Sing for Joy!

The Flower Festival is coming up much faster than I'd like it to! (August Bank Holiday weekend...and we're already into April!)

Our theme this time is 'Sing for Joy!', based on hymns and worship songs. 

Originally, I had the bright idea of asking the congregation for their favourite hymn and going with the top twenty, but when I started to look at the wording of hymns, I realised this probably wouldn't be possible. For a start, there are over 600 listed in our hymn book - potentially, every person in the church could come up with something different. I toyed with the idea of picking around thirty titles and getting the congregation to vote on a shortened list, but even that was difficult. When you look at the words, the themes that we feel are so important to interpret are somewhat nebulous to capture in flowers. How DO you capture 'hope' or 'spirit' or 'goodness'?

So we left the congregation out of it. A few of the flower team trawled through the hymn book instead, to find titles that would be recognisable - for both churched and non-churched visitors - and interpretable. We are great believers in presenting arrangements that are not simply floral art; we are Christian and we have a message to portray that cannot be hidden too deeply. (I also have memories of going to festivals where I've admired some of the arrangements but wondered how they linked to what they were supposed to be representing.) Anyway - back to the hymn choosing. It took ages. We ended up with a decent list though, just short of twenty I think, and the flower team met to decide who was going to do which one.

For the first time ever since we started holding festivals, we had multiple arrangers wanting to do the same arrangement! Everyone ended up with what they wanted, but it took some sorting. As one of the 'organisers' of the flower side of things - and I use that term loosely! - we don't prescribe what the arrangements should be. We give ideas for starters, but we believe that the individuals should have the freedom to design their own arrangements, not least because we believe our Festival is a God-given opportunity to share how we feel about our faith with others - and God speaks to us in many different ways.

We're due to have another meeting soon, to see what everyone's come up with design-wise. I've got mine sorted, though I have some mechanics to source for one of them...

The raw materials of a previous festival...