ICEJ
It’s the Summer – and that means it’s also peak Christian festival season. Across the UK, and indeed all over the world, Big Tops are being erected, speakers are preparing to get ready to think about writing their talks, and nearby branches of Morrisons are counting previous mistakes and overstocking on wine.
Festivals are often fantastic, uplifting and memorable experiences, but there are inevitable low points. Those moments where the only seminars on offer are a heavy duty eschatological unpacking of food symbolism in the book of Job, or a special ladies’ focus on Being a Daughter of the King. In those moments, you need something light-hearted to get you through to the next main session, and here it is.
This is Christian Festival Bingo: a fun game for all the family, where you get more (arbitrarily allocated) points for spotting these classic festival sights and scenes. Some might not be applicable to your particular flavour or tradition of event, but if you haven’t seen at least a few of the things described on the checklist below, you’ve surely never truly experienced a Christian festival…
- Someone praying over a broken tent
The holiday version of praying for a parking space, bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘Tent Revival.’ If anyone has ever heard of (or better still has photographic evidence of) a tent being miraculously healed by the Lord, please do get in touch. That’ll have the New Atheists reeling for sure.
- 14 people queuing with a phone charger around a power point in the Ladies
Ah, mobile phone battery life. The scourge of the modern festival-goer. For some reason, all phones naturally develop a nasty habit of losing power at five times the normal rate when you’re on site, meaning the quest for electricity becomes Holy-Grail-like. Enjoy noticing the innovative ways people find to charge their phones, including sneaking into the speaker’s lounge or unplugging vital stage equipment in the main venue.
- Spontaneous late night guitar worship
Everyone is very considerate about noise levels in the evening, especially when there are children sleeping. However, if someone pulls out a guitar, all bets are suddenly off; even at one in the morning. There’s nothing more certain to shake your faith in the living God than having your two-year-old woken up by a croaky affected rendition of Blessed be your Name by a curly-haired teenager wearing beads.
- A conversation where one person clearly doesn’t know the other
The problem with Christian events is that they can simultaneously make you feel the church is very big AND very small; that’s why we inevitably run into people we’ve met before. Enjoy observing the social discomfort when this happens, and one of the pair has no recollection at all of a prior meeting. Sample conversation: “So how are things going?” “How’s stuff at… home?” “What’s new with… the things you’ve been up to?”
- A guy coolly over-ignoring a celebrity
Some (nameless) festivals appear to attract an increasing number of what we might term ‘plain clothes celebrities’; people who are famous but are trying to blend in and have a normal time. If you do spot someone like this, see if you can also notice the people around them pretending not to have seen or realised, but also taking an unnatural number of over-the-shoulder selfies before running back to rave to their friends about who they’ve just seen queuing for the showers.
- Christians violating the unspoken rules of seat/space saving
No-one has a problem with you saving a seat. Or indeed, a few seats for your close friends. What is not acceptable is using an enormous device you constructed in your garage to reserve the first 12 rows in the Big Top for your entire church congregation. See if you can spot the many variants of this over the summer, as well as the wide range of innocent expressions worn by the evil perpetrators.
- A flashmob set up by some bright spark who has now created an ASBO crisis
“Wouldn’t it be great if…” are five words which, when spoken at a Christian festival should immediately be followed by “no”. Otherwise stuff like this happens: someone shares a ‘cool’ flashmob meeting idea, where as many people as possible will meet in the same place at the same time, without thinking through how quickly such an idea will spread through a site full of up-for-anything wacky types who all tangentially know each other. The result won’t be hard to spot; you’ll almost certainly be squashed in that 200-capactity prayer tent alongside the other 12,000 festival-goers.
- An overly officious steward
There’s always one. A man (don’t protest, it’s a man) who believes that it is his calling to bring some order to the great unwashed chaos before him. To this guy, no rule is too strict, and no official guidance can ever, ever be contravened. He will always make you walk the long way round to the correct entrance; he will never let you enter the venue before finishing your boiling hot tea. There is no space for pushchairs in Officious Steward’s world, and that’s also because babies are not allowed to cry there. Do NOT attempt to tell him that Jesus loves him. He already knows. But the law is the law.
- The glamping set
There’s nothing more demoralising when your first tentative step of the morning soaks your socks with dew, apart from doing so and then catching sight of how the other half camp. When Christians of a certain means visit a festival, they interpret the camping experience rather differently, bringing along beds, duvets, wine coolers, and an electrical generator to power all the fairy lights. Well, I say ‘they’ bring, I obviously mean that they have Jenkins organise and set them all up ready for arrival.
- People trying to look anonymous in the sex seminar
Sessions on sex, relationships and pornography are always well-attended, but are usually full of people who look ‘not to the right or to the left’ (Proverbs 4:27) but stare directly ahead so as not to make eye contact with any other person, especially the speaker. Keep a watchful eye for the little beads of sweat which appear on brows around the room when the seminar leaders starts a sentence with the words, “For some of you here…”
- Someone who has overdone it on the camping gear
Enforced camping always separates the Bear Grylls types from those of us who have canvas-themed nightmares. The former group often appear to have had a large Millets gift voucher burning a hole in their pockets, because they arrive with an abundance of equipment that wouldn’t be necessary if you had an entire Brownie Pack in tow. The really good thing about these people is that they ALWAYS have hot food on.
- A terrible Christian t-shirt
I’m not talking about the subtle, borderline amusing ones. Festivals are the only place many people would ever dare wear an ‘Abreadcrumb and Fish’ parody tee, or indeed an old school ‘Jesus Christ – He’s the Real Thing’ Coke-style slogan. The problem is that you can get a bit excited in the festival environment and buy one for yourself. Dare you to wear it to the gym.
- The free hugs guy
I mean… it’s just deeply problematic isn’t it?
- A home-made banner or flag
I have huge admiration for people who hit Hobbycraft hard in the run-up to an event, and are seen brightening up / severely restricting views in the main sessions with their home-made creations. Extra points awarded if you find one with a hand-sewn spelling mistake, although it’s probably best not to point these out.
Martin Saunders is a Contributing Editor for Christian Today and the Deputy CEO of Youthscape. Follow him on Twitter @martinsaunders.
