the Wild Goose part overall

so… wow! playing a theatresports game of word-at-a-time story with shane claiborne [a flippin good one involving an armadillo and a reconciliation within the neighborhood] in the van on the way home from the wild goose festival brought home how surreal this whole adventure is – i don’t put him on a pedestal or anything as he is just a man, but this is the guy who wrote the book that changed my life, inspired me to seek out community and continued to fuel my struggle with the acts 2.42 picture of church and what we see today in that weekly meeting’d thing we attend.

but ja, a couple of blogs are not going to do much justice or come close to explaining clearly my and our experiences at the wild goose festival but hopefully i can give out some tastes at least. this is the first time the wild goose festival has taken place and i strongly imagine it will happen again next year [at worst the year after] and become a regular thing on the calendar and i imagine it will grow pretty huge. not sure of numbers this year but i would say 2000 is a rough idea of how many people were there – the camping spots were so spread out and there is always so much on the go that it’s really hard to estimate because you never have everyone together in one spot at the same time but hearing the numbers as people were registering i imagine it was somewhere there.

okay so quite a big bunch of us headed out from the simple way – the five village people [me, tbV, A-Ron, E-beth and Erica] as well as Shane and Katie-Jo and Darin and his family and Didi and family and Janelle [from the office] and then our master chef Taehu [spelling?] who is a Korean American and amazing servant and food-producer and a bunch of his friends from different places, oh and also Kassim and Mike, two young guys from the neighborhood and then we met up with A-Ron’s kids [Ocean, Cana and Silome] and so we were quite a big group with a communal kitchen area that kept growing as we invited new friends in [really saw community working in the fest which was one of my highlights] to eat and vibe with us.

so basically the programme was a bunch of talks and bands and workshops and small group discussions happening all at the same time [5 to 8 at a time usually] and a very difficult-to-understand programme or schedule [but pronounced shedule] to try and follow to try and get to what you want to see/hear/be a part of… i probly could have used another week or so to go and attend all the sessions i wanted to but i did get to experience a lot of good and interesting and challenging and some perturbing stuff, but glad about everything i participated in i think, even the stuff that i was really not sure about

shane’s talk was probably my favourite, even though a lot of it was stories from ‘the irresistible revolution’ which i’ve already read but he did an exercise where we handed out blue pieces of material as scarves to a bunch of people in the crowd and we got people to hold them high to symbolise that we are under the same blue sky as a bunch of afghanistan children shane is in relationship with and so we video’d that and will send it along [same thing happened at papa fest] and that felt really significant and moving and just his message of Jesus and love and serving the pool stood out from a lot of the other discussion i heard or participated in. our new friend matt pritchard did a great workshop vibe in living in community together [some of the pitfalls most communities fall into] which was also a highlight and then one or two of the bands we saw…

as part of the village house we had to work shifts at the simple way booth handing out free copies of the latest issue of Conspire magazine [which a lot of the [people speaking at wild goose had contributed to] and selling subsccriptions and shane’s books and dvd’s and that was an incredible way to meet people and many of our new friends joined us in the booth helping us chat about the stuff with people as they got interested… one of the highlights was definitely new friends and especially new friends in community or trying to practically figure out what living intentionally in community looks like…

lowlights were three ticks, two of which were in places i cannot post pics about and so definitely not so amped about that – survived two full days ticks free while everyone else was getting mauled [think tbV survived tick-free] and then BOOM, too close… it was pretty heck-youknow…

so yes, overall an incredible experience and hoping we’ll be around next year for the second one to see how things go – huge room for growth and improvement but i think this is a festival that will provide some great conversations and dialogue on topical and relevant issues and will hopefully provide life change and kingdom growth for years to come…

[for  those who missed it before the wild goose is a celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit]