Many people are gifted. But only a few are rift-gifted.

Walt Disney was one of them. In fact, Walt was a three-time rifter, one of the few people who have successfully managed to find a rift in the continuum of life, to bet everything on it, and to make a profit by doing so. And he did it three times.

So just what is a RIFT? According to Seth Godin in Fast Company magazine, it's a big tear in the fabric of the rules that we live by. It's a fundamental change in the game, one that creates a bunch of new losers -- and a handful of new winners.

Walt Disney saw three major rifts, dove into them, and changed our culture forever.

First, he noticed early on that movies would transform the world of entertainment. Realizing that there would soon be a huge demand for family entertainment, he pioneered the development of the animated movie, perfecting the form in 1937 with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." At the same time, he grasped that a cartoon could work as a feature length film -- rather than merely a "short" that you saw in the theater before the feature.

The second rift came in the form of the automobile. Disney realized that the car was going to change the way that the American family got its entertainment, and sensed that a strategically located, extravagantly designed theme park could reinvent family travel. And he was right. So, beginning with California's Disneyland in 1955, he built another huge organization around this rift -- and it has dominated the theme-park industry ever since.

Once Disney was into this rift thing, he saw a third opportunity: Television. Although many people regarded television simply as in-home movies, or as radio with a screen, Disney saw in it an entirely different medium. So, with properties like the Mickey Mouse Club, he set out to build a third organization, one that would produce a never-ending stream of content for this market.

So Walt was a three-time rifter: Someone who saw rifts in the continuum of life, and who mobilized an entire organization to take advantage of them. As a result, the motto of most rifters ought to be WWWD: What Would Walt Do?

You've got to wonder what Walt would have done with the Internet. Or with cable TV. Or with home shopping, home video, and DVD. WWWD? (Seth Godin, "Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, my mom -- and now you -- have shared the secret of rifting," Fast Company, March 2000, 258f).

Of course, Walt Disney was not the world's original rifter. He wasn't the first brave soul to see a tear in the fabric of the rules we live by -- and then grab it and exploit it. Today's text from Acts introduces us to two rifters of the Early Church: Paul and Silas. After driving a spirit from a slave girl in Philippi, they are attacked, stripped, flogged, thrown in jail, and locked in stocks. Trapped in the belly of the Philippian Big House, most people would have cried, cursed, whined, and despaired. But not these two.

Paul and Silas see rifts, not roadblocks. Breaks, not barriers. About midnight, they are praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners are listening to them. They spot and exploit a praise rift in their imprisonment.

Then an earthquake hits -- one so violent that the foundations of the prison are shaken. Immediately all the doors are opened and everyone's chains are unfastened. Is this a divinely-orchestrated contraction of the Earth's crust? A God-given chance for a great escape?

Only to a non-rifter. Paul and Silas see other opportunities. The jailer wakes up and spots the prison doors wide open, and fearing that the convicts have escaped he does the only thing that an honorable Roman jailer can do: Draws his sword to kill himself.

HOLD ON! -- shouts Paul. "Do not harm yourself, for we are all here" (Acts 16:28).

Rift number two is an opportunity to save a life. Something that only Paul and Silas are able to see, in a situation where most Christians would have raced through the prison doors yelling, "Hallelujah! An earthquake! Sent by God to FREE us! An answer to prayer! Praise Jesus!"

But these two righteous rifters remain in their cells, and when the jailer rushes in they are able to exploit an evangelism opportunity. "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" asks the trembling jailer when he brings them outside. "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household," explain Paul and Silas. Acts tells us that they spoke the word of the Lord to him, and then he and his family were baptized without delay (vv. 29-34).

Maybe the question for us is not WWWD -- What Would Walt Do? The bigger point for us to ponder is "How can we be rifters for God?" How can we dive into surprising opportunities for praise and life-saving and evangelism, finding them and grabbing them and exploiting them as Paul and Silas did?

The Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City is doing some pretty daring rift-diving as it takes off as the fastest-growing United Methodist congregation in the country. It started in an unlikely place back in 1990 -- in the chapel of a local funeral home. "We called ourselves Church of the Resurrection, really tongue-in-cheek," recalls pastor Adam Hamilton. "We wanted to say, 'We're not afraid to worship in a funeral home because Jesus rose from the dead and we're not afraid of death.'"

Philippian prisons. Kansas City funeral homes. Praise rifts can be exploited in some unlikely places.

But this group of Christians is equally committed to evangelism, working hard from the beginning to reach nonreligious people for Jesus Christ. The rift they identified was "thinking people" -- thinking people who had felt like they believed in God at one point, but then found church to be irrelevant. "We wanted to reach them through their head first," says the pastor, "and then through their hearts."

This rift-jump seems to be working. Church of the Resurrection can hardly keep pace with its own growth, despite the offering of six services each weekend. The current sanctuary, built two years ago, seats 1,600 people, not nearly enough space for a projected attendance that could reach 20,000 in the next 10 years. (Corrie Cutrer, "The Business of Resurrection," Christianity Today, December 4, 2000, 78-79).

So where are the rifts YOU see opening up here in Fairfax? Where are the unexpected opportunities, the big tears in the fabric, the fundamental changes in the game, that YOU can jump into? Paul and Silas showed some unconventional behavior, and through their daring and faithful actions they led a group of prisoners in praise, saved the life of a jailer, inspired an entire household of converts, and expanded the Philippian church.

That's pretty impressive rift-diving.

Of course, this isn't always easy. The church, as an institution, doesn't naturally know how to zoom into rifts. So sometimes it's tough to be a rifter for God. But rifting is what the church needs, whether it knows it or not.

Just ask the Philippian jailer. Or his family. Or non-religious people today. Or people who want to be challenged in their heads as well as in their hearts. Like the Church of the Resurrection, Fairfax Presbyterian Church is well-equipped to be a congregation that can reach "thinking people" with the good news of the gospel.

If you're rift-gifted, it's time to exercise those gifts. The church needs you to lead people in the praise of God, in prisons and other unexpected places ... to offer the hopeless a word of encouragement, in soul-nourishing and life-giving ways ... to connect people with Christ, in communities that feed the mind as well as the spirit … to invest your time and your talent and your money -- yes, even your money -- in the innovative ministry being done in this place.

The rifts are there. You can see them. They are waiting for YOU to dive into them.

Now jump!

Amen.