Greenbelt – the Art of Looking Sideways (part 2)
Jonathan was at the kids activities, the girls were off terrorising the rest of the camp-site with their friends there was finally time for martin and I to catch our breath and look at the program. We did this in the essential to visit venue. Now at the Isle of Wight Festival that would be the Solace Tent at Greenbelt (as at many other festivals) it is definitely the Tiny Tea Tent . Martin is concentrating very hard juggling the daily diary and the big guide and trying to work out what we want to do. We decided that we wouldn’t worry about going to any talks as we could download them afterwards, we would concentrate on going to more experiential things. So I decided I wanted to do Beer and Hymns (which in the end had too long a queue so I didn’t get into it) Taize worship and the Wild Goose Big Sing. We both wanted to do Milton Jones, London Community Gospel Choir and a few other bits and pieces. We managed most of what we wanted to do but not everthing and boy did we have to queue for some events!
On Sunday Morning Martin decided to chill out at the tent and the rest of us went to the main
communion at the main stage. With the theme of looking sideways continued we had some unusual visual images. We looked though a mirror to see the mirror writing in our service handouts and also to see it on stage. It took me quite sometime to be able to see it in the mirror but eventually I got there.
We also put three different types of service sheet together to produce a word.
We used the red napkins in a responsive reading and had lots of confetti blown all over us and then shared communion together.
Usually at churches when they “share the peace” I look for an excuse to be somewhere else – I really hate doing the big phoney smile and hug or handshake thing. Small children are good for this as they can often be encouraged to start crying or need a nappy change at an opportune moment unfortunately mine are now to big for this and fortunately we don’t do this at our church. However even I enjoyed sharing the peace sat in a field surrounded by good friends some of whom seemed to be doing Rimmer impressions with the little mirrors – part of the looking sideways thing!
