Saturday, 20 September 2008
Turning Point
We are now seriously planning for the Turning Point project to take the Mainstage across the Channel to Mainland Europe from next summer. The ambitious plan is to follow what I felt the Lord showed me in a dream to re-establish a bridgehead on the coast of Normandy following the paradigm of the D-Day Landings that ended the Second World War in 1944 but at a terrible price.Read more about the background and how to get involved here... Miracle Street beyond the UK
We're then aiming to hold Mainstage Festivals in Paris, Berlin, Rome and Athens over the next couple of years ahead of the biggest step of all. We will load the giant Mainstage trailer onto a container ship for a sea passage down the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea into Mombasa, Kenya. We'll then connect with my friend Simon Guillebaud who leads Great Lakes Outreach in Burundi and other national connections we have in Kenya and Uganda particularly. Clearly at that stage it is highly unlikely that the Mainstage will return but I feel it is somehow in the destiny of this great resource to move across countries and continents carrying the fire of the Gospel. In mid October I'm going to Africa with Gary Stupple from here and also Francis Dognon my great friend in Normandy who we will work closely with for the European side of things. We'll spend a week with Simon and others to dream and plan together for Miracle Street in Africa! Watch this clip and catch the vision! Oh and turn the sound up!!
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
Big and small on the same day
The Bracknell Mainstage Festival this last weekend was one of the best run and the biggest crowds we have seen in five years of running Mainstage events. The weekend opened up with a giant Family Funday with upwards of 5,000 going through the event. I hosted the programme with Simon Thomas and there were many opportunities to present the Gospel. In the evening around 1,000 young people attended a Battle of the Bands event and then another 750 or so for the Church in the Park gathering on Sunday morning.On Saturday Jono also led a Miracle Street team to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight for a Parklife event. Jono reports "It was great to be back for our tenth event on the island of the summer! The weather was scorching and we had a good crowd turn up. A rather warm straitjacket escape got the message across as we looked to build a foundation for the evening event. We often find that without a big budget band for the evening it's hard to get people to stay around for ‘church’ if they have been around all afternoon. Shanklin was no exception. Maybe we need to explore ways of making the evening work by merit rather than piggy-backing it with a Funday? But we know that several hundred people came along, enjoyed the day, saw the church in a new light and were challenged to think about faith in a new light too?
