Greenbelt 08

Highlights for me at this year’s Greenbelt Festival included Molten Meditation - a fusion of charismatic and contemplative worship lead by Robin Vincent. As well as in his own session, I saw Robin Vincent in the Proost Lounge – a showcase of new talent from this label who were celebrating their first anniversary. But apart from this I didn’t get to much music. For one thing the Performance Café was always packed out. Does taking part in the hymn singing at the beer tent count? It was amazing.

So what did I get to?

Ikon led what was really an 18 point sermon on lessons they had learnt as a church. It lasted an hour and half but it was brilliant. Every point had a visual illustration and/or activity associated with it - pillows, balloons, video, discussions and lots of laughs.

This year I went to a couple of new venues:

1. St Ethelburga’s Tent where I did a little biblical meditation and heard a discussion on whether Eastern religions could give us any insights into Christianity and…

2, The Breathing Space Yurt where I took part into an insightful yet whimsical event called a Tea Ritual where we heard stories, quotes and demonstrations centred around the hospitality of drinking tea. Then we served each other a genteel cuppa.

Also I deliberately made Callie a priority, queuing to get her into the Children’s Festival and taking her to events such as an all-age service called Trinity Twister on Sunday morning, where we learnt about the trinity, played twister and took communion.

I’ve now downloaded a couple of excellent talks that I missed while I was with Callie: Jenny Baker on gender roles and Brian McLaren on post-colonialism. I might blog about them later and perhaps mention one or two more things.

As usual it was a great time.