item discouraging the use of village labels, Herrington warned against “the tendency of new developments to fracture into separate districts rather than functioning as dynamic, cohesive communities.” Officially, at least, community was intended to be synonymous with the entire town, and professional help was on hand to ensure that community building kept its course. A subtle reward system was in place very early, where especially active volunteers enjoyed the gratitude of the professionals. Each year, the Foundation handed out Community Service Awards and ran a “Tattle Tales” section in its newsletter in which residents were encouraged to inform on their “do-gooder” neighbors. Town Hall had established its own impromptu practice of awarding certificates for community-minded acts, and Herrington rarely missed a public opportunity to comment on “the incredible organic juice that flows up from the residents.”

  There was lots of evidence of this juice, but it was still too early to say that the residential fabric had developed the truly organic texture that is the Holy Grail of nostalgic mythmakers and community management professionals alike. Community pride among Celebrationites was a heady cocktail, mixed with equal parts of performance anxiety, property angst, and pioneer exuberance. Professional community management, on the other hand, had already proved itself as a well-seasoned vintage. Beyond the machinery of management, however, the battles being fought in town had fashioned community bonds that were arguably stronger than those brought on by the physical advantages of New Urban neighborliness or the Foundation’s culture of volunteerism. This was a sense of community forged out of conditions of adversity, and however much outsiders snorted at the mere idea of Celebrationites suffering, these internal struggles had worked their way into the guts of community building in ways that offered some lessons for the outside world.

  11

  GOD’S HOUSES, A PICTURE OF HEALTH, AND THE COLOR OF OUR MINDS

  “Eat fresh fruit, nuts, and vegetables. Get plenty of rest. Exercise. Get plenty of fresh air and sunshine. Avoid meat, high-fat and high-sugar foods. Get a good night’s sleep. Don’t smoke or use alcohol. Reduce stress. Learn to relax. Enjoy life.”

  —“The Corn Flake Connection,” Celebration Health

  Patrick Carrin, the pastor of Celebration Community Church, had delivered his Mother’s Day sermon on the gospel of love with vigor and dash. It had been international in scope, ranging from the Vietnam War to the crisis of faith in the old Soviet Union, and had touched, in some depth, on the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Assembled in the school cafeteria, where the church met regularly, members of the congregation were asked to stand, individually, to pay tribute to their mothers. Several rose and testified in turn. Joan Jones, retired schoolteacher and former tenant of my apartment, spoke passionately of her mother’s kindnesses and good deeds, and went on to praise “all good Christian mothers.” As she sat down, she leaned over, patted my knee, and added, sotto voce, “and Jewish mothers, too.” It was a characteristically thoughtful act, though Joan, who had quizzed me on my background at our first meeting, hadn’t quite got it right. It was my father who had been Jewish (though he had chosen not to be a Jewish father, as Holocaust refugees in out-of-the-way places sometimes did). My siblings and myself were brought up in my mother’s Church of Scotland at the sober Presbyterian core, a world away from the emotive witnessing of the Bible Belt. In making this inclusive gesture Joan was doing the Celebration thing. But there was already a trace of local history attached to her kind words, in a town where two Protestant congregations coexisted uneasily, each courting favor with the non-Christians and other potential recruits.

  Whatever Bible Belt energies pulsed through the veins of this town met here in Carrin’s nondenominational congregation, conceived as a church in the spirit of Celebration where people “leave their labels at the door and worship together.” Carrin, a shrewd Honeywell executive with his name on four patents and a graduate of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, spoke to me of uniting the Christian faiths. “As we enter the second millennium,” he predicts a “new paradigm” that “will see a tremendous wave of people integrating the Church, seeking commonality, and enjoying diversity together through agreement on fundamental issues.” In addition to several different kinds of Baptists, his congregation already included Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons, Episcopalians, worshipers from the Assemblies of God, and various independents. Regardless, around town it was referred to, often with disdain, as the Baptist congregation. To set up in town, Carrin’s church was sponsored and backed by Jim Horton, the much respected pastor of the College Park Baptist Church and the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Horton, along with other prominent Orlando pastors, had vigorously opposed the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney. Sinners were to be befriended and recruited, not shunned.

  Establishing the several houses of God had been one of the thorniest issues faced by the developer. The Baptist boycott was the least of the problems, though it had probably scuttled the prospect of an overtly Baptist ministry on Disney property. The town had been planned with one small two-acre site for ecumenical worship, classically located across the street from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s bank building. Small-town architectural convention demanded a neoclassical, steepled, clapboard building, and the cultural expectation was that it would be occupied by a mainline Protestant church. In spite of Walt’s own distaste for organized religion, stemming from an overdose of pulpit zeal in the Congregational Church of his childhood, the Disney company had a de facto Protestant identity—Catholics cannot be married at Disney World. In all prudence, however, the company could not make a decision to allot the site to any one faith, and so they hosted discussions among Celebration’s pioneer religious leaders about establishing an interfaith center. But who would program the services and manage the use of the center by so many different groups? TCC officials did not relish taking on that prickly task. When push came to shove, the bottom line was the decisive element. Someone had to come up with cash for the site, and the Presbyterian Church got their act together first.

