From Pixar to the Pulpit: Storytelling Lessons

A while ago our staff read the book Creativity Inc., which is about the movie company Pixar. The book offers so many great insights on management and leadership and there are great lessons on managing people. The book material on failure and having the right attitude towards failure is excellent and worth the read alone. It is also an enjoyable experience to read about someone who loves their craft and work.

When reading it for the second time, I was struck by how much energy and effort go into creating a movie. Years and years of work and hours and hours of conversations are needed to tell a compelling story and create interesting character development. And, as I read about Pixar, I felt more and more challenged to put more energy into how we communicate the Gospel.

As a Church, we steward incredibly Good News. We steward the greatest story in history and God entrusts us to tell this story well.  One of our key responsibilities is to clearly and compellingly communicate the Gospel worldwide. But this requires a great deal of work and effort.

As I read through Creativity Inc., I learned and relearned some key lessons that can be applied to our presentation and communication of the Gospel.

1. Do the hard work. It is clear from the work at Pixar, they work hard. They put passion and energy into their movies. They desperately care about their movies and want to make them as excellent as possible. When you watch a movie, it takes two hours of your time, but the movie took years of hard work.
2. The creative process is messy, and roadblocks are inevitable. Throughout the book, Ed Catamull shared stories of obstacles Pixar faced in creating movies. Every movie had its own challenges and problems when communicating the story and the development of characters. When working to communicate the Gospel it will be messy at times. We will hit roadblocks. That’s all part of the process and so we should not let that discourage us.
3. Feedback is key. At Pixar, they constantly meet to evaluate the process of the movie and identify ways to make even the little things better. Often, we take our communication too personally and get defensive about what we have created - whether it is speaking or preaching or writing a program or decorating. If we are going to get better at communication, we must be open to feedback.
4. Communication is a team effort. Have you ever stayed behind to watch the credits at the end of a movie? Me neither. (Actually, I have been forced by my kids at the end of Marvel movies to watch the bonus scenes.) Anyway, in the movie credits you see that it took a massive team to create the story. In the same way, our communication of the Gospel will be much better if we make it a team effort.
5. Do your research. At Pixar, they do research trips for their movies so they will be much more authentic. Their ongoing learning naturally seeps or soaks into the movies in ways that the audience feels intuitively. Similarly, we need to do research for our homilies/messages, so they are authentic. 

Which one of these five insights most resonates with you right now? What can you do to incorporate it into your communication of the Gospel, whatever form it takes, in this year ahead?

Rooting for you,
Tom