Celebrating creator and creativity

Sojourners, Jul/Aug 1998 by Vernon, Richard

A silver jubilee for the Greenbelt festival

For thousands upon thousands of people, four days at the end of each August are reserved for a musical extravaganza called simply Greenbelt. This festival in rural England has become one of what Malcolm Muggeridge describes as "the thin places." Such places are where the wall between the human and the divine, Heaven and Earth, becomes a translucent veil. The devotion of the attendees makes sense in light of the depth of their experiences of God and creation, especially in this, Greenbelt's silver jubilee.

Its Christian, artistic, and social justice natures aside, Greenbelt's cultural locus may require some transatlantic explanation. The two main secular pillars upon which the festival stands are bank holidays and rock festivals. A bank holiday is a Monday where all financial institutions (and by default all businesses) are closed. Of these, the August Bank Holiday weekend is the most firmly established. The nearest North American equivalent would be Labor Day weekend. Also now long established are the rock festivals such as Glastonbury, Reading, the Fleadh, and so forth. Imagine Lollapalooza lasting several days, or Woodstock being an annual event, and you'll start to get the picture.

Into this cultural context, insert a Christian arts festival, which started as a rock festival and takes place mostly under canvas, and things should be getting even clearer. This is an event unlike any you've had contact with before...unless you've been to Greenbelt.

Festival manager Andy Thornton says this about its appeal: "Because Greenbelt is an arts festival, rather than a conference, it keeps you in touch with different facets of being human, different facets of yourself. It doesn't become a `head-y' weekend but a sort of `whole person' weekend, with a whole person theology."

This theology, and the creative expressions that embody it, attracts a lot of people, an extra 4,000 of whom are expected at this year's anniversary. That's paying customers, over and above the 20,000-plus who normally participate and the (at least) 2,000 who volunteer each year as stewards, site-crew, reception staff, and the like.

But raw numbers alone cannot do justice to the experience of living in an instantly generated small town. The rainier festivals have something of a frontier feel-a muddy site, a gold-rush, canvas boom townwhere people come with dreams and fervor in search of the means to find value and purpose in their lives. Many of them find just those things, and come back again and again, year after year.

TESTIMONIALS are not hard to extract from "Greenbelters." One woman, now in her mid-30s, describes the event as being "the one thing that completely changed my whole outlook on Christianity and turned me from a selfish, inward-looking Christian, into one who realized that it's all about looking out. Faith is expressed in relation to other people and how you care for and serve them, not just in `my daily walk with the Lord.' It really made the Bible mean things to me and how I live, and my experience there in 1986 is why I have worked in full-time Christian justice ministries for the past 10 years."

Greenbelt can be so many different festivals, not just in some hoary old way (that there are as many different versions of an experience as there are people who experience it), but in a very nuts-and-bolts, sheer quantity-ofevents way. Festival goers can spend the entire weekend doing nothing other than taking in live music, be it rock, folk, alternative, world, dance, or blues. (Last year a group learned and performed Faure's "Requiem," a remarkable and moving feat.) They can go to seminars on post-modernism and the Bible; be trained in youth work; write a liturgy to be shared on the final night; go to readings and meet authors; or just hang.

Of course, there is always the option to worship. Sample the different styles: Every year Benedictine monks observe matins and vespers on the campsite. Catholic, charismatic, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist worships, as well as the Iona Community's Celtic liturgy, are all on offer. There is an Episcopalian prayer tent. This is no melting pot; rather, more than a rich stew, it is a smorgasbord of spiritual, cultural, and personal experiences.

"The hope is that the festival is sustaining a more radical and socially aware Christian faith," offers Thornton. He explains one of many special developments for Greenbelt '98: The Peace Tent is a dedicated venue in which the Fellowship of Reconciliation will be running various events, including workshops and seminars on creative, nonviolent resistance and assertiveness training. This type of collaborative effort is another hallmark of the festival's spirit of ecumenical, faithful ways of approaching contemporary issues and needs.

Greenbelt '98 continues the relationship between the event and Christian Aid, and an emphasis on campaigning for fair trade and equipping people to make a difference in this supermarket-styled marquee. A cosponsor this year, with Christian Aid, is The Open Book, a joint effort by the Bible Society and Churches Together In England (itself a collaborative effort), which "seeks to engage our culture through new initiatives in creative arts and storytelling, media, education, and politics."