We have finally reached the end of another stage in the long-running saga of the Sheffield Nine O’Clock Service and its one-time leader, Chris Brain. A jury in a London trial has found Brain guilty on 17 counts of sexual assault and sentencing is due at some point in the near future. This story in one way is very old news. The older among us have known most of the details of Brain’s offences for 30 years. The newspapers gave extensive coverage to the scandal when it broke in 1995, and Roland Howard wrote a competent account of the story in his book The Rise and Fall of the Nine O’Clock Service A cult within the church (1996). I do not intend in this blog to go over the details of this material which has been rehearsed again in the trial. My task is somewhat different. I want to remind my readers that there is another story to be told. The Nine O’Clock Service (NOS) is an important story in any history of church work among young people in the 20th century. However much we want to focus on the scandalous aspects, or criticise it and its theological and practical outworkings, it did, in its day, attract a significant level of support from the wider church and its leaders. The ‘rise and fall’ of NOS, in short, remains a notable event in the history of Church of England youth work. The problem was, as the Soul Survivor drama also clearly demonstrates, that few people are ever willing to critique ‘success’ or ask uncomfortable questions. Still less has there been any real understanding of the toxic dynamics that are so often a feature of large crowd events. Even now there is remarkable little insight into the vulnerability of the young to large group dynamics which can overwhelm them, both spiritually and emotionally.
My interest in writing about Brain now is not to comment or add anything new to the material presented in the NOS court case about his criminal behaviour towards young women. My purpose is to recall another aspect of the Brain story, one that does not seem to have attracted much discussion. This is the way that the NOS innovative worship style for young people had then many imitations right across England. To say that NOS was influential is not in any way arguing for the quality and soundness of what Brain was doing in Sheffield. But it is true to say that in youthwork circles there was a feeling that something new and exciting was going on. Up to the moment of its collapse, NOS was also being regarded with approval by church leaders from different theological traditions. Certainly, I cannot recall anyone speaking out against the rave services, planetary masses and the highly idiosyncratic teaching. At the time I was open to the teaching of Matthew Fox, an American Dominican, who provided some theological mentorship for Brain and the distinctive themes of his teaching. Like many of the fashionable ideas current in the 80s, Fox’s ideas on Creation Spiritualty have receded in their influence but, no doubt, they will be dusted down and ‘discovered’ again at some point in future. A greater influence on me at the time were the writings of Lesslie Newbigin. In his book, The Other Side of 1984, Newbigin, like Matthew Fox, had attempted to challenge the dominating ideas of the 18th century Enlightenment about the nature of truth and reality. The Enlightenment had given the facts revealed by science a privileged and esteemed place within Western thinking and culture. This approach needed to be challenged and certainly not assumed to be the only manifestation of truth. Interestingly, John Wimber was saying some similar things to his audiences and the resulting discussions helped to give rise to some interesting theological discussions in parts of the Church.
The second influence from NOS, one which affected me only indirectly, was the way that church youth work all over the country seemed to want to copy some of the practical aspects of the NOS worship experiments. Youth workers from many churches travelled to Sheffield to attend the highly innovative forms of worship and seek to copy ideas for their own ministries. Brain seems to have been able to recruit some highly gifted people to help him create dramatic expressions of worship, using light and sound to foster a highly charged atmosphere for his services. I never became familiar with the detail of these styles of worship, and certainly nothing changed at the level of our Sunday worship where I was serving. But the NOS influence was strong at the Diocesan level of youth work. The youth worker for the Gloucester Diocese had embraced the NOS vision with a degree of enthusiasm which now seems, in retrospect, to have been almost idolatrous. Once bitten by the NOS bug, the youth worker seemed unable to focus on any other type of youth work in our diocese. His whole energy seemed directed towards organising NOS look-alike services around the larger churches of the diocese. There were, I believe, some older church people who wanted to identify with this new energy for youth work and so the worker was able to raise the necessary money to buy lights, sound systems, smoke machines and other equipment for these services. The fact that my parish was right on the edge of the diocese, meant that my young people were unable to attend unless they had very obliging parents. I also had queries and concerns of my own which made me less than 100% enthusiastic for these new forms of worship.
What were my worries about the stories of NOS inspired worship that came back to me as a parish priest? In the first place there was an uncomfortable level of control (manipulation?) of feelings and mood at play. If an idea is powerfully shared through the forceful use of symbols, it may have the effect of taking over the feelings and driving out any rational process. In other words, the worship was, for me, a bit too physical and overwhelming; there was no opportunity to reflect. It seemed to be a matter of surrendering to these powerfully induced emotions. Teenagers are not a group easily able to work out how best to resist uncomfortable attacks on their rationality, especially when these assaults are made with the help of sound, light and imagery.
The second and perhaps more serious problem that I felt at the time, but probably never gave expression to, is what we would refer to now as safeguarding concerns. If you are skilled at creating highly emotionally charged atmospheres in a nightclub style environment, then it is not hard to see how such a setting can be exploited. When I heard that at our local Gloucester NOS services, routine hugging was included in the expression of love and mutual acceptance, I began to wonder whether such episodes might soon get out of hand. Intimacy, embrace and love may all be words that potentially fit into a Christian setting, but they may also be words used by a predator who is able to exploit the fact that personal boundaries may be routinely undermined in the new styles of worship.
The end of NOS in Sheffield was sudden and dramatic. The NOS events that I was observing with concern locally in the Diocese of Gloucester probably did not, in fact, get out of hand because our local NOS-inspired events also stopped when the Sheffield ministry of NOS came to a sudden end in July 1995. Brain’s dominance over the project had been total and so, with his sudden resignation, everything connected with the NOS effort all over the country stopped overnight. All that was left behind was a sense of shock, trauma, disillusionment and, no doubt, a sense of betrayal. It would probably be difficult now to discover how far the NOS influence had spread around the country and whether the effect on my diocese was typical of other areas. Almost instantly after Brain left, the diocesan Youth Officer in Gloucester resigned, and all his future local planned services were cancelled. I have never seen any discussion on the impact that NOS’s experiments had on church youth work, not only in Sheffield but around the country. A ‘learning lessons’ was probably just too difficult a task. It was also realised, probably, with some embarrassment no doubt, that the oversight of Brain by senior church figures had simply not been undertaken with any degree of thoroughness. No one among the senior clergy in Sheffield, who had offered an extensive welcome to the NOS experiment, resigned or even showed a real desire to understand what had gone wrong. For me there was a realisation that senior clergy in the Church of England also had very little understanding of what I was beginning to see as the central problem at NOS – the issue of power. Throughout the project, there seems to have been an inability to understand, let alone deal with, the power dynamics at NOS. Accountability and democratic decision making were nowhere to be found and no one senior in the hierarchy was prepared to challenge the dynamics of the group as long as the project appeared to be successful. 1995 and the aftershocks of the NOS experiment also marked the beginning of my own interest in power abuse in the Church. Much of the focus of my more recent writing, in the blog Surviving Church and my book Ungodly Fear, looks back to this theme of power and its abuse and this had been vividly displayed in Sheffield. The aftershocks of NOS still reverberate. A continuing failure to fully understand how power operates within its structures contributes to a serious weakening of the Church and its capacity to influence British society over recent decades.
