At Spring Harvest Skegness

Spring Harvest and me... we have history.

Back when I worked at Prospects for People with Learning Disabilities, my charity would usually run inclusive ministry sessions - but that wasn't my part of the work. I was responsible for the exhibition part, where we'd have a stand in the resources section and talk to anyone who would listen about how people with learning disabilities not only could, but should be part of church life. I'm not a natural salesperson so being at this stand for hours on end was close to my idea of purgatory... the occasional lovely conversation just didn't make up for the hours of standing there smiling and waiting.

Plus, it cost the charity a fortune to exhibit there! Spring Harvest had always been the biggest and most important, but also the most expensive place we went. I've been to Minehead and Skegness as an exhibitor. Many years later, Open Ears (the charity for deaf people I served by subtitling at meetings and events) asked me to go to Spring Harvest Harrogate, which was a new and very different venture for Spring Harvest: not at a Butlins, but at a convention centre with a hotel next door. A different target audience, not so much families with littles but perhaps a more mature group. They did offer children's sessions there, and my kids went (though they were really small, this was well before the Pandemic!), but they quickly realised that people didn't come there with kids because it wasn't so much of a holiday - apart from the targeted kids sessions, there wasn't much for kids to do there. Unlike at Butlins.

So I had never actually stayed at Butlins and taken part in Spring Harvest before, despite having this involvement going back 10+ years! 

Because the Minehead event already had a person doing subtitling, I was asked if I could go to Skegness this year. The family would come for free if I served, and I thought they might have fun and the kids would learn more about Jesus, so I jumped at the opportunity!

After five hours' drive (!) we arrived and as the kids began exploring the site - a fairground! An amazing swimming pool with multiple slides! - I went to the big hall to get set up. Two years' break from putting on the event meant that perhaps the team had to find their feet again in some ways, so things felt a little frantic as I was sent from pillar to post to get my workstation set up. But, we just managed: with 15 minutes to spare for the main event start!

The four sign language interpreters were a wonderful team to be part of, we would always pray for each other at the beginning of each section. One evening, the main speaker - Pastor Agu - actually sat down with us to go through his talk and make sure we were prepared. That was much appreciated; he seemed to really get it, and wanted to ensure we were ready to bring his points across well. 

One morning at breakfast, N(7) struck up a conversation with a lady sitting next to us and when I mentioned what I was doing, she was astonished: "You do that? I thought it was automatic!" - I had to laugh: would have thought all my typos might have given my humanity away!

We had our struggles, too. On the third day, someone had complained that the captions were giving them a migraine, and so the decision was taken to take them off the main screens and only have them on a tiny monitor off to one side of the stage: useful only to maybe the first two rows of people sat on that side of the auditorium, and then only if they had good eyesight!

It's the little monitor off to the bottom left!

I was terribly discouraged... but I shouldn't have been: so many people came forward to ask to have them back that the next day, we had them back up. It just goes to show that most of us only speak up with complaints, not compliments, so Spring Harvest had only heard the complaints and didn't realise quite how many people appreciated the subtitles until they were suddenly gone!

Two years away, social distancing, and not being around other people in groups probably contributed to another problem Spring Harvest perhaps hadn't expected: I think many people struggled with being around so many others, and at one point, they had to give a reminder to please be kind to one another and remember that stewards and others were serving as volunteers. I personally definitely didn't experience any unkindness, on the contrary, the amount of people who came up to me to tell me they appreciated my work was overwhelming and wonderful. Apparently the lady I met at breakfast wasn't the only one who had thought I was a machine, though: one of the organisers told me one evening that she'd had several comments on what a great AI / automatic speech recognition software they had, and when she told them that I was a human they were astonished!

Frankly, I don't think I'll be out of a job too soon. It's probably coming, the way software is improving day by day; but at the moment, between different accents and specialised words (at a Christian event in particular!) I'm fairly safe.

So while I worked every morning and evening, the kids had the time of their lives. They had special sessions from 10-1 each day: D was on the 'green cat' team while N was a 'green frog' and they were also taken through the theme teaching of "Renew, Restore, Rebuild" - which I thought was an incredibly apt theme to choose after two years of Pandemic life. It was clear that so many people needed renewing, restoring, even rebuilding; and it was so beautiful and life-giving to be physically together with so many Christ-followers again! To sing together: "All my life, you have been faithful!"

And so he has. So he is. Thanks be to God!