After decades without a church on Main Street or any other Disney property, a house of worship is coming to a suburb of the Magic Kingdom.
Walt Disney Co.'s Celebration, a planned community on 4,900 acres in Osceola County, Fla., will be the site of a Presbyterian church by the summer of 1998.The Community Presbyterian Church is being built with the help of a six-figure gift from Dorothy Disney Puder, a niece of Walt Disney and his brother Roy. Puder and her husband, a retired Presbyterian minister, are in their 80s and live in California.
"It's a great privilege for us," Dorothy Puder said. "This money was not our money, but the Lord's money. So when this opportunity came up, we were thrilled about contributing."
The church, on a two-acre site near the heart of the downtown Celebration Village, will include an 800-seat sanctuary. A nearby parsonage for the minister is nearly completed. Estimates of the cost of the facility range from $3 million to $6 million.
The Puders declined to reveal the exact size or form of the gift but said that it came from Disney stock left to Dorothy by Disney and her uncles.
"It's our way of remembering Walt and Roy," said the Rev. Glenn Puder. "It's a great fit as far as we're concerned. The money is coming full circle."
The announcement of the Celebration church comes at a time when Disney is under attack from the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God and several family values groups. The organizations are upset by corporate policies as well as products distributed by company subsidiaries that they consider antithetical to the Judeo-Christian tradition. These include offering health benefits to partners of gay employees, promoting and distributing controversial books and films such as "Priest" and allowing so-called Gay Days at theme parks.
Disney officials have consistently refused to respond to these criticisms. However, since the protests began in earnest last year, the company has appointed a Jesuit priest, Georgetown University President Leo O'Donovan, to its corporate board. This summer Disney also released "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," the company's first animated film to feature Christian faith as a pervasive theme.
Celebration is Disney's effort to re-create an ideal American town. Other houses of worship will be constructed in later phases of the development, as it is built out to its capacity of 8,000 homes and 20,000 people. So far, more than 150 people have moved into the community. The community's official opening is Nov. 18.
"We would love to see many different worship centers in Celebration," said Charles Adams, vice president of the Celebration Co.
Celebration officials discussed worship centers with more than a dozen denominations but were swayed by the plans of the Presbyterians, Adams said.
"The group that really took the ball and began to move it along was the Central Florida Presbytery," Adams said. "They were way out ahead of everyone else."
The Presbyterians were willing to accept the 2-acre site offered in the downtown area, utilizing surrounding office and commercial parking for Sunday services.
Other groups, Adams said, "had aspirations that were bigger than that site size," and will probably wait for 5-acre sites outside the Celebration Village area.
One committee, involving Lutherans, Baptists and Jews is exploring the possibility of an ecumenical worship center, with the help of Disney planners, Adams said.
Landing the Celebration church is a coup for the Presbyterians, who represent one of the smallest denominations in central Florida.
The Presbytery intends to make the facility a national showcase and the centerpiece of a campaign to build 10 new churches in central Florida.