HeartEdge & St Martin-in-the-Fields at Greenbelt

We were pleased to, once again, make a very positive contribution from St Martin-in-the-Fields to this year’s Greenbelt Festival. St Martin’s Voices gave two Great Sacred Music performances (which attracted their largest audiences there to date), led Night Prayer and a Come and Sing workshop, while HeartEdge organised and led a panel session with Inclusive Church on ‘Wit and wisdom from the Margins’.

The Great Sacred Music performance on 'The Passing of the Year' explored through word and song the passage from spring to summer, autumn to winter. ‘Amazing Grace’ explored great hymns and spirituals from the UK and USA, including Amazing Grace and Abide with me. ‘Come and sing’ was a fun hour-long workshop singing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus alongside Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

HeartEdge delivered a session that effectively combined affirmation with challenge which was described by one of those who came as being ‘a brilliant and thought-provoking session.’ The premise of the session was that people and communities so often overlooked — in society and church — have much to teach us about who we are called to be. Ours was a panel of church leaders and thinkers all with lived experience of various marginalisations — disabled, BAME, LGBT+ or single — as we reminded ourselves that the ‘calling from the edge’ is what shapes our prophetic and political thinking best. Our panel members were Revd Sally Hitchiner (Diverse Church), Fiona MacMillan (Inclusive Church), Rev Bev Thomas (Amani Consultancy), and Jackie Elton (Single Friendly Church).

Discussions in the session touched on the idea that the role of the Church (however defined) is to anticipate, in the here and now, the kind of radical welcome and acceptance that will be our experience in the coming kingdom of God – to have a taste of heaven now! It was suggested that, ‘beyond function, diversity in gender, and particularly diversity in sexuality speaks of the abundance of God, the playfulness of God’ and that we ‘understand God, not out of need but, having had our needs met by the eternally abundant God, we relate to God out of sheer delight’. We also discussed reinventing the Church calendar to ensure that single people feel as involved as others.

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Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah.