Early this summer, we were fortunate in being able to enjoy a special family holiday in Florida. Inevitably, we spent a few days in the DisneyWorld theme parks.

It was great fun, with exciting rides and many happy moments meeting our favourite characters for photos and autographs!

One thing struck me when reading one of the many quotes that were dotted around the parks, sayings by Walt Disney himself: ‘I don’t want the public to see the world they live in while they’re in the Park. I want them to feel they’re in another world.’ To enter the Magic Kingdom, you have to take a nostalgic steamboat or a futuristic monorail; you can’t just drive in. It’s an intentional design feature to get visitors to cross the boundary between reality and fantasy.

While we enjoyed Disney, we also spent several wonderful days in the ‘wild’, walking round nature reserves and seeing God’s natural creation - free of charge too! We came across many unfenced and untamed alligators, manatees, dolphins, snakes, turtles, and even eagles and armadillos.

Away from the crowds, this was more majestic, and actually far more ‘other world’ to us than Disney.

That made me think about Church. How do we want people - and our children, to feel when they cross the threshold? Not, actually, as stepping over the boundary into ‘another world’, and certainly not a fantasy world.

Church must be an integral part of this world, with a glimpse of a better world to come.