Wild Goose Festival

The Wild Goose Festival began as a simple but potent idea: What if Greenbelt - a UK gathering where art, justice and faith collide - could happen in a North American context? Many people from the US have returned from Greenbelt wanting to see a festival like this emerge here. Greenbelt has served as a source of inspiration to our team in many ways. It manages to embody creativity and social action, launching some important initiatives like the One Campaign in Europe and the Jubilee 2000 campaign to end Third World debt. Greenbelt brings people together from different Christian traditions and also welcomes people who don’t identify as Christian.

It could be said that US Christianity may have more economic resources than any other religious community in the history of the world; but those resources haven’t always been put to the best use. Many people perceive and experience Christianity to be divisive, prejudiced, sometimes even violent, and often full of guilt, rather than being a life-giving source for the common good. So we [organizers of event] wanted to nurture a gathering that could be rooted in the Christian tradition while also critiquing its shadow side: learning and embodying the lessons of justice, welcome, creativity, and grass roots community, while acknowledging the broken parts of our own tradition, ensuring that marginalized voices are heard, and committing to radical love as both our goal and the path we use to get there.
The theme for this year is Exile and Return - from God, from each other, from ourselves. If you travel this June to Shakori Hills, NC, you will have the opportunity to participate in conversations with leaders in social justice work, hear extraordinary music from around the country, dialogue with political influencers and creative writers, experience performances of provocative theatre and inspiring cinema, eat together with friends, strangers, maybe even a few enemies. And the end, you’ll have journeyed somewhere new, and maybe have found your way back to things you thought you had lost. Wild Goose is your festival: a miraculous space at the intersection of justice, spirituality and art.