Posted on 07/02/2011 8:31:02 AM PDT by markomalley
AT LEAST 25 Christian music festivals are held each summer in America, but they have never catered for theological liberals. Until this year, that is, when the Wild Goose Festival—named after a Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit—kicked off on June 23rd on 72 wooded acres in eastern North Carolina, not so far from the intellectual hub of Raleigh-Durham.
The idea, seven years in the making, was based on Britain’s Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, which draws 20,000 people a year. About 1,500 people came to the American version, which explicitly pitched its appeal to artists and musicians, nonconformists, post-Christians, non-Christians, disaffected evangelicals and a liberal evangelical subset known as the “emergent” church.
Instead of Bible studies, there were labyrinth walks. Instead of praise-and-worship music, there was hymn-singing in a beer garden and a bluegrass liturgy presided over by a tattooed female Lutheran minister. Visitors were greeted with buckets of water in which to baptise themselves, and tubs of mud to remind them that “dust thou art”. (In Britain, the mud is usually underfoot.) Lecture topics ranged from sex trafficking and social justice to authority in the church and interfaith relations. Visitors could learn from Tom Prasada-Rao, a singer, how to chant “Om” and “Hallelujah Hare Krishna”, or hear Paul Fromberg, a pastor from San Francisco, talking about his 2005 wedding to another man. “God is changing the church through the bodies of gay men,” Mr Fromberg told a packed session on human sexuality. Also under discussion was “religious multiple belonging”—in other words, belonging to a clutch of different faiths at once.
Several disillusioned evangelical leaders attended. One was Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Bakker of the defunct-Praise-the-Lord-TV-network fame, who gave meandering talks on growing up fundamentalist. Frank Schaeffer, who has made a career out of criticising his evangelical parents Francis and Edith Schaeffer, called the Bible “Bronze-Age mythology” and confessed he had a “conflicted ambivalence” about abortion.
“We’re a laboratory for justice, spirituality and art in the way of Jesus,” explained Gareth Higgins, the festival director and a peace activist from Belfast who has worked with Greenbelt and now lives in North Carolina. He and other organisers managed, miraculously, to recruit 150 musicians and speakers, none of whom charged for their services. They hope that the emergent cohort will rise from the ashes of an evangelicalism ruined by right-wing politics. As 78-year-old Phyllis Tickle, author of several books on emergent Christianity, put it, “We’re at the start of a 500-year upheaval in culture and the church.”
Most evangelicals do not view the emergents so kindly. The few conservatives at the festival privately complained that the panels were stacked with liberals and that issues dear to them, such as abortion, were neglected. Greenbelt has often met similar criticism in recent years.
Mainline Protestants, however, seemed delighted by the festival, and may well latch on to the emergents to shore up their shrinking numbers. Buoyed by their success, Wild Goose’s organisers are planning to repeat the festival next year in the same bucolic place
The “labyrinth walks” are just creepy and Satanic to me. I’m sure most discerning Christians would agree.
"Enter by the narrow gate;
for wide is the gate
and broad is the way that
leads to destruction,
and there are many who
go in by it.
Because narrow is the gate
and difficult is the way
which leads to life,
and there are few
who find it."
Actually, I disagree. There is one at a Catholic retreat house in the woods near here. I walked it at night, when it was barely lit by a single lamp on a pole. There were places where it was completely dark and I had to just keep going in what I believed to be the right direction to stay on the paths, which can feel disorienting, since they make hairpin turns.
And what came to my mind was, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path," from Psalm 119. It was a lesson.
North Carolina is known for it’s woodsy goofballs.
Perhaps it was an exercise, but it was anything but Christian.
Sad, really.
>>And what came to my mind was, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path,” from Psalm 119. It was a lesson.
For these people, the lesson would the interpreted as, “My feelings are a lamp unto my feet, and there are many paths.”
“And all the people said, ‘Unnngh!’.”
I don’t want to think what this could devolve into.
A gay acquaintance who happens to be relatively conservative has told me some real horror stories about the “gay scene”. He hand his partner went to a picnic for gay families and friends at the infamous Rainbow farm in southern Michigan some years ago.
He said it was the only picnic he’s ever seen that involved gay men having sex in the mud with children watching.
I doubt that highly.
The few conservatives at the festival privately complained that the panels were stacked with liberals and that issues dear to them, such as abortion, were neglected.
I would not presume to speak for Jesus, but does anybody picture the Lord taking a pregnant teen (or woman for that matter) by the hand, leading her to an abortion clinic?
And the festival is promoted by non-other than, Jim Wallis, BHO spiritual advisor.
Interesting that it took place in a “grove of trees”.
A good Christian can get something out of almost any given situation - that doesn’t mean all given situations are Godly or good or that one should put thmeselves continually in those places.
Blessings
Mel
There's a famous labyrinth on the floor of Chartres cathedral. It a kind of meditation. Think of it as a metaphor for the Christian's journey through life requiring perseverance through life's many turnings.
I cannot say anything about the flaky goings on in the N.C. woods.
Look at all those itching ears going down the wide road. It is shocking how many have fallen away from the atoning blood of Christ for other ways of their own imagination.
Read my tag line.
Luckily for these folks God is not as much into smoting as he once was.
New Age Beyond Thunderdome
Two gender unspecific humans enter!! One gender unspecific human leaves!!
Freegards
A whole 1500 attendees? That’s truly a groundswell.
My mother loved to go places where flaky people like these gathered, so I’ve seen plenty of what goes on at these kinds of events first hand. As a child, I didn’t realize what made me dislike them so much, and dislike the whole hippy movement as well (of which events like this are a descendent). Now, I know. It’s because of the phoniness, so thick it would take a chainsaw to get through it. These people are so busy pretending they (and all people) are something they aren’t that they totally lose sight of who they really are.
They can call themselves "Mainline Protestants," but the label is no more true than if you were to stand in a garage and call your self a 1952 Studebaker.
After all, Nancy Pelosi calls herself a Catholic.
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