🎪 The Big Church Festival

Big Church Festival — the biggest outdoor Christian gathering in the UK — opened on Friday 28 August 2026 at Wiston Estate. You camp for the weekend, go to worship and concerts, spend time together, and hold out the gospel. It started in 2009 as Big Church Day Out: one day in a field, inviting people who don’t yet believe to come, sing, and hear the good news. This year more than forty thousand tickets went, and it sold out. The younger lot in the churches had been waiting for it all year.

Some of our worship team went last year from The Rock Church in Harpenden and came back saying they were so blessed and that they had the best time. So this year the five of us booked, and from our congregation alone more than forty adults and young people turned up. A few were already on the field on the Thursday, tents up a day early, making a weekend of it. The WhatsApp group was full of photos of people leaving the house and the usual pre-festival buzz.

We packed properly on Friday morning and left early in the afternoon. Then, on the motorway, one message landed — “Is everyone okay?” — and the chat went dead. Shortly after, the organisers said there had been an incident, that day’s programme was off, and everyone was to go back to their tents. When we reached the entrance the police had already shut the gates. We sat in the next village for hours.

When they cancelled the rest of the weekend as well, you knew it wasn’t just a few people hurt. We found out later that around half past three, in a strong wind, a wooden sign structure had come down. Six were injured. One person pronounced dead there and then.

It was well into the evening by the time we got on site. We’d come all that way, so we thought we’d find our church family, stay the night in our tent, and drive home in the morning. The walk from the cars to the tents felt endless. Tents in every direction — a sea of them, no edge to it. But the place was eerily quiet. You could hear some muted worship here and there, low and thin, yet some were already packing up and leaving, and others just sat inside their tents staring blankly. A full moon hung over a late-summer evening. It was a strange, almost otherworldly sight: so many of the Lord’s people, his Betrothed, in one field, grieving, looking like sheep without a Shepherd. Walking through it I couldn’t shake the word apocalyptic.

That day’s McCheyne reading included the last verses of Lamentations:

“You, O Lᴏʀᴅ, reign forever;
Your throne endures to all generations.
Why do You forget us forever,
Why do You forsake us for so many days?
Turn us back to You, O Lᴏʀᴅ, that we may be restored!
Renew our days as of old —
Unless You have utterly rejected us,
And You remain exceedingly angry with us.”

The Church in Britain needs prayer, and needs it badly. Lord, turn us back to You. Make us a church that aches for Christ’s coming and loves His appearing. Maranatha.