April 2025 · Butlins, Skegness & Minehead
Can I confess something? I cannot remember the last time I had an uninterrupted quiet time. Not one. Somewhere between the school run and the small person who needs a drink of water at the precise moment I open my Bible, the still small voice has had to learn to speak over a good deal of noise. If you are raising young children and quietly wondering whether your spiritual life has been reduced to snatched sentences and half-finished prayers, I want you to know you are in excellent company, and that I am writing this with crumbs on the keyboard.
Which is exactly why Spring Harvest occupies such a peculiar and rather brilliant place in the British Christian calendar. It is a serious theological conference. It is also a week at Butlins. Thousands of Christians gather each Easter — in 2025 at Skegness in early April and at Minehead the following week — for teaching of genuine depth, held in a holiday resort with a swimming pool full of shrieking children. I have never been able to decide whether that combination is faintly absurd or quietly profound. I have concluded it is both, and that this is rather the point.
The genius of the waterpark
Let us be honest about why the venue matters, because it is not a joke. Deep, sustained Bible teaching has historically been available to those who could sit still for it — which is to say, not to parents of small children, and disproportionately not to mothers. A campsite in the rain with a toddler is not a retreat; it is an endurance event with hymns.
Butlins solves this with unglamorous, unarguable practicality. Children are in a fairground, a pool, an activity club, being cheerfully looked after, having the time of their lives. Their parents are in a hall receiving teaching they have not had the headspace for in years. Nobody is being noble about it. And I would argue there is something deeply theological about an event that removes the barrier between ordinary domestic life and a serious encounter with God, rather than demanding you escape one to reach the other. Grace has always been rather good at meeting people where they are, and where a great many of us are is knee-deep in laundry.
No greater story
The 2025 theme was No Greater Story; the main reason I wanted to write about this event. The invitation was to see your own life inside a much larger narrative — not as a set of disconnected days to be endured, but as a chapter in something coherent that began long before you and continues long after.
The theologian N.T. Wright has a lovely way of putting this. He suggests we might read scripture as a five-act play. Creation, then the fall, then Israel, then Jesus — four acts, beautifully written, fully performed. And then Act Five, which begins with the early church and has not finished. We are not audience members. We are the company, on stage, in the final act, improvising faithfully in the light of everything that came before, working out what fidelity to the script demands in a scene its original author never explicitly wrote.
I find this steadying in a way that few things are. Not because it removes the uncertainty — improvisation is uncertain by definition — but because it changes what my small, ordinary, crumb-strewn life is. The nappies, the spreadsheets, and the difficult conversations are not an interruption to the story; they are the scene I have been given. That reframing has done more for my peace than any amount of striving, and peace, as anyone who knows me will tell you, is the thing I prize above almost everything money can buy — chiefly because it is the thing money cannot.
What the week actually holds
The teaching runs from morning to evening, worship woven through it, and the speakers are not lightweight. In 2025, the halls heard Rick Warren, whose Purpose Driven Life has sat on more bedside tables than almost any book of our generation; Rob Parsons on family; Cris Rogers; Leon Evans; and Bear Grylls, who is rather more accustomed to eating things he found under a rock than to expounding scripture, and who is, by all accounts, entirely serious about his faith and Worship was led by Anna Hamilton, Elle Limebear and Jake Isaac.
Around the main sessions runs a seminar programme of real range — apologetics for the intellectually restless, sessions on prayer that treat it as a discipline rather than a mood, teaching on justice, on marriage, on how to hold a phone without letting it hold you. There are strands for single adults, which matters, because church life can be quietly and unintentionally tuned to the frequency of families.
And then there is the thing nobody puts in the brochure. You share meals with strangers from a dozen traditions who read the same book differently and love the same God anyway. Somebody prays with you in a queue. A conversation over a terrible cup of coffee lodges in you for a decade. That is not the fringe benefit. That, I suspect, is the substance.
How I read it
I don’t think it’s an accident that the deepest weeks of my life have been the ones where I stopped optimising. My whole working life is spent thinking about compounding, patience, the long game — and yet the most valuable return I have ever earned came from a week where I did nothing productive at all, and let myself be taught, fed, and prayed for. I keep having to relearn that rest is not the absence of work but a positive good in itself, which is roughly what I mean when I say that slowing down deliberately is a power move rather than an indulgence.
So if you are weary, and if your quiet times are currently three sentences long and interrupted twice, I’d say this: there is a whole week designed for exactly you, held in the least spiritual-sounding venue in England, and I have never once heard anyone come home from it and say they wished they hadn’t gone. The story is much greater than the chapter you happen to be standing in. It is quite something to spend a week being reminded.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a reflection, not spiritual direction. Your own next step is yours and God’s to work out.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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