“DO YOU must pay?”
While I used to be sitting outside the Coracle, the small church tent within the mishmash of religions and genres — mostly exotic — two people got here up and asked the identical query.
No — the prayer-tree was free. There was a tree under there somewhere, but, by Saturday morning, it was hidden under a blanket of colored ribbons (strips of material taken from last 12 months’s abandoned tents), each inscribed with a prayer in marker pen.
A number of venues down the avenue was a Wish Tree. You needed to pay for that.
Twenty minutes’ walk away — or greater than 45 should you selected to make the journey when the concourses got busy — the important church tent was giving out cups of water. By the tip of the festival, the organisers expected to have given out 20,000 cups. There was sometimes a brief queue for the misting spray, too. All free.
These small gestures, designed to convey something very basic about God, sum up the church presence on the Glastonbury Festival. Over the past decade or so, what was a more customary approach, with give-away literature and so forth, has been honed right down to its simplest level: “positive engagement with a human being”.
The description was the Revd Chris North’s. His day job is National Discernment Adviser, but, for the past 22 years, he has helped in, and now co-chairs, the small steering group that runs the church space.
“Glastonbury is a spiritual place,” he said, “but people don’t anticipate finding the Church here — or in the event that they do, it will be somewhere at the sting, wagging its finger.”
Many of the people he meets have been hurt by an encounter with the Church prior to now, or by their experience of its teaching.
Jason BryantThe Coracle (within the chairs, the Revd Chris North and his daughter Gabby)
But the festival’s founder, Michael Eavis, who was serenaded in absentia during Coldplay’s set on Saturday night, worships in a Methodist church, and from the beginning gave a big marquee for the local churches to operate in. It is sited on the hill above the Pyramid Stage, made visible from afar by the massive black cross on the sloping roof. The festival organisers provide 25 tickets for the volunteers who run it (and camp behind it, with the assistance of a mobile ex-Salvation Army tea-van and a fresh-water standpipe).
The group was larger: Mr North regrets the post-Covid cutting down. Before the pandemic, a 70-strong church team ran an evening shelter for festivalgoers who were too unwell, or too unhappy, or too lost, to return to their very own tents — sometimes as many as 200 in an evening. The festival organisers handed this task to the welfare team, saying to Mr North and his people “just be Church”.
The Coracle, where the prayer-tree was, is an example of this, now in its second 12 months. Before, the church group had stayed aloof from the Healing Fields, with its tarot reading, hand-fasting, multiple types of Buddhism, different kinds of yoga, etc. Now, though, there may be a Christian presence — modest, low-key, but friendly . . . and free. Most of the time it was staffed by Gabby, Mr North’s daughter: “The best conversations just occur.”
The Revd Lee Barnes, adviser for curacy and fresh expressions within the diocese of Bristol, was one other on the team, also there together with his daughter. He co-chairs the steering group, and has been coming to Glastonbury for 32 years, from the age of 18. He treats it like a retreat (not a silent one), and described himself as a giant believer in “festival Christianity”. Festivals, he said, “are profoundly creative places where God might be discovered.”
DIOCESE OF BATH & WELLSThe Bishop of Bath & Wells, Dr Michael Beasley, on Sunday
The Revd Alan Chandra, a self-supporting evangelist in Bristol, was there for the primary time. His impression was of a spirit of generosity and openness — perhaps, paradoxically, due to the 15 kilometres of fencing round the positioning that now effectively keeps out the remainder of the world (especially gatecrashers). “It gives people the liberty to be the person they need to be.”
They agreed, though, that individuals who got here to the festival to flee the issues of on a regular basis life often found that being there merely amplified them. “There’s nowhere more lonely to be than when surrounded by 250,000 people having a very good time,” Mr North said.
Jo Morling was not lonely by any means, but she wasn’t having a very good time. She was a part of the six-strong Iona Community team. She sympathised with an adolescent with ADHD who got here to the Iona venue, a yurt with cushions, blankets, and a hearth pit in a shady glade near Block 9, the grungey late-night zone. The girl was in tears, overwhelmed by sensory overload and in need of survival strategies.
“Don’t get me mistaken,” Ms Morling said. “I like sitting here talking to people. You hear essentially the most amazing stories.” She’ll be giving her ticket to a different Iona volunteer next 12 months, though.
Not all of the encounters are probability ones. The important church tent was divided in two, one half kitted out like a front room, with flowery wallpaper and sofas, the opposite with an altar comprised of a picket pallet. Here, the clergy within the team offered services for the renewal of marriage vows.
Jazmine and Gordon had been in contact with the team in January, after their planned wedding in Cyprus needed to be postponed. They’d been occupied with hand-fasting, but did the church team do relationship blessings? They did (seven this weekend, plus two baptisms). The couple, wearing matching leopard skin, sat in camping chairs before the altar for the readings, then the Revd Justine Richards gave an address: “This is just not fluffy love that’s only going to exist at Glastonbury.” She prayed with them, just as Cyndi Lauper struck up with “Girls just need to have a good time” from the Pyramid Stage.
Church TimesJazmine and Gordon have their relationship blessed by the Revd Justine Richards
The couple, who knew one another as teenagers, have been together for five years, and hope to marry when funds allow. Saturday’s ceremony won’t have hindered them: like the remainder of the church offering, it was free — just one other example of the message of generosity and openness that the church team hoped to convey.
The next day, the Bishop of Bath & Wells, Dr Michael Beasley, can be given a five-minute speaking slot on the Pyramid Stage, but, for essentially the most part, the church team at Glastonbury were working quietly under the radar, giving support and reassurance to a whole bunch of festivalgoers.
Ms Morling, within the Iona glade, summed it up. “People don’t come to be evangelised. They come for the madness that’s Glastonbury, and places like this offer an oasis from the madness.”
