This year I was a contributor to the Greenbelt Festival on the 180 team running the skate park. Was a great time, a few tweets made it up onto the church sofa and everything. Being a contributor is pretty great, at first we had figured we were the same as volunteers so we were going into the volunteers lounge and making ourselves a cup of tea or coffee and so on. Then on the second day a woman told us that we weren’t meant to be there and that we had to go to the contributors lounge instead. We were a bit annoyed by this assuming that we would have to pay for drinks there or that it might not even exist. However we eventually found the contributors area and discovered almost what heaven might be like. We didn’t have to make our own drinks, or pay for them there was a whole team of people there to help make the festival even better for us and we got everything we could need, free wifi and electricity as well. If only I had taken something that could use either of those effectively.
Throughout the week I made it to a few talks and bands, some of the highlights were Courtney Pine and The Herbaliser on the main stage and most of the bands in the Performance Cafe. However 2 things really stood out this Greenbelt for me. One was the brilliant Beer and Hymns where there was nothing fancy about the worship leading just a plonky piano and a singer or two, no fancy new songs just a whole load of people enjoying their beer and enjoying singing hymns passionately to God. The other was a talk I went to see, by Dave Andrews, he talked about the defining characteristic of the 20th Century being violence, more people died because of a another person in the 20th century than the rest of human history! The only way we can change this is to stop thinking of plan A (treating others how they treat us or how we think they will treat us) and start following Plan B (treating others as we want to be treated). His Talk has really made me think about how my life work for this and how this can be done big scale as well as small scale. Continue Reading…












