by Peter Franklin, UnHerd
This week Chris Brain, a former Anglican priest, was found guilty of 17 counts of indecent assault against nine women. The cases arise from the Eighties and Nineties, when Brain was the charismatic leader of the Nine O’Clock Service (NOS) — a Sheffield-based religious movement that turned out to be a cult.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the whole affair is that NOS took root within the Church of England. Reports in the Times and Telegraph focus on failings of ecclesiastical oversight, but we shouldn’t forget the other side of the story: what was it that drew young people to NOS in the first place?
Well, I can offer some perspective — because I might have been one of them. In the early Nineties, I was a student at Sheffield University, and though I was (and still am) Catholic, most of my churchgoing friends were evangelical Protestants. As such, they had to reconcile their Bible-believing faith with living in a hostile, secular society. For many of them, the tension was relieved by a radical rejection of old-fashioned, liturgical worship. By blowing away the cobwebs and distancing the true church (as they saw it) from pew-bound “Sunday Christianity”, they thought they could turn the tide.
So when, in Sheffield, word spread of a student-led church service that had embraced cutting-edge popular culture, the excitement was palpable. NOS offered so much more than the usual guitar-strumming niceness. One by one, the cooler members of the student Christian body (yes, they did exist) gave it a go — and some never came back. The rave church had claimed them.