I’d like to teach the world to sing

Did any of you see the wonderful ‘Choir’ series on the telly recently? I did and what an uplifting tale of one person’s vision for a community being realised so effectively. For those of you unfamilliar with the concept, Gareth Malone, a choirmaster goes into a community, be that a school or, in the case of series 3, an actual community (South Oxhey) and transforms the people therein through the power of communal singing.

Previously, I gather, he has done this in schools but this time he has taken on all ages from all areas of the town and merged them into a cohesive, and not unpleasant sounding, group of singers. The effect this has had on the town of South Oxhey was quite startling. Here we have a singing group that consists of what were 3 or 4 disparate (and previously non-existant) singing groups. The climax of the series was the South Oxhey Festival, a one day event on a bank holiday to which the whole town was invited to celebrate all that was good about South Oxhey and, of course, hear the choir sing.

To see the pride the partcipants and the watching crowd had in their town was inspiring.

To hear the comments about meeting new people and making new friends made me think back to my time at church. This is apposite as I was invited to a service this weekend on what is known as ‘(please, please, please) come back to church sunday (we’re desperate for people but not so much as we would actually change anything about the way we do anything to make it any more appealing in any way)’. The ‘church’  want us all to go back, to return to the fold. We know that you were led astray by the devil but God is still there every Sunday at the same time, doing the same things and he isn’t even a little bit miffed that you haven’t been in a while. So come on, come back and we’ll pretend it never happened, in fact we’ll pretend nothing ever happens, better still we will actually do nothing so we don’t even have to pretend.

I couldn’t help but contrast this notion of going back and returning to that of the choir going forward, trying something new, inspiring and leading people into new experiences. Experiences that enhance their life and build them spiritually and physically. Experiences that bring them together for the communal good. And with no agenda but that. You don’t have to believe, you just have to be.

The church is one of the few organisations that has the wherewithall to do something like Malone has done but it seems too content to sit on it’s collective big backside and ‘beg’ people to come back rather than get out there and do something for meaningful for them.

So, thanks, but no thanks, I won’t be going back any day soon.

How Soon is Now II ?

Just got back from Greenbelt 09 where the theme for the festival was ‘Standing in the long now’. On my experience of the weekend I would alter that slightly and call it ‘Standing in the long queue’.

I really cannot remember that last time I had to queue so much and I started the summer going to Glastonbury. The thing was, at Glastonbury (G), there were queues for the loos, that would be expected and it was much the same at Greenbelt (GB). The problem with GB was that everything that was even remotely popular had to be queued for, usually for about an hour prior to the item starting. I think the longest recorded queue from someone in our party was 2 and a half hours for Rob Bell.

At times the enforcement of the queueing was a little heavy handed. Take the 2nd Beer & Hymns session. When I went into the beer tent a good hour and a half before the planned start to have a quick beer with Dylan (whilst he ate our shared pancake) there were already quite a lot of people in there. We sat outside and watched the queue form. Meanwhile some of our friends and family arrived to meet up with us before we moved on to our next activity (we had already done the singing the day before) so I suggested they nip in through the side of the fence and join me whilst we waited for the others to arrive. Eventually the stewards realised that people were getting in this way so they posted someone to stop it. Consequently some of our friends were on the wrong side of the fence. When they wanted to go off and do other things I suggested their children came with us so I politely asked the steward if they could come in for a few minutes and sat with us, whilst I finished my drink.

‘No they can’t’ I was told, ‘we are at the legal limit for the number of people and we would be breaking the law if we let them in’. This was probably the case, there were probably more people in than should have been but there is no way they could have known how many more as there was no way they could have known how many were actually in there. There could have been a conversation here whereby they established how many children we wanted to bring in (2) and how long we would be staying for (5 minutes) but there wasn’t. So instead we asked if our child could nip out that way to be with his friends on the other side. ‘No he has to go through the front gate’, presumably so they could let someone in to keep the numbers precise. So I lifted him over the fence and off he went.

I finished my drink and we all moved off, no real harm done, some people were let in to the ’space’ we had vacated and off we went to queue for something else. The whole thing tainted our weekend though when it really didn’t need to.

So a couple of questions for the GB organisers (lest they be reading this)

• Why were the most popular activities not put in venues that could accomodate the expected interest? e.g. Rob Bell had a 2-3 hour queue fro each of his sessions. Given that he is quite a popular character and he was featured prominently in the guide and he was recommended by a lot of people, why wasn’t he on the main stage?
• Why is there a fence round the beer tent?
• Why can’t the stewards use their common sense?
• Why wasn’t it really sunny?

I did enjoy my GB though, good to see some old friends and to make some new ones (Simon Thomas is on the christmas card list). I really enjoyed seeing and hearing Paul Cookson and Stewart Henderson, two poets that are very entertaining. I also thought that Dans le Sac vs Scrobious Pip were excellent. I would probably not seek out 100 Philistines Foreskins again though (no offence).

So will I be going next year (yes) will I grumble a bit about stuff (probably), still, when you get to 27 you do get a bit tetchy in your old age.