Greenbelt 2006 - Redemption Song.
Molten Meditation Report.
  Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers over this Greenbelt weekend - we had an amazing time.

Getting together with thousands of other Christians pursuing a better and wider understand of God, wanting to experience and discover new ways of worshipping, wanting to learn and be inspired by talkers, thinkers and theologians who are practically living the kingdom, and wanting to celebrate this awesome creative God through our own creative expression.

Simply amazing - and the food was good too!

(Please click on the images for a larger view).

  

A festival vista.

Camping.
  
  Molten Meditation's contribution came in three parts:

On the Friday evening we took part in one of the first worship events of the festival, Evening Prayer - Thanksgiving for the Word, where with a small group of people we shared poetry, dance, sung liturgy, lit candles, poured water and then meditated together on how nothing can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8: 38&39). At the end we introduced our take on "sharing the Peace" that involves the tying of string around a neighbours wrist and telling them that Jesus loves them.

  




String tying - Jesus loves you.
  
  The first full Molten Meditation session was early on the Saturday morning. The set up was easy, everything worked, everything survived the trip. Decided to go with the laptop and projector in order to play the music and project moving "visualisations" that pulsed and evolved with the music. It was a bit bright in the tent so the lava lamps and projected images were not as effective as hoped but they still added to the atmosphere. We had about 60 people come along and spend the hour with us.

The format followed that of a three layer meditation sandwich - after a brief introduction I prepared people for meditation by talking them through some simple relaxation exercises into the first meditation on Matthew 6: 25-27 "Do not worry about your life". Then we sang the worship song "To be in your presence" together, just with guitar, leading into the second meditation on 1 John 4 "God is love". After this we blessed one another with a few minutes of string tying and telling each other that Jesus loved them. We then finish with the Romans 8 meditation.

Everyone seemed to really enjoy it - got lots of positive feedback from people which was wonderful to hear. Despite dim lava lamps, the odd technical hitch with sound and very noisy tractors moving rubbish out the back of the tent, the people who came were blessed by it, as was I as I had no where to go but to sit and spend time with God myself.

For more information on the format of the session click here.
  

Our first session.

String tying...

Being community...

Sharing...
  
  The last session we did was on the Sunday night, 10pm.

Originally we were the last event of the evening in this, the Church Times venue, but Taize needed a larger venue for their over popular night worship and so were moved to be on right after us. This meant we had to be very conscious of time but also that there would probably be a few hundred people queuing outside as we finished.

Again the setting up was easy and we had time in which to do it. The biggest problem was that it had been raining on and off during the weekend and the grass inside the tent was wet and muddy and so it was not a comfortable place to sit. I hadn't considered this at all otherwise we would have brought a tarpaulin as well as our tie dye throws. Despite the sogginess we had about 100 people, weary from two nights camping and two days of seminars, workshops, music, sunburn and rain, ready to spend some time meditating on the word of God. That really spoke to me, the realisation that they hadn't come to see "Molten Meditation", they hadn't come to see me perform or listen to my music they had come on the strength of our description in the program which was "Scripture meditation", they had come to spend time with God, to dwell on scripture and be blessed by it. Our role was simply to help them do that.

We followed the same format as the Saturday session and again I found the string tying to be really moving and a lovely way to approach people and share the love of Jesus.

We thank Jesus for smooth way that everything came together, from the car working, to the ease of access to the site, to the laptop running flawlessly to the lovely people who ran the venues and the stewards who counted people in and out. Mostly though, that people came, entered in and enjoyed what we brought.
  

The Sunday night session...

about 100 people...

trying my best to look spiritual...

More string tying and fellowship.
  
 
Other Highlights.
Mixed in a lot of stuff over the weekend.
 
  The best inspirational speakers for me were:
Jackie Pullinger - completely practical, grounded, amazing woman of faith and leadership
Jim Wallis - American preacher, theologian and campaigner working for justice and peace, gave two amazing talks on non-violence, and how the church should be dealing with issues of terrorism and politics. Gives me hope in the idea of an America based on something other than war.
Jo Rathbone - Very simple seminar on how the church should be an example of stewardship, recycling and ecological care. She was there on behalf of Eco-Congregation. Made me want to weep.
Peterson Toscano - A performance artist who tells his own story through different characters. He spent 7 years and $30,000 trying to go straight, to become "ex-Gay". He went through programs, residential courses, hours of prayer and three exorcisms all to "heal" his homosexuality. His reason for doing it was because he loves Jesus and wants to do whatever it is that God wants him to do and this is what the church was telling him God wanted. He's just as Gay now as he was when he started and his performance was full of laughter, joy, tears and brings you to a deeper realisation of Gods enormous grace and our poor use of it.
 

The awesome artistry of God's creation.


Sunset over the glorious toilets.
  
  Worship and music:
Got a good wide flavour of this from all sorts of extremes - all good.
Really enjoyed the "Night Prayer" service led by nChant who are a choir of women bringing a contemporary approach to Medieval music and sung liturgy.
Fuse Factory brought stunning electronic music combined with a vast array of video images and visualisation topped with a female singer.
Andy Flannagan (top worship leader) teamed up with DJ Lee Jackson to create some spontaneous, beat laden but guitar driven worship using familiar songs.
Sunday Main Stage Communion. A Greenbelt tradition is to get the whole festival together for communion at the main stage. It was led by John Bell of the Iona Community and was a strange mix of African songs and bits and pieces from all over. Sharing communion with a little group of 20 amongst nearly 20,000 was a marvellous event.
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My trusty Rain Livebook that ran the music and visualisations for the sessions.


Main stage communion.
  
  Best highlights come from God.
The whole weekend was full of wonderful encounters of God but there was one moment, just some simple words overheard from a stranger, that blew me away.

I was laid out, on the Sunday afternoon, on a stretch of grass in front of the bandstand where the big speakers would give their talks. I'd just finished hearing about God and politics from Jim Wallis and was about to hear about heaven from John Bell while trying to protect myself from the scorching sun. I lay there thinking about what I'd heard, about my sunburn and about the meditation session later on and my ears tuned in to a couple of people seated on the grass nearby. They were sharing their highlights of the festival so far. One said to the other that they had come across a CD called "Molten Meditation" that was a bunch of meditations with music and looked really good. My heart froze in my chest. We'd sold about half a dozen CD's so far out of the 30 we'd stocked in the Greenbelt music shop and out of those six this lady had bought one, and out of 20,000 people she had decided to sit on this patch of grass at this time, and of all the countless things they could have talked about they mentioned the one thing that was most important to a man a few feet away. She hadn't even been to one of the sessions, she had none of our string around her wrists, she'd just seen the CD in the shop and picked it up. Behind my shades tears welled up and I thanked God for his mercy and his awesome grace that he would bless me and melt my heart through the randomness of strangers - to me it was as if God had said "you did ok".
 		 

Special thanks to Louis and Rachel for their help and support over the weekend.


And to my wife Maria of whom I am the greatest fan and without whom I am lost.
  
  If you experienced a Molten Meditation session at Greenbelt this year then please send us your feedback. You could post it on our forum if you like - tell us what you liked and what you didn't like and also how you'd like to see it evolve.

If you would like to invite us to your church or event to run a Molten Meditation session then please get in touch. If you'd like more information on running your own session then please click here.		  
             
   
             
 
Molten Meditation © Robin Vincent 2006 -2007
robin@moltenmeditation.com