  Flush with a quarter-million-dollar gift from Walt’s niece, Dorothy Disney Puder (who announced, “This money was not our money, but the Lord’s money”),1 their bid not only secured the site but also determined that the Presbyterian church would become the town’s alpha-male “community congregation.” For a while, both Protestant congregations (each headed by a man named Patrick) met at different times on Sunday morning in the AMC theater, and some confusion resulted, with residents mistaking one for the other. Carrin’s group eventually removed to the school cafeteria, leaving the larger spac
e to the now-burgeoning congregation of the other Patrick, the Rev. Wrisley, who had been appointed as the only full-time religious leader in town. Yet the rivalry continued. In a letter to prospective church members, Carrin boldly pleaded: “Leave your prejudice at home and come take part in what will become the most watched new church in modern history.” Everything that was new in Celebration was prone to an overkill dose of publicity.

  Wrisley had been recruited from a ministry at Peachtree in Atlanta, where he and other pastors had built a mega-church—the largest Presbyterian church in the country—with about 11,500 members. The “church of the next millennium” he was assigned to build here was a “national church,” since it had been voted up and approved by the Presbyterian General Assembly. In accord, he claimed, with the precepts of the New Urbanism—it was to be a “New Urban Ministry”—Wrisley envisaged a site with embedded religious themes:

  The church will be surrounded with loggias, porches, gardens. It’s going to be a sensual environment in that it will stimulate the senses. Not only the eyes and ears, but also smells—we’ll have a fragrant garden. Jesus spent most his time in four places. The sea, the mountain, the desert and the garden. So what we want to do architecturally is to develop a movement where you experience vegetation from the desert, then there’s this long stream to represent the river or sea—a giant rock will have water coming out of it—and then you have plants and vegetation that are germane to the Garden of Gethsemane. So you experience the Gospel sensually, before you even go in to hear it. It’s an environmental imagination.

  If there was more than a touch of Imagineering to this vision, plans for the interior sounded not unlike a Virgin mega-store. “We want it hot-wired, with cable, media, electronics. It’s our notion that the stained glass of tomorrow for the church is electronics and technology, not glass.… In our culture, we’re moving from page to screen, and the church needs to be there with it.” Burly, bearded, and jovial, Wrisley did not have to strive hard for his downhome image (his e-mail name is “DisneyPope”), and his agenda was firmly in line with the precepts of a postmodern Gospel. He was completing a doctoral dissertation on the concept of a New Urbanist ministry with Drew University’s Leonard Sweet, a “church futurist” and entrepreneurial author of works including Quantum Spirituality, FaithQuakes, and a devotional called Soul Café, which spelled out the “ten commandments for the postmodern church.” Wrisley’s reformed liturgy laid him open to some congregants’ criticism that his God was too much of a “buddy” and not enough of an authoritative or transcendental force. He was nothing if not an evangelist for relevance, insisting that “the church has been doing American Bandstand ministry in an MTV ‘Grind’ culture.” As in Celebration proper, the church’s laptop- and circuit TV–driven infrastructure would be treated, on the outside, to a neotraditional skin. Its Welcome Center on Celebration Avenue was to be housed in a Victorian home, fully equipped with a porch, and its sanctuary was planned to seat eight hundred people, by far the biggest meeting place in town. Despite a second gift from the Puders, redeemed from Disney stock inherited from Walt and Roy, initial funding for the $11 million site was very slow in accumulating, but when Wrisley launched a local campaign, $800,000 was collected from congregants within a year. Even so, “value engineering” forced a reduction in the scope of plans for the site, rescheduled to break ground in September 1999. In the meantime, the congregation had come up with some ideas of their own. One member wanted to donate a full pipe organ—not exactly MTV.

