Each week we’ll be hosting a guest post by Wild Goose friends writing about what they’re looking forward to in the first year of the festival. This week we have Shane Claiborne, mendicant wanderer and nu-monastic extraordinaire.

A celebration of art, creativity, and prophetic imagination
A showcasing of fantastic Kingdom-minded projects and missional businesses (not just funnel cakes and university tables)
A spectrum of diverse voices harmonizing without homogenizing – old and young, catholic and protestant (and other), all colors of skin, from many walks of life
Courageous and daring
An uncompromising fusion of Jesus and justice without making folks who are new to either of these feeling excluded  — perhaps a few debates or panels inviting critics to share their voices would be nice
An event that is creative enough to make sure money is not an obstacle to folks who want to attend
Good teaching…. And good music
A convergence of movements
A place for families and kids
A public witness where we can do something together to bear witness or stir a little holy mischief (perhaps a vigil outside a weapons contractor or abusive corporation)
A space that feels sacred –  filled with worship, genuine fellowship, and celebration
A gathering where theory and practice meet, where prayer and reflection are married, where there is good thinking but also good living taught and practiced
An embodiment that displays the unity of Christ’s body, and creatively practices Communion/Eucharist together
A few things I would like to make sure Wild Goose is NOT:
Homogenous
Pretentious
Preaching to the choir
Celebrity-driven entertainment
Branded by one organization or movement
Sloppy with theology
Sloppy with practice
Another Christian music festival
Profitable (expensive)
A passive gathering of spectators
Just another event to go to every year
It is a gift and honor to be part of this little adventure with all of you.  –shane claiborne

The Greenbelt Christian Arts Festival has been a draw for Anabaptists in the U.K. for decades.

Now it’s crossing the ocean.

The festival has been going on in England since 1974, presently drawing more than 20,000 people each year. It is one of the most exciting things happening anywhere in the Christian world. Now, plans are under way for a version of the family-friendly event to come to North America as the Wild Goose Festival.

‘One of the most exciting things happening anywhere in the Christian world.’ To the unacquainted, this might sounds like cheap hyperbole, yet another self-aggrandizing soundbite in an over-hyped world. And yet, for those of us from North America who make regular pilgrimages to Greenbelt – like Vic – it’s simply our experience. Something powerful happens when like-hearted people seeking to embody love and justice while exploring creative spirituality get together to celebrate and display the wisdom path of Jesus in unprecedented ways. We definitely owe Greenbelt for this inspiration, as well as the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, among others, as Vic continues:

Wild Goose’s draft mission statement focuses on inclusion and on the development of a radical community of grace, joy and peace that will seek to change lives and bring God’s healing and hope to the world. If this sounds familiar, it should: Some of these ideas and language are used in the “Vision: Healing and Hope” statement adopted by Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA.

It’s true. While the Wild Goose “Flock” comes from a wide range of denominational backgrounds, our ethos and guiding spirit have been profoundly influenced by Anabaptists, Quakers, and other Radical Reformation communities (as well as their antecedents, like the early Celtic Church) who carry a torch for God’s upside-down Kingdom. Though more established, top-heavy, and temporally powerful institutional churches tried to marginalize their testimony of peace, simplicity, and the nearness of God’s presence, their light could not be put out. Further, we’re witnessing a beautiful reunion in this post-Christendom world, as many of the formerly persecuting denominations have formally apologized, making moves toward reconciliation and adopting the very ethos they once rejected. The late philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote that “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” Surely such an atmosphere makes this seem nearer? We hope.

We were enthralled with the Anabaptist feel of the music, dramas and talks, many of which provided Christian perspectives on peace and justice issues. In a country where only a small percentage of people attend church regularly, it was astounding and thrilling to see this huge crowd, averaging around 30 years old, gathered to hear about what it means to follow Jesus today.

Some of us are not quite sure what “Anabaptist music” sounds like, but we concur with the author that it’s astounding: Across Europe where outward, institutional Christianity appears to be dying – indeed, where the body seems to have been cold for a long time – Greenbelt is a seedling sign of life, a counter-indicator of resurrection. In the U.S. and across North America our situation is somewhat different: Signs of religiosity are still everywhere, from megachurches to the halls of political power. And yet, increasingly, many of us are feeling that the emperor of American Civil Religion has no clothes. Where European Christianity has been declared dead on arrival, much of the form of North American Christianity resembles Vampire Christianity – walking around, undead, and – as Dallas Willard once remarked – wanting Jesus only for his blood.

