see you on the airwaves?

Despite being exceptionally wet before the festival, the audience were greeted with glorious sunshine on Friday morning, which lasted throughout the four-day festival, leaving conditions perfect for a huge range of insightful talks, outstanding music, and stimulating programmes of performing and visual arts.

New artists appearing at the festival included comedian Robin Ince, who proclaimed it one of his favourite festivals of the year; and the creators of the sitcom Rev, Pirates-of-the-Caribbean actor Tom Hollander and writer James Wood, who were ‘overwhelmed’ by their experience. Returnees warmly welcomed included human rights activist Peter Tatchell, comedian Milton Jones and jazz legend Courtney Pine.

Despite a last-minute cancellation by Gil Scott-Heron, Greenbelt’s audience rallied behind stand-in headliners The King Blues. Rachel Stringer, Greenbelt Head of Content, said: “We always knew we had a terrifically strong lineup on Monday with Clare Short, Jeremy Hardy, David Morrisey, Roger McGough, Linda Marlowe, Mark Kermode, and especially our mainstage first support The King Blues, who stepped up to create a brilliant end to another great Greenbelt.”

This year’s theme – The Art of Looking Sideways – encouraged oblique views on a range of subjects including sustainability, ethics, church and international development, with particular focus on Greenbelt’s three-year campaign on Israel-Palestine.

The annual communion service raised over £43,000 for Trust Greenbelt, the festival’s charitable trust which supports
organisations that embrace the festival’s faith, arts and justice focus.

Over a hundred talks recorded at the festival are available at greenbelt.org.uk/talks [http://greenbelt.org.uk/talks]

2011 earlybird tickets for next year’s festival (26th – 29th August 2011) are available at greenbelt.org.uk/tickets

What’s the key to a successful service that attempts to include some 20.000 people? I think it’s this: to stay true to the recipe for worship that has already endured for centuries, and make only the most subtle changes. You can try way too hard with this stuff – trying to re-invent the wheel rarely works. What is necessary, though, is the kind of thing that the lovely Martin Poole is so good at – creative, interactive acts on a grand theatrical scale that make people feel involved whether they are front of house or back row. The confetti canons were extranordinary; tiny mirrors through which you could view the back-to-front writing from mainstage, but also spot your own image on the forehead of the person you greeted was an inspiration.

Bread, wine, people, prayers and blessings. This is what the church has done for a couple of thousand years. The key, I think, is not to change the recipe, but to make sure it works on a grand scale.

Greenbelt is always stuffed to the gills with great things to try, see, hear, watch – but one of the best features that you can’t exactly advertise is that if you become a festival regular many hours can be spent simply catching up with other Greenbelters. This is like a once-a-year meet up for old friends, people who come from far and wide. I’ve just had ten minutes each with friends from Glasgow, Nashville, Bristol, Bath and Hampshire all of whom I haven’t seen for 12 months or more. In this respect Greenbelt has become something of a pilgrim site – a place to go to where you aren’t sure quite how, but it will change the spiritual temperature somehow. I’m walking round with a sense of hope in my heart that wasn’t there three days ago.

Saturday 3pm: Big Top, chairing a panel on how you know what you know. Includes scientist Keith Skene, artist Bobby Baker Robin Ince and Giles Fraser.

Saturday 3.00pm Winged Ox CANCELLED

Sunday 7.30-8 on Radio 2 with John McCarthy

Sunday 10.30 am leading worship from mainstage with Martin Poole, Stuart Townend and more

Sunday 6.00 Hebron (Talks 2) The Writing on the Wall – a talk about the bible and the arts, based on my new book.

Sunday 8.15pm signing books in the book tent. (eek – I struggle with this bit, hope it doesn’t look pretentious)

In between whiles, track me down for a Tiny Tea!

Keeping a blog has done several things for me. The first is that it’s one of the few modes of writing that you publish instantly, and get an instant response. Not everyone wants that, but I like the sense of keeping in touch with what interests readers, and what they think. The second is that long ago someone said to me, “If you want to be a writer, write every day. Doesn’t matter much what you write, but you have to do it all the time.” The blog gave me a way of writing one short piece every day about what was going on around me. Readers bugged me if I didn’t write. And after a few months I had a message from TallSkinnyKiwi, one of the granddaddies of blogging, that said “I like your blog better now. You seem to have found your voice.”

The voice matters. When I started the blog eight years ago I was writing academic papers, lectures, supervision reports and committee reports. I knew more about theology than was strictly necessary, and I could write things down that made sense, words in the right order, delivering the information. That’s what I had been trained to do. But in the process I had lost my voice; in fact, one adviser in particular had criticised me for writing “too much like a book” and insisted I rewrite some materials in a strictly technical style. The blog helped me to recover and develop a voice again.

But you know what? Before the blog I had been published – a chapter or two in a book here and there. But the blog itself actually won me two publishing contracts. I didn’t have an agent; I didn’t send a manuscript to anyone. The publisher came to me and said “We want somebody who writes like you.”

So there you go. Now I write weekly instead of daily on the blog because I spend a lot of time writing books in the voice I developed here. Right now I’m finishing a manuscript for the book of 2011. When it’s done I have to decide what to write for the one after that. Any thoughts?