Blog: Rend Collective Experiment - Campfire Tour
As Northern Ireland worship band Rend Collective Experiment take their Campfire Tour around the UK, Giles Hardy reports for Louder Than The Music from the sold-out show in London.
Hot as a campfire!
Over six hundred of us squeezed into the sweltering Garage in Highbury to see Rend Collective perform the London leg of their Campfire tour and we weren’t disappointed with what we got. But there was a big bonus, the band managed to convey the community feel of worshipping round a campfire into the gig.
Starting with Kumbaya, a traditional campfire song we’ve all sung at some point in our lives, acknowledging the Lord’s presence, leading swiftly into our response Come on My Soul, urging us to “let down the walls” and engage with our Saviour with lines like “its time to look up”, “raise your voices” and finally “sing my soul” backed with a tight Mandolin charged beat... classic Rend
The stage
The stage was compact, well lit and played nicely to Rend’s taste for close quarters Irish folk music with mountains of different instruments. The roadie was working up a sweat constantly handing out different bits of kit as the band switched instruments and positions on the stage, adding to the visual excitement. The sound quality and mix was excellent not easy with the style of music and range of instruments played.
We declared who God is with the traditional hymn You are my vision but “folked” up with banjo and clapping like only Rend can. With lines like “You're my great Father, and I'm Your true son, You dwell inside me, together we're one” great to sing out in declaration.
Then there was a bit of Gareth’s banter, he "had been looking forward to being in the Capital with all the beautiful cool London people, but still felt that the Irish were probably still 2% cooler” I guess that may be true if they were all like Rend Collective and had a beard !
By now we were all “parboiled, you know like, potatoes" he quipped, but he still insisted that we put our arm round our neighbor as we sang and danced to the energetic beats of Build your kingdom here, talk about worship with intensity!
You bled sung by the whole band, backed by tambourine beats and picked banjo is, Chris explains “about simplicity, getting back to that place in our relationship with God where we can say easily, yes God loves us”. Chris tells us that it was “written a few years ago, during that time where faith taught in your youth group collides with real life and it all starts to seem like it’s black and whites don’t seem to work out well in the real world”. He observed “A lot of people are struggling with their faith even now, what we’ve found is that there’s a desperate need for us to recover that simplicity. You can choose to take your doubts away from God, but we think that’s a terrible mistake. The Bible’s about wrestling with God and finding that blessing, like Jacob did, recovering something that’s much more beautiful from God on the other side of our doubts”.
An explanation of Campfire
Gareth explains the genesis of the Campfire album “Some people were asking us why we brought out an album called Campfire, others asked us why we brought out an album with the same songs as our other two albums (laughter). Well the first answer was we didn’t have any other songs (laughter), the real reason is we didn’t feel like we were finished yet. The campfire is an amazing picture of what we as the church can be".
"We wanted to help people to re-imagine worship and community. Around the campfire, there’s no stage, no important people, no celebrities and we are all on the same level, no pretences, nobody wears their fancy clothes to a campfire, do ya? because you know you’ll leave stinking of smoke and you can’t get it out for days”.
“That’s what we imagine community and church should be like, we should come open and honest to one another, all on the same level all gathered round the one thing, the flame of God’s love and gospel, when Jesus said that we are a city on a hill, we are a light, He wasn’t talking about lightbulbs, he was talking about individual campfires, lots of people in small communities around fires and that to me is an exciting picture of what we can be as church”.
Encouraging the crowd to meet with Jesus, Gareth implores us “Lets not be entertained, let’s get stuck in” as we sing Rend’s take on 10,000 reasons' led by acoustic guitar, accordian and great beats to a now very familiar song.
The Cost, a wonderful personal declaration “Yes, I've counted up the cost, And You are worth it” with picked mandolin, acoustic guitar and intricate, sensitive percussion woven in.
The Close
Closing with Alabaster, Chris talks of “costly perfume smashed at Jesus’ feet, an amazing picture of what worship can be. What we’re saying is its got to be costly to be worth something, our worship is not something we just do with our mouths, but is something we do with the rest of our lives. What’s the point in loving God if you if don’t love your neighbor” Chris leads the band on a rare non-folk instrument the electric guitar.
The encore
Movements, was led by Chris on the Ukulele in a frenetic sing-along at the end of the evening, the exhausting finale to an amazing evening of praise and worship round the Campfire.
The smoke on my clothes will last for weeks.
Giles Hardy