Because of the Dark Night of the Living Dead our faith is presently going through on ourcontinent, our numerical aims for Wild Goose 2011 are far more modest: We’re hoping to gather a large handful of the Flock next June, and we plan to intentionally cap our attendance numbers to allow for the most participative, generative experimental gathering. It did, after all, take decades for Greenbelt to reach its present critical mass; here in North America, there are far glossier, glitzier, and glamorous religious goods and services that can be consumed. We won’t appeal to everyone and that’s okay. Because we know, just like our friends across the pond, that

Many…are longing for a Christianity with integrity that addresses issues like war, poverty and the environment. Like many in the Emerging Church movement, which has close ties to Greenbelt, British Christians are looking for Anabaptist-style theology and finding it at Greenbelt.

The Wild Goose Flock is comprised of “emerging” Christians to be sure, and also “missional,” “organic,” and “fresh expressions” and – to be quite honest – church dropouts. Further, we’re Catholic, we’re mainline Protestant, we’re evangelical. We’re Pentecostal and charismatic; we’re First Nations followers of the Way; we’re spiritual, but not religious. We’re Mennonite and we certainly hope we’re a Society of Friends.

Greenbelt’s mission is to ‘re-imagine the church as an infectious global conspiracy, working for God’s peace, healing and friendship in previously unimagined ways.’ Greenbelt’s coming to North America is an opportunity for Mennonites here to get involved with what is anticipated to become a high-profile event on the cutting edge of Christian faith. It may have a significant impact on the way Christianity is perceived in North America. Now is the time to get on board.

Only time and our shared experience will tell if the Wild Goose Festival is the “second coming of Greenbelt.” But we fully concur: This is an unprecedented opportunity for people of faith, hope, love and goodwill to alight together, chasing after the Goose. What we’ve sown in tears of sorrow over the state of North American Christianity, we may just reap in joy of new beginnings. We’ll be taking flight together as we make temporary migration to Shakori Hills, North Carolina, June 23-26, 2011. Will you join us?

Please stay in touch – via this blog, Facebook, and Twitter @WildGooseFest.

Let me fly away with you
For my love is like the wind
And wild is the wind

~ from “Wild is the Wind,” covered by David Bowie on Station to Station

The Holy Spirit led me into ecumenical and later interfaith work through a Wild Goose chase that started in 1997, during a college year at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.  Studying Roman Catholic theology, medieval women, the Russian language, and Orthodox Christianity gave me ecumenical perspective on the roots of my own Episcopal tradition.  Outside the classroom, I witnessed secularization in Dublin and the scars of religious violence in Belfast. My father and I went on a Celtic pilgrimage, visiting Glendalough, Ninian’s Cave, the Isle of Lindisfarne, Bede’s Jarrow, and Durham Cathedral (built with stones from Hadrian’s Wall).  My dad was called by the Goose to start a retreat center where the Spirit could be encountered in nature’s thin places.  Less than a decade later, he and my step-mother moved to Aibonito, Puerto Rico to start Centro Espiritu Santo.

I first heard squawks about the Emerging Church in 2003, while working at the Episcopal Office of Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations.  In 2006, my friend Isaac Everett asked me to co-found an emerging church.  We were encouraged by many people, including Ian Mobsby, founder of the Moot Community in London, who invited us to Greenbelt. We launched Transmission in the New Forms Café at Greenbelt 2006, which felt like three-days in heaven.

The following summer, I was asked to be part of a group trying to start a North American Greenbelt.  The weekend before I attended a planning retreat, my life took a wildly unexpected turn, when my now-husband proposed.  That summer, the Wild Goose also called me to leave my job at the Episcopal Church’s national office to do innovative, grassroots ministry.  I found the courage to flap my wings, fly out of my safe nest, and found the perfect position, working with Samir Selmanovic to launch Faith House Manhattan, an interfaith community whose motto is “experience your neighbor’s faith.”  This position has stretched me beyond ecumenical, Episcopal or “emerging” into interfaith.

