Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st June was, once again, Parklife Music Festival at Heaton Park in Manchester. As such, Heaton Park Methodist Church were all geared up for another weekend providing Parklife Sanctuary, a place to rest, recover, refresh, offering a place for a free drink, phone chargers, snacks, or simply a meeting point or a place to sit and rest.
Parklife is festival that welcomes over 80,000 people each year primarily in the age range of 17-25, and this year was a complete sell out! In previous years we have met with 3000-4000 people and hoped that this year with might hit the 5000 mark with it being our 5th year. In the end our numbers show that we met around 7,500 people in all kinds of different capacities and gave out almost 10,000 business cards advertising who we are an what we do.
Every year has been a wonderful experience with our relationships with festival staff, attendees, and local community growing and deepening. This year we had one young person return who was with us until 4.30am on the Saturday night last year having got completely stuck with no way home. Their thankfulness and joy that we were back again was great to see and a real encouragement and testament to our volunteers for the amazing work they do.
We don’t intentionally seek to offer conversations about faith, but inevitably being a church space, people ask questions and want to know more so we had a number of conversations along the lines of “why do you do this?”, “why aren’t you charging for it?”, “what is a Methodist?”, “how can I become a Christian?”.
As always, it has been a total privilege to be a part of Parklife, and thanks must go to our 30+ amazing volunteers, to the festival organisers, and Welsafe team, and to all the people who came to visit us. We couldn’t do it without any of you, but we are so glad we get to do it with you!
Parklife Sanctuary will be back in 2027 for year 6, on 10th/11th July if you want to get involved, please do get in touch! If you can’t join us in person, please do pray for our outreach and all the thousands of people we meet each year!