just back from greenbelt festival at cheltenham racecourse. didn't get time to blog as i help plan and co-ordinate all the worship at the festival. when greenbelt is over, the bank holiday weekend is gone and it always feels like summer is over. time to get back to work and nearly time for school again.
congrats to joel who did amazingly well in his gcse exams (and had a great time at reading festival while we were at greenbelt).
i didn't take many pics at greenbelt as i was often too busy meeting people and catching up! but i have uploaded 8 that i like. once again my favourites are taken at night on long exposure of the site, the lanterns stall, organic beer tent, and tiny tea tent. anyway they are in a small greenbelt 2006 set. if you took photos at greenbelt add them to the greenbelt 2006 group and if you didn't but were there and want to see other peoples photos go there...
if you want to track what people are blogging typing greenbelt into technorati should track some reviews and what people are saying.
as for me i love greenbelt - it's what church should be - vibrant, creative, celebrating the arts, diverse, engaging with issues of justice and spirituality, asking tough questions. as ever i bumped into loads of people i knew which is always a highlight. this year grace got our act together and managed to camp together and have a few meals, barbecues and late night tots of rum. the two things grace did on site were a shed installation turned into a camera - i'm sure someone else will have a decent photo but i haven't. we painted a shed black, cut a hole in the side and put an old lens in from a pair of glasses and painted one wall white opposite the lens so that when you sat in darkness in the shed, once your eyes adjusted you saw the people walking past upside down on the white wall. i couldn't believe how well it worked. the other thing we did was communion by numbers which was amazing...
other thoughts - fuse factory were brilliant | ikon's service fundamentalism was wonderful. it was like a piece of performance art brilliantly staged exploring and provoking around issues of fundamentalism. i think people will be talking about it for a few weeks to come | jen did a brilliant job with john bell of running the sunday morning - everyone seemed happy even at the feedback meeting | seeing michael franti was a treat though i realised that was the only time i bothered to go to the main stage all weekend | new forms cafe had been done amazingly by ben and ian and teams from sanctus1 and moot along with a huge support tech team | i did a panel on mission and emerging spiritualities - i generally hate panels but thought this one really flowed and raised some interesting stuff | i did a seminar throwing a hand grenade in the fruit bowl - it was basically a chapter for a book i wrote on preaching that got rejected but you can download it free here... someone asked me why i had presented the content which was deconstructing preaching as a talk - that question undid me and i have no response so i doubt i'll be doing that talk again! anyway i'd better go and put the camping stuff away. back to the routine now summer is over...
here's the shed - it looks incredibly dramatic with the wide angle lens and the sky. you can see we painted it black, cut a hole in the side and put a lens from an old pair of glasses in it. then inside was a white wall opposite on which an image appears inverted. the connection with faith was to encourage people to think about the 'upside down' kingdom of god. they could write thoughts on that in chalk on the outside.
and here is a shot from inside the shed of what appeared on the white wall. brilliant... another crazy grace idea comes to fruition - i think it was mike who first suggested the shed obscura on a tube journey back from seeing DJ shadow or something..
Recent Comments