Phyllis Tickle‘s book The Great Emergence proposes that “the two overarching, but complementary questions of the Great Emergence are: (1) What is human consciousness and/or the humanness of the human? and (2) What is the relation of all religions to one another—or, put another way, how can we live responsibly as devout and faithful adherents of one religion in a world of many religions?”

This is a time of religious transition in the United States, when conversations among people of different faith traditions are not only possible, but necessary if we are to learn to live with each other in mutual respect.  Faith House will be hosting wild geese from other religions so that the raucous gaggle there can “experience our neighbor’s faith” during three days that promise to show us new paths forward.

I believe faith is born of experience.  Leaps often land us where God wants and small flaps can create waves we could not have foreseen.  Loud squawks chase us in new directions and sometimes we step out and ask God to point our wings where the spirit blows, knowing that wild is the wind.

Today, I sit on the brink of another personal transition, as my husband and I await a baby due this September 11th.  We plan to bring our own little gosling to the Wild Goose Festival next summer.

Bowie Snodgrass and Samir Selmanovic of Faith House Manhattan are coordinating the interfaith programming for the Wild Goose Festival, June 23rd-26th, 2011. You can keep up with the Festival on Facebook and Twitter.

We Wild Goosers appreciate technology, but we believe it should be in the service of enriched tangible community-making, instead of leading to its diminishment. The advent of social networking has reunited old friends, classmates, and coworkers, but it has also fed into the alienation and anxiety of our age – does you “like” what I have to say? Are you my “friend”?

At Wild Goose, we hope to build friendships that last a lifetime. Shared camaraderie and common cause around the luminous values of truth, beauty, courage and meaning – or, if you prefer, faith, hope, and love. This starts as conversation, and it starts online. So please, by all means, “Like” us on Facebook. Our Facebook page is becoming a place where we can see who else in North America and around the world is intrigued by this vision for a shared experience, creative empathy, and meaning-making. You can share photos, anecdotes, playlists and more – the sky’s the limit. But let’s not make this Page – glorious as it is in all its pixilated glory – an end in itself. We want to see neighborhoods, congregations, intentional communities and cohorts take to the streets – on foot, bicycles, biodiesel busses, and yes even minivans – and make your way to Shakori Hills next June 23rd-26th for a truly unique time of in-person (re)connection.

We’ll see you on Facebook – and we look forward to when our gaze can meet yours.

But beyond the headlines, the growing community working toward the Wild Goose Festival recognizes that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to ecological disaster: Beyond BP, beyond failure in technique, is our continued mass consumption of oil. Wild Goose friend Brian McLaren recently completed a multipart examination of what’s gotten us into this mess and how we can give up the oil habit, here.

The Wild Goose Festival is a space to galvanize people with a sense of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts – inspiring a new community taking care of the earth as seriously as other justice issues that require our attention. We feel that God’s Spirit is leading us into concrete actions of kindness on the part of our neighbors, our enemies, ourselves and our shared ecosystem.

And we want to practice what we preach – The Wild Goose Festival will be ethically aware from our planning to the festival itself – watch this space in coming months for tangible help in carpooling and community stops along your festival pilgrimage. Our hosts at Shakori Hills are seasoned in utilizing local vendors and sustainable practices to leave the land in better condition than we found it.

At Wild Goose, we not only want to raise the issues, but embody the solutions. We hope you’ll join the Wild Goose community soon, and that we’ll see you next June.

We’re on Twitter – we have been for months – but we’ll be sharing a lot more content with you via @WildGooseFest in the days to come. Twitter followers will be the first to know about breaking Wild Goose news, additions to our programme, and exclusive contributions from our ever-growing online and soon-to-be-corporeal (just over nine more months!) community.

So: Will you follow us? Again, we’re @WildGooseFest – and, as long as you’re not a “social media expert,” we’ll follow you back.

We’re tremendously excited to announce that the first Wild Goose Festival will take place at in the Southeastern United States, at Shakori Hills in Silk Hope, near Raleigh-Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina from June 23rd-26th, 2011. Shakori Hills is a beautiful site, operated by a community group who already host a popular music and arts festival in April and October each year.  Shakori Hills is a place where people of all ages and a variety of backgrounds come together to celebrate community, enjoy the natural surroundings, and learn from each other; it’s the perfect venue for what we’re attempting with Wild Goose.

