Well, before I knew it I’d turned 16, finished my ‘O’ Levels, and was contemplating starting 6th Form. No real direction to be honest, nothing much to get too wound up about. And church was still there, a pervasive background to my social life. Girls had entered the frame recently as well (a small group used to hang around with the older BB members), and so a fairly average (if slightly straight-laced) teenage lifestyle was in train.
And then I got an invitation to go to Greenbelt. Alan and Celia were friends of my parents, and were involved in leading the BB company that I was part of. I’d never heard of Greenbelt at the time, but they must have said something to make it sound interesting, because I accepted their invitation, along with a number of other young people from the church. So off we trudged, and found ourselves in a tent in a huge field with thousands of others. I was no stranger to camping, having done a lot of it with BB. And I was no stranger to the Christian sub-culture, having been exposed to plenty of that through Church. I don’t really remember what we did there – I have recollections of wandering around the main village, and the toilets stick in my mind, but other than that there is nothing too much that sticks in my mind.
But what I do remember is the Sunday. On Sunday morning, Greenbelt holds its Communion service. This is the point at which the whole of the festival comes together to celebrate communion. This year Cliff Richard was playing at Greenbelt (that very evening, in fact) and as a consequence the crowd was quite large – 30,000 or so. As we sat there in that service, 30,000 people all partaking of this one uniting ritual, it suddenly all made sense to me. I don’t remember this being prompted by anything any individual said or did, I just remember thinking that here was something that really mattered to all these people, something important to them, and I wanted some of it. I remember saying a prayer of some sort, a prayer of surrender to Jesus (I’d heard templates of this prayer plenty of times before, so I knew the words to say), and that was it. It was kind of like finding that last piece of the jigsaw, the piece that finally enables you to make sense of the whole of the rest of the picture. I knew all the background, I’d heard it all a thousand times before, but something about that gathering of people made it real, made it make sense in a way that it just hadn't before.[1]
And so, filled with this new life and purpose, I proceeded to tell everyone around me about this wonderful, miraculous event that had just changed my life. Except I didn’t. I don’t think that I really said much to anybody about it. I certainly don’t remember talking to my parents about it (I think the first time that really came up was when I brought a Good News Bible with some Christmas money). And I don’t really remember talking with anybody else very much about it either. However, somewhere along the line, it did prompt me to start going along to the Youth Club at the church. This not only introduced me to a wider group of friends (including more girls – yippee!), some of whom were for more overtly Christian than I would have been comfortable with before. But it also, slowly but surely, pulled me in to a scene that started to help me to make sense of that experience at Greenbelt. It gave me a language to describe my conversion experience, and gave me a framework not just to understand where I was, but where I should be going. Suddenly here were people who understood what was going on, and were able to show me where to take it. And it made sense. It really did. I was so glad of that. Life was falling into some kind of place, and here was something solid and principled on which to base it. God was suddenly something real, someone who was part of my life, every single day. And with that came a really strong sense of community and fellowship with a like-minded group of people. By this stage BB was starting to fall apart a little, but here was something more than adequate to take its place. I threw myself wholesale into this community (which may have been helped a little by a recent girlfriend!), and found within it a sense of purpose and belonging. I may not have been consciously looking for it, but now I found it, I knew this was what I wanted.
[1] The other life-changing event of that Sunday took place that evening. Somewhere in the evening main-stage line-up, sandwiched between something like Garth Hewitt and Sheila Walsh, an upcoming Irish band had blagged their way onto the running order. That band was U2. And that 15 minute set was the start of a life-long following of the band.
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