Alternative prayers rooted in a festival tradition

Andrew Brown on the fringe groups exploring art and fun in a Christian context

Imagine a Grateful Dead show without the music or the drugs and you have something quite like a Greenbelt Arts Festival.

The dates are about right: this Christian festival has been going for 22 years and a fair proportion of the 20,000 festival-goers seem to have come every year. They bring their children or grandchildren now for three days of peace, music and theology among the cowpats.

This year it is held at Castle Deene, near Corby, Northamptonshire, in the heart of perfect English countryside. There is one main stage for music, but the audience in front of it is surrounded by marquees for theological discussion, liturgical dance, and other forms of fun.

The festival crowd are the sort of people from whom the alternative service movement sprang. In fact the Nine O'Clock Service group performed here twice, once in 1989 and once in 1992; and their performance in 1992 was a milestone in their alienation from the rest of the scene, which had less to do with their act than with their arrogance and refusal to discuss what they were up to.

Evangelical Christianity has traditionally distrusted both art and fun, according to Martin Wroe, the chairman of the festival this year. Greenbelt was set up to explore the possibilities of both in a Christian context. At one marquee, entered at random, volunteers were having voluminous bloomers put on over their clothes and then stuffed with balloons. The compere, or preacher, or celebrant (the correct term was not obvious), then walked solemnly round each one with a pin, keeping score as he popped each balloon. After that the congregation was bidden to rise and dance.

Other parts are more traditional although among the 250 performers this year there is bound to be someone to please everyone. They range from the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev Richard Harries, to Jo Ind, a feminist theologian who last year told a seminar that she found prayer sexually arousing. There will be a Roman Catholic mass celebrated by Fr Michael Seed, the society priest who is instructing Alan Clark; and a dance service by Holy Disorder, one of the groups influenced by Nine O'Clock Service.

There are workshops on the Bible, politics, and music. And of course there are workshops on sex: sex as a four-letter word and sex as a three- letter word. There is a prayer tent and a counselling tent. But the flavour is best conveyed by the fact that it is the only gathering of 20,000 people to which I will take my five-year-old daughter, confident that if I lose her she is likely to come to some good.

David Aaronovitch, page 14