flamjangled tea party :)

Two nights and three days of camping at a music festival!  60 hours of outreach to the hippy fringe, white English-speaking music subculture!  Mission has some interesting byways!

This weekend sells itelf as "musical mayhem" and as an "outrageous costume party". True enough.  I dressed up as a Fransiscan Monk and painted the participants into a large canvass called "Invitation to the Party", a reworking of Jesus' parable of the invitation to the party.  

We were a small team this time, all from Claremont Methodist: Lloyd and Andrea Fisher-Jeffs and Matthew Graham.  Matthew and Andrea also painted and drew, so we were a counter-cultural artists colony.  Counter-cultural but not anti cultural.  We camped amongst a thousand campers and lived the life - with a particular mandate to make friends and give out fruit for free - and to find avenues to speak out God's love and represent the Other Party of the Kingdom.

I spent most of the time at the main dance floor, capturing the crowd in acrylics on a large canvass.  This generated a lot of interest and a great many conversations. Responses ranged from downright hostile to very open repeated conversations.

Many people were visibly dismayed to find out that my intentions were gently evangelistic - but in three sentences they had heard the story: "I am illustrating one of Jesus' stories.  God is giving a party to which everyone, no matter where they are or what they are or who they are, is invited. Some people decided to ignore the invitation, and anybody can ignore it,  but everyone is welcome!" I believe that once the story has been sown into somebody’s heart then the processes of the parable of the sower come into play. The mysterious processes of the Word of God germinating with power are unleashedJ
This has now been our second sortie into this particular sub-culture. We will need to reflect on whether this should become a part of our rhythm of ministry as Serving Strangers.  It is certainly a field of work that is wide open and apparently not very thoroughly worked!  Pray for the Lord of the harvest to send labourers into his harvest field! (Luke 10:2)