So, Mighty Ducks: Game Changers? I’m in. I appreciate the half-step away from pure reboot, and if the pilot is telling at all, it’ll be a light romp not unlike the Disney Channel classics of yore. And who couldn’t use a bit of one-dimensional flat characters with predictable stubborn growth arcs and easy humor? I’m delighted.
As my wife and I were chuckling through the pilot — especially almost every time Nick (Maxwell Simkins), the lovable sidekick and host of the second-most popular youth hockey podcast in Minnesota, opened his mouth — I was also struck by how Nick and main character, Evan (Brady Noon), tackle the tall task before them.
If you’re in the dark, I’ll just say that the Ducks have become so high-powered that their supremacy and obsessive culture has made them the enemy. Evan has been freshly cut, too slow and behind the developmental curve, and he and his mom are starting a new team that will bring back the fun that rec league hockey has lost. In short order, he needs four teammates to join Nick and him so they can register a new team by the league deadline.Game on. #TheMightyDucksGameChangers, an Original Series, starts streaming March 26 on #DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/yOVNOzAq5n
— Disney+ (@disneyplus) February 24, 2021
As a pastoral minister and as the friend who often feels like I’m doing a lot of initiating and not always receiving quite so many invites in turn, I was struck — and felt seen — by Nick and Evan’s manner of recruiting.
First, Evan invites a few people one on one in conversations. Props to you, Evan! There’s nothing like the retail effect of that face-to-face invitation to mobilize people. Unfortunately for him, he gets shot down each time. Frustrating!
Next, Nick, the savvy preteen podcaster, offers to AirDrop an invite to everyone lunching in their middle school cafeteria. As everyone around them gets the ping on their phones, we see a montage of sneers, as people dismiss the notion. No one bites; the mass appeal strikes out. However, sometimes this sort of low-cost exposure to a new opportunity can help grease the skids toward eventual commitment a bit. Nonetheless, no quick gratification here! Worth a try. Gotta wait and see.
After some more steeling of nerve and a little pep talking, Evan needs to get it done in the eleventh hour. Once more, in the lunchroom, he makes a mass appeal. This time, rather than a passive e-blast, he throws down a lunch tray while standing on a table and delivers a plea from the heart. His appeal to break from the norm and join an oddball crew secures the four yeses he needs. Reinforcement of the initial blast? Effective pathos appeal? A mix of a few things? No matter how, way to go, Evan!
Man is this relatable, in social life and in ministry. Thinking here especially of pastorally connecting people to programs, events, etc. deep temptation is there to rely entirely or mostly on easy, wide-reaching, passive marketing: e-blasts to large existing listservs, posts to social media platforms, printing and hanging flyers, making an announcement over the PA or at a Mass. That stuff is important, helps move the needle, and gives people an easy way to catch on to something. But as much as we’d love for a social post to go viral or get shared repeatedly, it rarely does. We know the retail ministry is what reinforces the passive stuff and personally engages and develops interest. But even then, it just often feels like people are averse, low-commitment apathetics sometimes.
I know among Millennials, my social frustration is frequently that people wait for others to commit first. The frequent response to invitations was “who’s going?” or “who will be there?” And in my snide INFJ-ness, I want to say “you and me”!
Now working with Millennials and Gen-Z’ers, I see a lot of interest in faith and justice, and a lot of desire to come together around common interests and causes. The trouble here is often follow-through, a disconnect between stated interest and the commitment needed to do outreach and then show up for stuff. It’s especially tough, as my job was already part-time and largely remote, even before the pandemic made it almost 100% remote. I don’t have the preexisting relationships or clock time to build and utilize those relationships. Maybe the pandemic has made this extra bad, but I worry that it's become congenital.
There’s always room for outreach, invitation, and inclusion to be more thoughtful, more robust, more thorough. Yet, there’s also a point at which some of the burden falls to recipients. Are you really as interested in community life as you say? Will you take the risk to be a part of something new and unestablished? If you love hockey and love being part of a committed team, would you fall in with a ragtag new group with the right values?
I know among Millennials, my social frustration is frequently that people wait for others to commit first. The frequent response to invitations was “who’s going?” or “who will be there?” And in my snide INFJ-ness, I want to say “you and me”!
Now working with Millennials and Gen-Z’ers, I see a lot of interest in faith and justice, and a lot of desire to come together around common interests and causes. The trouble here is often follow-through, a disconnect between stated interest and the commitment needed to do outreach and then show up for stuff. It’s especially tough, as my job was already part-time and largely remote, even before the pandemic made it almost 100% remote. I don’t have the preexisting relationships or clock time to build and utilize those relationships. Maybe the pandemic has made this extra bad, but I worry that it's become congenital.
There’s always room for outreach, invitation, and inclusion to be more thoughtful, more robust, more thorough. Yet, there’s also a point at which some of the burden falls to recipients. Are you really as interested in community life as you say? Will you take the risk to be a part of something new and unestablished? If you love hockey and love being part of a committed team, would you fall in with a ragtag new group with the right values?
Surely, programs could always be improved, and ministers could be more gregarious. But I also always hope (perhaps naively) that folks will realize their social capital a bit more. We certainly allow ourselves to be inundated with content across so many platforms and media, to an extent that can get overwhelming. Yet, it's all content that we’ve self-curated and invited into our feeds and inboxes.
It was interesting in this show to watch a pair of 12-year-old protagonists attempt to walk the outreach tightrope, and I was rooting for them to make it across to a positive end. I think we could all do well to acknowledge the power we have as recipients of invitation. Part of it could be filtering down the breadth of our feeds and inboxes a bit; maybe we're each due for a little spring cleaning of unsubscribing to e-blasts or unfollowing a few accounts we don't keep up with. More importantly, though, most all of us could do to be more consistently responsive, especially to non-generic, more personal outreach, and to place higher value on replying to friends, to ministers, and also to the invitations from God.
It was interesting in this show to watch a pair of 12-year-old protagonists attempt to walk the outreach tightrope, and I was rooting for them to make it across to a positive end. I think we could all do well to acknowledge the power we have as recipients of invitation. Part of it could be filtering down the breadth of our feeds and inboxes a bit; maybe we're each due for a little spring cleaning of unsubscribing to e-blasts or unfollowing a few accounts we don't keep up with. More importantly, though, most all of us could do to be more consistently responsive, especially to non-generic, more personal outreach, and to place higher value on replying to friends, to ministers, and also to the invitations from God.
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