This week in Christian history: Wild Goose Festival, black bishop consecrated, First Peace of Kappel
First Wild Goose Festival begins – June 23, 2011
This week marks the anniversary of when the first Wild Goose Festival, a mostly progressive Christian multiday gathering featuring art, music, and speeches, began at Shakori Hills, North Carolina.
Named after a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit and modeled off the Greenbelt Festival in England, the first Wild Goose featured multiple music performances and remarks made by figures including evangelist Tony Campolo, activist Shane Claiborne, pastor and author Brian McLaren, and Jay Bakker, the pastor son of former televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
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“I wasn’t waiting for this event, because I just didn’t think it was ever going to happen in Christendom, in America,” Jay Bakker told those gathered at the 2011 festival. “I just got so tired of, you know, conservative festivals that if you say the wrong thing, you don’t get to come back.”
Critics, including Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, have criticized the festival for being influenced by “gnostic beliefs that Christianity has repeatedly rejected.”
“Many ‘Wild Goose’ voices flatter themselves with fanciful dreams of sophistication and praise from secular elites. Their 1960s-style hoopla is supposedly updated for the 21st century. But ultimately this featherless old Wild Goose won’t fly,” Tooley stated at the time.
