Jul 15, 2021

The rise and fall of Chris Brain and the Nine O'Clock Service

Sean O’Neill
The Times
July 15 2021

At an extraordinary service in St Thomas’s Church in 1989, the Right Rev David Lunn, then the Bishop of Sheffield, confirmed 100 people in the Anglican faith.

It was a moment of great excitement for the church hierarchy because they were almost all young people, usually thought of as being out of reach.

They had been brought to Anglicanism through the Nine O’Clock Service, or NOS, a radical mix of rave culture, social and environmental campaigning and religion that drew queues of black-clad young followers for its weekly gatherings.

The hierarchy was buzzing at the prospect of a vibrant model of service that might be copied around the country to attract new congregations.

Chris Brain, the charismatic young Christian rock musician who had emerged as leader of the NOS, met Dr George Carey, who was soon to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, and later recalled: “He said to me, ‘I’d be very happy to see an NOS in every town and city in the UK’.”

Brain was fast-tracked for ordination and invited to contribute to the archbishop’s collection of essays on evangelism. Lunn told the BBC that the NOS had a “permanent significance” and was a “new development in the way we understand the Christian religion”.

The church authorities were either unaware of, or happy to turn a blind eye to some more disturbing aspects of the movement.

When Brain was ordained in 1992, the NOS borrowed at considerable expense the robes worn by Robert de Niro in the film The Mission for the service.

There were allegations of controlling behaviour and followers handing over thousands of pounds while cutting themselves off from their friends and families. Young women were enlisted as “postmodern nuns” in Brain’s Homebase Team. Some allegedly gave massages and engaged in sexual activity when putting him to bed.

One member of the group, interviewed by the BBC, said: “He would talk about how we were discovering a postmodern definition of sexuality in the church. It’s just language — language covering up the fact of what was really going on: one bloke getting his rocks off.”

Fiona Gardner, a church safeguarding adviser, drew parallels between Brain and Peter Ball, the disgraced bishop who indecently assaulted young men he had recruited to his monastic community. In her book Sex, Power, Control, Gardner says that “the hierarchy were willingly seduced by both men and embraced them even when serious doubts were raised about their authenticity”.

Several people — clergymen and disillusioned members of the NOS — tried to alert the church authorities to what was happening.

There had been consternation in 1992 when an NOS service at a Christian festival included a troupe of dancers in black Lycra bikinis cavorting in front of 15,000 people.

Church leaders finally listened in August 1995 after disclosures by three whistleblowers.

One woman claimed that there was bullying and people were “blurring boundaries sexually”. She worried about how money was spent. The NOS charity, the Nine O’Clock Trust, recorded an income of £272,000 in 1994.

Brain was suspended from his ministry. In a September 1995 interview with a Sunday newspaper he said that the sexual contact he had with women followers was “heavy petting” but “non-penetrative”. The Homebase Team had been created to help his wife at home because he was so busy with his work. “It was like any other vicarage, you always get ladies helping the vicar’s wife. They set up a rota but the idea of handmaidens is ridiculous,” he said.

Brain added: “These were relationships which began 10 or 12 years ago when I was part of the nightclub scene. When I became a priest, I should have done something about them . . . I didn’t and that was wrong.”

He claimed that it was “utterly ridiculous that I was made a priest . . . I was the breakthrough for the church but it changed everything for me. Everyone became dependent on me.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-chris-brain-and-the-nine-oclock-service-ggknfzpvl

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