The site has plenty of space for the activities we’re planning, but is compact enough to feel manageable; it has the potential to generate a genuine experience of authentic community.  There are two stages for music and other performances, and space in which we’ll create open air venues for talks and public conversations, film screenings, and just chilling out with the North Carolina summer.  Shakori Hills is committed to sustainable living, evidenced by the small organic farm on site, and the local vendors who’ll be helping provide food and drink at Wild Goose.  The physical setting is stunning – camping is available not only in open fields (with a quiet space for families and others who want to sleep better at night!), but also in among the trees themselves; the vibe at Shakori Hills is laid-back, witty, engaging and, above all, welcoming.

It’s 45 minutes from Raleigh-Durham airport (RDU), and less than a day’s drive from places as varied as Chicago, New York City, Miami, Nashville, Atlanta, Boston, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New Orleans.  And for those further out, we’re hoping to establish a network of Wild Goose community friends within half a day’s drive from Shakori so you can break up your journey to this extraordinary long weekend of justice, arts, and spirituality with a free night’s accommodation along the way.  A note on the location choice: It’s obviously impossible to find a venue that is easily accessible to everyone in the US: the size of the country gets in the way!  We have been very aware of the need to make Wild Goose open and welcoming to as many people as possible; our venue choice expresses this in a number of ways – the ethos of the site resonates with our vision, it is very easily accessible to a large proportion of the US population by road; and the air links are very good too.  We want to encourage people to carpool, hire buses, cycle, walk, paraglide, whatever means makes it easiest to get to Wild Goose while minimizing the environmental impact.  We’ll offer opportunities on-line for people to arrange transportation with others in the Wild Goose flock. Our ticket price will reflect our desire to be good financial stewards too – Wild Goose is not a commercial endeavor, and while it does require substantial funding to exist, we are not here to make money out of our guests.  We’re working hard to make the festival as accessible as possible, wherever you may live.

But for now, we’re delighted to be working with the good folk at Shakori Hills to make the first Wild Goose Festival an event to remember: where the physical design of the site helps generate a spirit of conversation among diverse people, that leads to transformational encounters with the questions of justice, the possibilities of artistic creation and witness, and a spirituality that engages heart, mind, and body.

Tickets for the festival go on sale in September; we’ll be announcing some of the themes, activities, andcontributors then, so watch this space.  For now, if you’d like to volunteer to help the Wild Goose fly, contact us at: wildgoosefestivities [at] gmail [dot] com – we’ll email you the moment we have more details. Keep up with us on Twitter and Facebook for unfolding news.  And remember, the festival begins on the evening of Thursday 23rd June 2011, ending early afternoon on Sunday 26th – so we hope you’ll start planning to be with us…  More soon!

* For more information on Wild Goose see this; and check out our friends at Greenbelt - a chief inspiration for Wild Goose -  for more of the kind of things we’re hoping and planning for.

The Wild Goose Festival seeks to be a place where people of faith and people who struggle with faith (which might be all of us?) can wrestle together with what it means to be people who live at the intersection of justice, creativity, and spirituality in the 21st century. This is a conversation our larger culture is having, involving artists, authors, blue collar workers, ministers, and more.

Like Greenbelt, Wild Goose will be a time for exploring the nexus between faith, art, and politics. Themes such as social justice, care for the environment, and community building will be woven together with inspirational music, art, and lectures, presenting a variety of viewpoints and artistic styles. Communal worship, family activities, theatre and film round out the mix. It promises to be a fabulous experience, and an opportunities for visionary and creative people from many backgrounds to connect over a three day period. Exact details have not been established yet, but it looks as if the inaugural Wild Goose Festival will take place the last weekend of June 2011, at a venue to be announced soon. The first one will be not-to-be-missed, for if this event follows the trajectory of Greenbelt, before too long it will be huge (20,000 people or more). But the first event will likely be much smaller and more intimate, since it will be just getting started.

Thanks for sharing with your readership, Carl!

If you blog, we’d love for you to spread the word about the Wild Goose Festival. Even if you don’t blog (or don’t very often these days), we’d love to connect with you on Facebook or Twitter @WildGooseFest (we’ll follow back!). Next week, we’ll announce our location and share more ways that you can be involved in co-creating the Wild Goose community.