At short notice, I booked a day pass to visit David’s Tent on Friday - my first time at the event. David’s Tent is (wait for it) a non-stop 72-hour Christian worship event, taking place on the Wiston Estate in Sussex over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
The majority of delegates camp on site. I attended as a day visitor. When not inside the worship tent, those attending can relax in the beautiful location at the foot of the South Downs, visit the resource tent, chat with friends, attend one of a light programme of workshops and talks, sit around the fire pit or sample the varied street food options from the onsite vendors. There is also a children’s programme and a youth programme running all weekend.
So, as a newbie, what were my first impressions of David’s Tent?
The Church is a Wonderful Thing
Being among thousands of Christians from across the UK was a powerful reminder of the glorious multi-coloured nature of the church of God. There is really nothing on earth like the church in all its diversity. Worshipping together with brothers and sisters of different races and cultures, I was reminded that, in many of our communities, the local church is the most racially integrated society in town. We are perhaps not always aware of this aspect of who we are - and it should be a cause for celebration.
Emerging from Lockdown is a Process
The last time I had been in a large crowd was at the Memorial Stadium in January 2020 (Bristol Rovers drew 2 -2 against Coventry City in the 3rd round of the FA Cup, since you ask). I had not attended an in-person church meeting of more than six people since March of the same year, and as we all know, a lot has happened since then.
I needed to initially spend some time simply looking around and getting used to the novelty of the event. I’m not a great Christian conference attender, so there was a lot of adjustment I needed to do just to get used to the crowds, the sound and the sight of over a thousand people actively engaging in sung praise and worship.
Biblical Prophecy is Very Powerful
2800 years ago, while predicting the coming of the Messiah, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah announced that as Christ’s rule extended in the earth,
“the Sovereign Lord will make righteousness
and praise spring up before all nations.”
I am not sure whether Isaiah had any knowledge of the British Isles. If he did, it would have been of windswept desolate islands far to the north where the inhabitants worshipped the sun (rarely seen!) and where human sacrifice was a feature of their pagan religion.
Fast forward a few millennia and, here in England’s green and pleasant land, thousands of inhabitants of these isles had gathered for a non-stop 72-hour festival of worship to the God of Israel whom Isaiah served. There are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. One way is to see it as a fulfilment of ancient biblical prophecy concerning the Kingdom of Christ. Understood in this way, David’s Tent is a tangible illustration of the tremendous formative power of the prophetic word of God. Isaiah’s words not merely predicted Christian worship throughout the Gentile nations; the spoken word of God was itself the ultimate creative force that caused these realities to come into being.
A Spirit of Devotion
The idea of thousands of people paying money to attend a four-day event whose focus is non-stop praise and worship to God is both ludicrous when viewed from a secular perspective, and also glorious when seen through the eyes of Christian faith.
The spirit of devotion that must underpin such an enterprise was wonderful to sense. I was reminded of the extreme love of the woman in the gospels who poured out very expensive perfume onto the feet and head of Jesus as an act of pure devotion. Her worship was criticised by some at the time as being wasteful, the money spent on the perfume being capable of helping poor people with practical material needs. Yet Jesus affirmed her act of worship as “a beautiful thing”.
I was struck by this same spirit of devotion to Christ represented at David's Tent. This was manifest not only in the big tent itself but in the volunteer team members who so warmly greeted my wife and I when we arrived and made us feel welcome as first-time attendees. My sense was that a free ticket to the event was not the ultimate motivation of these beautiful young people who choose to stand for hours in a field miles from the main activities doing nothing other than welcoming car drivers and showing them where to park. It felt as if they saw their practical service as a form of worship to God, every bit as valid as the sung worship taking place within the huge tent.
I found this very heartening.
A Well-run Event
The event itself seemed well-thought-through. Various groups of musicians and singers took turns to lead the worship in the big tent, which I estimated could probably hold up to 3,000 people.
There was some limited seating at the back of the tent but the rest of the space was open. People stood, sat, kneeled or lay prostrate as they engaged with the worship. People entered and left the tent continuously during the worship sessions over the four days. I was surprised to learn that the worship went on all night with a quieter acoustic set. The worship musicians faced inwards on the square stage, effectively facing away from the congregation, emphasising that this was not a performance event but a shared act of worship.
There was plenty of physical space at the event. A good supply of street food vendors meant little obvious queuing. The portable toilets were pristine - not a sentence I have had the occasion to write before. Mind you, it was day one.
The Need for Training in Biblical Theology for Contemporary Christian Worship Leaders and Songwriters
I found the content of the worship songs to be of varying quality. Kingdom Choir were magnificent. Apart from that, I was disappointed at times with lyrics that spoke very little about the attributes of God himself. With so much rich truth revealed in the Bible about the person and nature of God, it seems such a shame to omit this rich vocabulary in favour of more prosaic lyrics that speak of ourselves and our individual felt needs and responses.
More seriously, many of the songs evidenced a low level of engagement with the meat of biblical truth. Lyrics were often abstracted from their biblical and theological contexts in ways that I found superficial and unhelpful. Specifically, songs describing “love”, “power”, “faithfulness” and “grace” frequently included little explicit reference to the person and work of Christ, the Incarnation or the nature of the new covenant.
