Greenbelt the aftermarth

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 23 October 2007 07:33:28

I have heard people describe Greenbelt as their church. Often these are dispirited people who have embraced spirituality but have rejected much of normal church. They are the types of people the Spirited Exchanges talks are for, (which have now become an almost annual part of the festival).

For people like me the situation isn't quite at that stage but we do hover around the margins sometimes, struggling with main stream church and only feeling truly in the zone at Greenbelt. This means that after experiencing a wholeness and "normality" at Greenbelt we have to reaclimatise to our normal church situation afterwards and this is something I realise I find incredibly hard to do. Looking at the seasons of my life I realise that I find post-Greenbelt awful, particularly in relation to my church life.

Now does this mean I shouldn't go to Greenbelt? Of course not. The things that Greenbelt offers, which allow me to feel completely normal and whole are things that I can't experience anywhere else and so of course I should and will continue to go. However, what it does mean is that I need to reframe my Greenbelt experience and not seeing it as what I wish the rest of the world could be like to seeing it as part of a wider tapestry of life.

In the same way as we seek to take away the divide between the religious and the secular (and that's one of the reasons I love Greenbelt) we also need to take away the divide between different forms of church in our life, so in many ways we are constantly doing church (i.e. worshipping in community with others). In that way we may be able to take away some of the resentment we feel towards "proper church" because it would just be one part of the picture, which is required to give the full vibrance of living in faith in fellowship with others. It would also allow us to remove some of the special status given to Greenbelt and enable people like me to move in and out of the August Bank Holiday Weekend with less personal disruption.