Readers of my blog will know that from the 5th until the 10th April I served on the ‘Base Team’ at Spring Harvest Minehead, originally I envisioned writing blogs during the week…then found there was no internet at Springy (or free internet anyway), I then thought I’d write upon my return however because of having to write an essay on Springy and proof read two, alongside catching up on thousands of e-mails (exaggeration!) the Spring Harvest blog is happening now…six days after the event and midway into the final week of Spring Harvest for ‘08.

The Base team was all about heading out around and about Butlin’s and finding young people who were disengaged with the main youth sessions at Springy (iScape & Distinctive), we would chat to the young people, befriend them, perhaps encourage them on their faith or just talk about whatever they want to discuss about.

The second part of the Base Team role was to organise late night events which (to an extent) threw us into ‘Red Coat’ kinda positions, we organised Open Mic Nights, Drop-ins and x-factor’s which all went really well…we unofficially overfilled the venue a couple of evenings (officially numbers were spot on!!!).

Having never been to Springy before I was intrigued to compare it a bit with Soul Survivor which I attended in the summer and I think that at Springy the Youth Work provided for young people seemed to be much more hyped up than the events at Soul Survivor…obviously this is based on the few sessions at Springy I attended in both iScape and Distinctive, however I thought that perhaps the teaching at Spring Harvest was more in depth than Soul Survivor (which I liked).

At the end of the day though most Christian events in their own way tend to be hyped up…I don’t mean this as a bad thing but they seem to produce their following, some groups rave about their yearly trip to SS others about their trip to Springy or Green Belt and I think this excitement and hype can be a good thing, many people will feel so re-energised in their faith because of it, others of course may find it discouraging and unhelpful.

So there are a few little thoughts on Springy, I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the Base team, laughed a lot, thought it was of great value to Spring Harvest (as often it’s disengaged young people we forget!) and will hopefully get to do it again next year!