Make it Transformational: A Blog for Champion Discipleship

I went to college in Los Angeles, and had friends who knocked down extra cash for the weekends as professional seat fillers.  They knew producers who would hire them to dress up and attend big Hollywood awards shows—Grammys, Emmys, Oscars, you name it—to fill in seats so that the crowd always looked full for the cameras.

They loved it.  They saw some great entertainment, rubbed elbows with the biggest stars on the planet, and invariably returned with plenty of behind-the-scenes stories of the type that today fuel an entire multimedia industry of celebrity gossip.  And they got paid to do this.

But why seat fillers in the first place?  Oh sure, sometimes attendees at these big events leave their seats to accept or present awards, but the reality is that these awards shows are terrible, and most people can't wait to get out of there. 

Take the Academy Awards.  Here you have a mammoth production budget to hire the very best entertainers in the world to sing and dance and tell jokes, and the attendees are so bored and distracted they can't be bothered to stay in their seats.  Queue the seat fillers!

The complaints against the Academy Awards are so well-known they’ve become clichéd.  It’s too long.  The acceptance speeches drone on and on, so much so that we need an orchestra to usher the winners off the stage.  No one cares who wins the award for Best Subtitle Font Design for Foreign Animated Films except the mother of the winner.  The self-congratulatory tone, the endless parade of self-importance, the winning movies no one ever saw or cared about, it’s all too much.

Contras t this to a nonprofit fundraising event here in Los Angeles that my wife and I attended last week.  The organization followed a model of charity events they learned from MIF, which is to say they abandoned the keynote speakers, auctions, comedians, singers, casino nights, dancing elephants and all other trappings so common for charity events. 

Instead they told their story in a concise, compelling way, focused not on how great the organization was, but how the organization was equipping regular people like those in the room to solve huge problems.  The place was packed, so much so that two tables of staff and spouses were seated outside, next to the helicopter pad! 

The guests were so riveted by the narrative of the evening-- how God had called this organization into existence, how lives were changing, and how all of us could play a part in the next chapter—they stayed long after to socialize.  The organization also raised a lot of money, but this felt secondary somehow.

And through the whole event, not a seat filler was needed.