Simon Jenkins' comment piece in Saturday's Guardian exploring the extraordinary public appetite for live performance highlighted by the success of the Simón Bólivar Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall last week, is certainly borne out by our experience at The School of Life. Our Secular Sermons on Sunday mornings now draw a crowd of over 500, eager for good ideas delivered with palpable passion. When most churches can barely scrape double figures for their weekly attendance, and media experts tell us the future is all on online events, what exactly is going on?
Jenkins calls it the “magnetism of human congregation..... which invites the audience to speak, to think, to make up its mind and to vote. .... The more leisure we have, the more we want to escape the tyranny of screen and earpiece, the now ubiquitous workstation. Theorists seem unable to handle this want, because its technology is old-fashioned, that of live sound heard by a live community of enthusiasts in real time and place."
Read his full piece here.
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