Big Church Festival 2023

With 6 stages spread across the 6,000 acres that is the beautiful outdoorsy grounds called Wiston House, almost every Christian music genre was available for you to do your best dance or head nod to. Or to simply be still, with your hands-raised-up-in-surrender-and-focus-on-God to. Whether that was at the Main Stage where the likes of Sam Henshaw, Martin Smith and Kings Kaleidoscope headlined, or over at the Illuminate Stage where gospel rap/grime was going strong courtesy of Guvna B, Still Shadey (who I happened to interview and you can check out here) and Joshua Luke Smith et el, the extensive line-up of artists had me wishing I had been gifted the supernatural ability to be at all 6 stages at once or be able to teleport myself from one stage to another within 3 seconds max.

Unfortunately this was not the case and not only did I find myself clocking 36,000 steps across the 2 days but equally missing out on several acts (as well as any of the lyrical action happening at the Spoken Word Stage). All was not lost ,as en route to the Worship Tent [where I later caught Becca Folke’s Holy Spirit filled worship and then much later later Amanda Cook’s night time set] I stumbled across Tom’s Stage in association with CSW. I was not mad at this, especially because I made not one but two discoveries. The first discovery was the soft soulful voice of @racheljanemusic whose 15 minute set had me sitting barefoot on the grass swaying and vibing and swaying some more. If you don’t know about Rachel, you have permission to at this very moment pause reading this so you can go find her on Spotify and add her to your ‘Listen Later’ playlist.

The second discovery was putting a face to the name of the talent that is @ryanhylton. [Sidenote: since last year I have been listening + liking Ryan’s songs ‘Holy Water’ and ‘No Other’ which Premier Gospel Radio put me onto, so while I knew his voice, his face remained a mystery.] Ryan graced us with a set that included both of the above, alongside ‘Good God’ and ended with the beautifully written ‘Purify’, a song he penned after his mum passed away. Again you have full permission at this very moment to go add all these songs to your freshly created ‘Listen Later’ playlist.