  On the national religious scene, there was some skepticism about placing a large house of God within the bosom of Mammon, or at least a Lord of the Marketplace. Wrisley responded in the press, “If you want to play cynic and say Disney represents American capitalism gone exponential, then I’d say there’s no better place for the church. I don’t care how fast your Pentium processor is, people die and get divorced; and kids get head lice at school here. You can’t buy happiness, and you’re going to have hurt.… The mere presence of a church here blows the notion of Disney illusion out of the water. You don’t build a church in the land of make-believe.”2 The Rev. Roger Richardson, executive president of the Central Florida Presbytery in Orlando, who had brokered the Celebration ministry, was not at all sobered by the prospect that his church might some day be at odds with Disney. “A faithful church doesn’t have to be a fearful church,” he declared. “We’ve seen kingdoms rise and fall and we’re still going forward, and we’ll be here long after Disney is here and gone.”3

  As the Celebration congregation ramped up, its social justice ministry was soon active, perusing Habitat for Humanity plans to build affordable housing in Orlando and Kissimmee, and actively competing with the Foundation for many of the same burned-out volunteers. As Wrisley noted, “You can only effect change if you’re inside.” Around town, of course, there was a different concern. Members of other denominations naturally felt a little sore that the Presbyterians had stolen a march on everyone else, and inevitably, there were suspicions about backstage deals. In Central Florida, Presbyterians numbered a mere 4 percent of church members, and so Celebration was a real coup to have pulled off. Before long, however, Wrisley had built a three hundred–strong congregation, and he credited a trend among boomers of rediscovering their faith. Indeed, many folks I knew in town mentioned that they were much more religiously inclined than they had been ten years before. Wrisley saw a challenge in responding to these returnees, who had been “shaped by a sound-bite world, where everything has to be sensual and engaging.” Two-thirds of his congregation were non-Presbyterians, including lifelong Catholics and a few charismatics, who decided they wanted to commit to a church within the community rather than travel to worship. Melding this group culturally was a challenge. Wrisley’s casual style and dress helped, but he sometimes adopted a more direct educational strategy.

  One such attempt occurred in late May, when Wrisley put on a service based on the bagpipe-heavy ritual called the “The Kirkin’ O’ The Tartan” to teach the Scottish heritage of the Presbyterian Church. This ritual was an entirely American creation, introduced in Washington, D.C., in 1941, but not untypical of the image of Scotland abroad. The tartans, after all, were associated historically in Scotland with Highland traditions, and therefore with a Catholic heritage that had been fiercely at odds with the lowland Reformation. But that was all in the bloody past, and the Highland regalia had long been co-opted into the official national symbology of State and Kirk, and packaged for export overseas. For the Celebration service, the Orlando Regional Police Pipe Band lent their wobbly bagpiping talents. Wrisley briefly covered the history of the Scottish Reformation and the founding of a church governed from the “bottom up.” In his sermon, he inveighed against “complacent American Christians” who have grown “spiritually fat on spiritual junk food, a feel-good diet that doesn’t burn any spiritual calories.” This “couch potato spirituality” makes us forget the “blood, sweat, and tears” of those who suffered and died for the history of the Church. The Scots Presbyterians, Wrisley told us, came to this country, like other immigrants, in order to practice their faith free from persecution. To be sure, there were other groups who had suffered much more persecution than the Scots Presbyterians, but Wrisley’s theme of different immigrant groups drawn by a common purpose was one that would be easy to identify for a congregation composed of many different religious backgrounds and especially attentive to any petition on the topic of pioneer sacrifice.

  Many Catholic families preferred their own devotions, and they organized early to start a parish in town. The Catholic organizers included some of the town’s most active citizens—Lise and Ron Juneman, Rodney Jones, Robin Delany, and Ray Chiaramonte—and, given the pioneer drive, nothing seemed impossible to this group. At one meeting I attended, in which they rehearsed what they might say in their first meetings with the bishop from the Orlando diocese, their spirit was clearly resolute: “We feel we are on a mission here, and that we were chosen to do this, and will co
ntinue, whether you help us or not.” With kids being pulled weekly from the school and sent to parochial schools, the group also hoped TCC might welcome a private alternative in town and would help them set it up.

  In the course of the next several months they learned a good deal about the company and about their church. TCC, it turned out, was unwilling to discount the price of land sufficiently, not even for an initiative to found a crucial communitywide institution. For his part, the bishop decided the residential demographics showed that a parish could be sustained in the Celebration area, but he was unwilling to pay a million dollars for the three-and-a-half-acre site that residents had selected—just east of downtown, across from the planned Presbyterian church. One would-be parishioner described the hardball negotiations between the diocese and TCC as “one corporation going up against another corporation.” Mary, Queen of the Universe, a shrine across from Disney World frequented by tourists and locals, had cost only $30,000 an acre, and the bishop did not want to see attendance there depleted by an area rival. In addition, the diocese ruled that a new parish has to serve as a mission of an existing church before it could be licensed on its own—an eternity of waiting if you are on pioneer time.

  The group held the town’s first Catholic mass in the Lakeside Park pavilion in December, but was discouraged by the diocese from holding any more. They had run up against a brick wall in town, even though Rodney Jones reported that the group had built a support base of five hundred area families who would have been willing to pledge the million dollars required to buy the land. By way of compensation, the bishop committed informally to a parish within two miles of the town. Though it would be several years in the making, Celebration residents, with a higher proportion of Catholics than most southern towns, would play a leading role in the formation of that parish.

 

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