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Greenbelt is ............ Youth festival, music festival, political festival, evangelical festival, development festival, broke festival, harvest festival… there’s something in all these myths about Greenbelt that is accurate, but nothing entirely true.
We come from ordinary Christian communities and from none, from being joined to worshipping families where the presence of God is regularly obscured, from places where artistic appreciation is confined to hymnody and flower arranging. We have a hunch there is more to it than this, that where two or three are gathered we can become more than the sum of our parts, maybe even a sign of another kingdom. For many of us, Greenbelt has been a kind of epiphany – an earthy sacrament, a rocking religion, an unruly faith in an untamed God, Spirit of wonder and compassion, celebrated with noise and passion, argument and laughter.
In a materialistic, anti-institutional era, where the church is marginalised and mocked, and religious icons of substance and charisma are hard to find, at its best Greenbelt remains singular in its faith-affirming, politically engaged, life-transforming experience. With many understandings of Christian community dying, one way people anticipate a new way of being church is through alternative meeting places and movements like Greenbelt. As the Canadian singer Bruce Cockburn put it, “The festival and the people involved in it are the closest thing I’ve got to a church. There is a sense of community built around a worshipful intent and a shared understanding of the need to question in the context of faith.”
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