Sunday morning saw me and a host of other people rushing about backstage, soundchecking and other-stuff-checking for Greenbelt’s mainstage communion service. It was my pleasure and privilege this year to work on the service with the wonderful Martin Poole of Beyond church, as well as the talented Mr Stuart Townend, another friend of many years.

What’s the key to a successful, ecumenical service of worship that attempts to include some 20,000 people? I think the key is to start with one of the recipes for worship that has already endured for centuries, and use that as the template. There is a good reason why liturgies become established… it’s because they WORK! You can try way too hard with this stuff – in my experience trying to re-invent the wheel rarely works. But taking the elements of a classic and then re-interpreting it means that everyone will have some sense of recognition of what is happening. And if you are really skilful in the re-interpretation you can make it feel inclusive of most denominations.

This year we took the structure of a communion service, taking what you would find in common in a Catholic, Church of England, Wesleyan or Lutheran context, and gave every part of it a new twist. A eucharistic liturgy is like a 5-act play: it begins with a three-part confession (of praise, faith and sin), follows with a liturgy of the word (read scripture, proclaim it) then intercession (look outwards to the world) then a liturgy of the sacrament (bread and wine) and finally the blessing and dismissal (the service is not complete until the people of God, filled with the presence of God, are back out in the world).

I love working with Martin Poole – he is so good at creative worship, but his background in theatre and TV means that he has a great feel for the scale of each act of worship. With a field full of 20,000 people it’s hard to make people feel involved whether they are front of house or hundreds of yards away on the back row.

We came up with the idea of giving everyone a little pack with some pieces of pre-printed paper with the essential bits of the service on it, and a small piece of plastic mirror. With this, the festival theme “the art of looking sideways” was enacted in worship.

With the mirror people first of all had to view huge letters that were held up on stage but back-to-front. Hence people were not just standing watching, but having to interact with what was onstage. As the service progressed and the information on the paper had been used, there were then instructions that there were several different versions of the paper: each person had to find people with the other versions, and only when they got together did they discover that the pieces of paper folded together turned unrecognisable blobs of ink into the word “god”. Then there were confetti canons that released snowstorms of confetti into the air, floating down like manna from heaven. The dynamic was taken away from the stage; the back row became the place where the actions were. And then later the mirrors were used a second time: each person stuck the mirror on to their own forehead while they greeted others: thus they saw themselves at the same time as they looked at you (and it made everyone laugh too, always a good thing). The message came through all of these that it’s only when you connect with other people that you see yourself, and God, more clearly; in addition, it enhanced the idea that sometimes you don’t see spiritual truth by looking at it directly, it’s just as likely to come at you laterally.

Ecumenical worship on a massive scale sounds like a huge challenge – and it is. There are always the finer details that don’t match up between denominations – is it a sacrament or a memorial? who pronounces the words of forgiveness? is there a priest, or does the very word priest ruffle people’s feathers? To some extent you can’t resolve all those problems; we will never agree on all the details, so you have to hope that those who come along are more interested in finding a space to worship together than picking a fight

Nevertheless, bread, wine, people, prayers and blessings is what the church has done for a couple of thousand years. The key to a sense of inclusion with thousands of people is not to change the liturgical recipe, but to make sure it works on a grand scale, introducing activities and elements that help people connect with each other, not just with the stage at the front.