In my five hours on site, I heard only one song that referenced the Trinity (at least all three-in-one got a mention) and one song that centred on the death of Christ. This particular song steered clear of the biblical teaching of the death of Christ as a substitute for sin, and its lyrics seemed to rest upon a moral influence theory of the atonement. More Abelard than Anselm, for those who are into this sort of thing.
I heard the Bible read only once during the sessions I attended - a reading that consisted of one verse from Psalm 21. At various points, I felt that we were drawing near to God into a shared experience of his manifest presence, as if heaven were touching earth. I suspect that had someone read Revelation 5 at such a point, the congregation may indeed have been helped to “draw near” without any further exhortation.
All of this matters of course, not least because of the didactic function of song in the church. If we are taught what to believe and how to apply it partly through what we sing, and if worship songs can and do have a formative role in our beliefs, values and actions, then it is imperative that such songs are deeply embedded in biblical teaching, language and themes.
Being encouraged to believe that “I will never be lonely” and that “my cloudy days are past” (as two of the song lyrics claimed) seems to me not to serve young believers very well. Such a belief does little to prepare them for lives that will be characterised by various degrees of suffering as an integral part of their Christian discipleship.
Lou Fellingham and Stuart Townend are two examples of outstanding contemporary British songwriters whose worship songs are sung around the world. I appreciate that they may not be available for every Christian event but I was struck by the need for their gifts to be multiplied and passed on. At the very least, I would hope that the current emerging generation of worship leaders and songwriters might spend the next year studying and internalising Martyn Lloyd Jones' Eight Commentaries on the Book of Ephesians as a first step in their commitment to creating songs that are more biblical in their language and theology and thus more helpful and more edifying for the church.
Where are the Fathers?
Those I saw at the event were mostly young - I would estimate in their twenties - though this of course may simply be another version from an oldie of, “Don’t the police look young these days.” I would estimate that females outnumbered males inside the tent by about 60 % to 40 %.
On the Friday night, of the seven worship leaders taking part, five were women. The Friday night session was hosted by an American woman and I heard an interview with a woman (while the equipment was being rearranged on stage in between sets). David’s Tent is certainly not a place where women’s voices are marginalised.
All of which left me with an unanswered question: where are the fathers? I may of course have simply missed them (while out getting a Thai green curry, for instance), but the low numbers of visible senior male role models, combined with the lower numbers of men present overall at the event, left me somewhat concerned.
A Christian feminist response, of course, may argue that men have had quite enough of the leading roles for too long and that, any short-term imbalance in the opposite direction is merely a necessary corrective. Perhaps. Or perhaps we need to do some more deep thinking about what it means and looks like for men and women in Christ to truly complement each other in the church’s work, worship and service in ways that enable all believers - male and female - to grow together into “the full measure of the stature of Christ.”
Something More Important Than Covid
I was somewhat conflicted at the decision of the organisers of David's Tent to require certification of either full vaccination or a recent negative covid test in order to be admitted to the site. Temperatures were also taken on entrance to the tent itself. Though I perfectly understand the health and safety arguments in favour of this approach, I am generally very nervous about the drift toward covid certification for any purpose beyond international travel and a limited range of medical roles. Certainly, at a local church level, it does seem to me deeply problematic that we would ever exclude a fellow believer from in-person fellowship on the basis of their (private) medical record.
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
Avoiding death at all costs (at least among citizens in rich nations) has been the driving force behind the world's pandemic response. While Christians must not endorse or contribute toward a culture of death, we also affirm counter intuitively that there is something worse than death: namely, death without God. By not loving their lives so much as to shrink from death, the early Christian believers could endure a range of terrible events, including plague, warfare and state-sponsored persecution from a perspective of faith and faithfulness to Christ.
Although I have no desire whatsoever to catch this dreadful disease, and although I will continue to take reasonable precautions to avoid it, when worshipping together with fellow believers on Friday, I was reminded that there are certainly worse things than catching it - and even worse things than dying from it. For the Christian who has received eternal life as a gift through faith in Jesus, we do not face death and dying in the same way as the secular person does. Death is an enemy - but in Christ it is a defeated one and believers look forward in certain hope to the resurrection of the dead, the renewal of the cosmos and the restoration of all things in Christ.
The late John Wimber was asked why, while carrying life-threatening illness in his own body, he continued to place himself under strain by travelling the world teaching, healing the sick and equipping believers to do the same. I recall him saying once in his characteristically pithy way that he would, "rather die doing this than stay at home waiting for that." As I stood among the crowds at David's Tent worshipping our great God, I confess the thought did cross my mind: if I had to go, I wouldn't mind going like this.
A Question
When attending any event for the first time, a question will often be. “Would I go there again?” In the case of David’s Tent, my answer is, “Given time, opportunity and circumstances, probably yes.” It does not attempt to be an event that is going to directly equip believers in gospel outreach, mission, kingdom work and service or in being salt and light in a secular society. But for what it is - an extended opportunity to lay aside other things and draw near to God in devotion and adoration - it is a welcome opportunity for personal and corporate renewal. Despite the shortcomings of the event, the opportunity for such a focused retreat and opportunity for renewed devotion to Christ is to be welcomed, especially after a year like the one we've all had.
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