As the great Steve Jobs said “I’ve been waiting for this day for 3 and a half years!”
In 2021, we received approval for our resource consent application for Festival One at Hartford. Yes! The Lord be praised.
Many of you will know about this, some of you may have even been there for one of our crew days. This is A beautiful property, loaned to us for the period of Festival One each year by the Gardiner family.
As you can see, while we’ve been organising the resource consent, we’ve been visiting Hartford and practising, getting ready for you all. We know what it is like to camp there, to cook there, to wake up to a slow Waikato morning and hear the birdsong. To lie on our backs at night and to see the myriads of stars that our Heavenly Father has flung into space. We’ve even set up a wee stage and sound system and had Strahan, Derek Lind, Aaron Boyens, and Te Rautini play to see what it feels like to listen, to dance, to worship in this space. Let me tell you - it feels goooood!
We’ve spent the last three years planning for hosting you here, on this beautiful farm park that is dedicated by its owners to the glory of God. We’ve been greeted onto the whenua by Sonny and Pam from Ngati Hauā. Wouldn’t you know it - this is also their whenua! We carry on sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ on behalf of their ancestor, the great preacher and leader Wiremu Tamihana. God’s planning is exquisite.
So what will it be like? In a word - amazing! Beautiful flat land for camping. Nooks and crannies for us to build the Market, the Kids Zone, Soul Lounge, and so on. A natural amphitheatre for The One Arena. Really, you’ll just have to come to check it out. This video from when we got cancelled will give you more of an idea - click here.
It will be camping. We are supplying water, toilets, showers, first aid, HQ, General Store, vendors, stalls, all the usual things you would expect. Power is via generators that we supply and cabled across the site. (On the ground, in yellow jacket, not up in the air with ugly power lines). If you can come self-contained thats a huge help!
We are so excited we can barely think! At our management meeting this week - via zoom - some of our team were bouncing around so much we could barely keep going. We have been hoping and praying for this for so long - to be able to host you on a site that is truly beautiful and to be able to put the creative energies of the design team to decorating the already beautiful creation around us, rather than having to build everything from scratch.
You know me, I could go on and on. So I’ll stop! But I do want to say this. Thank you. Thank you to so many of you who have prayed and prayed and prayed for this to come to be. We deeply appreciate it. Thank you to those of you who have so generously supported us. We are beyond grateful. And most of all, thanks to our Heavenly Father who worked some dramatic miracles to enable this to happen .
I simply can’t wait to be there with you all.
God is indeed good.
G
Festival Director
