Harvest Festival 2026: Giving thanks for what grows among us

Harvest is a moment to notice what has been growing.

Of course, most of us are not bringing in the wheat. Very few people in SE1 have spent the previous week, tilling the soil or anxiously watching the weather in case it ruins the barley. Our experience of food is rather different. It arrives on a lorry. It sits under fluorescent lights. It appears in a paper bag on a bicycle. We are surrounded by food and almost entirely separated from its production.

Which makes Harvest useful.

Once a year the Church reminds us that food is not just stuff. It comes from somewhere and somebody grew it, picked it, packed it, drove it, stacked it, cooked it. A great many things have to go right before you can casually buy a tomato.

And so we will gather to give thanks for the food that sustains us, for the earth and those who cultivate it, for the countless hands through which our daily bread passes.

But harvest invites us to notice other kinds of abundance too: friendship, generosity, neighbourliness, hope. The things which are easily overlooked because they grow slowly and quietly among us.

Here at St George the Martyr our Harvest Festival is also a celebration of the Borough Food Cooperative, one of the most visible expressions of that abundance in our parish.

Over the past year the Borough Food Cooperative has continued to be a place where food is shared, waste is reduced, and people meet one another. That matters in itself. But anyone who spends time there knows that the BFC is about much more than what is on the shelves. It is about people knowing one another, looking out for one another, volunteering alongside one another, and creating a place where people feel welcome.

Last year, after our Harvest Festival, I wrote about a “miracle of belonging” quietly growing beneath our feet. I still think that is a good description of what happens here.

This year we will once again gather at the altar to give thanks for what God has given us, and for the ways in which those gifts are shared. We will give thanks for the BFC, for its volunteers and members, and for all those who make its work possible.

Harvest is a good reminder that what we have is never simply ours. Food, time, money, gifts, friendship, care: all of it becomes more fruitful when it is shared.

Please do join us.

Harvest Festival

& Celebration of the Borough Food Cooperative
Sunday 11 October, 11am
St George the Martyr, Borough High Street, SE1 1JA

Everyone is welcome.