Mickey’s Commandments #6: Avoid Overload

Part 6 in a 10 part series on Mickey’s Commandments as presented by Michael Lingerfelt in a recent conference.

6. Avoid Overload

It seems simple enough. Yet, here is Walt Disney World, with every kind of distraction, attraction, and whimsical pastime known to man. Avoid overload? How does Disney avoid overload.

They pace themselves, or rather, they pace us. As you enter the parks you can’t see everything at the same time. The characters don’t stay out too long. They create an environment that allows or stimulation, but not overload.

We are going through something related to this at work. We are not the only church that is doing this. In a culture filled with images and messages, trying to communicate clearly to the church body is more and more difficult. We know that too much information becomes overload, it becomes noise. So, we are trying to pull back, and limit the amount of communication… to limit the sheer volume.

For the past few weeks we have been classifying event promotion based on size of the potential audience. The smaller the potential audience, the more targeted the promotional strategy must be. It has been a change, which some have not embraced. It’s mostly the smaller events we are filtering out of the main communication tools which are causing the complaints. Once we explain why we are doing what we are doing, balancing the requests for promotion with the ability of the audience to process it, most people understand. What this means is that smaller events must use alternate methods of communication; Use your mailing lists, send home notes to parents, announce things in age related classes, make some phone calls.

If we don’t do this we will overload the audience. We just do too much stuff. Large churches always do a lot of events, and have a lot of activity (it’s one of the bonuses of being a large church) but in order to help us reach our ministry goals it is important that e focus our congregation’s attention on the most important messages. We have to pace the congregation’s process of information.

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