The Nine O'Clock Service (Multimedia Presentation Blog Post)
Content/trigger warning: sexual assault, cult control and abuse
You all know I like a nice cult, and this is a 1995 documentary about the Nine O'Clock Service experiment in the Church of England, which imploded in that year in multiple complaints of sexual and other abuse of the congregation by the leader. This blog post is in fact a multimedia presentation (have I just aged myself by using that phrase?) because in addition to the documentary I have been reading the 1995 book (The Rise and Fall of the Nine O'Clock Service) about the group and will link to a recording of one of its services. I think I can therefore say that in terms of media this post is bang up to date by 1995 standards, and should probably be read to the sound of a dial-up modem.
The group has hit the news again this year because its then-leader was convicted in August of 17 assaults so will be at His Majesty's Pleasure for a good while to come.
The Nine O'Clock Service started as a Sunday evening service for younger members of the congregation at a Church of England church in Sheffield. They didn't want conventional church services and set up an approach drawing on multimedia, the club culture at the time, the environmental movement, the charismatic movement and radical discipleship ideas of the time. Ultimately the experiment moved out of the parish church and hired its own venue in the city centre, being feted for its success and given a status as an extra-parochial community, and visited by busloads of ecclesiastical sightseers.
Unfortunately as this was going on, Chris Brain, the leader was... well, I don't think it is accurate to say that he was sleeping his way through the female members of the group. What he was doing was much more sinister, in terms of breaching other people's boundaries, destroying other couples, playing people off against each other, getting people to give him thousands of pounds, manipulating people to believe he was the voice of God, it just goes on and on. Basically everything that goes on in a textbook cult went on. Even to the extent of the entire group all dressing the same, cutting off family and listening to the same music.
As a documentary this one uses a mixture of narration, and interviews with people who were involved interspersed with interesting archive footage of the group's services. It's another example where it's devastating to just put people in front of a camera and let them speak, especially as these are people who have been abused in one way or another by the Nine O'Clock Service.
An especially devastating example is where one of the congregants describes sitting next to Chris Brain at a congregation wearing a cassock and having him keep asking her what she'd got on underneath. Otherwise the interviews are a series of shocks and revulsion. Brilliantly, between the interviews with the congregation members Brain himself is also interviewed, and the contrast with the congregants is also devastating. He comes across as manipulative, verging on delusional, and frankly a nasty piece of work.
The documentary is straightforwardly journalistic, and its technique makes the church leadership look defensive and clearly negligent. In fact I have to wonder if the bishop of Sheffield subsequently regretted his appearance on this documentary, because he comes across as not accepting any responsibility for what happened at all. None. The reality is Chris Brain was absolutely feted by the Church of England at the time and they have to take some sort of responsibilty for such a huge balls up.
I would say that this is an excellent documentary. Its strengths in addition to its technique as I've said, are the interesting use of atchive footage of services at the Nine O'Clock Service and events like Brain's ordination. Its weaknesses include that it omits some important facets of the church's life completely: its income was in hundreds of thousands of pounds, it wasn't unusual for people to donate actual houses to it, and while there was much talk of helping the poor, in reality the funds kept Chris Brain in luxury and supporting its hugely expensive services. Every week it was essentially setting up a rave, requiring much expensive technology and effort, none of which came cheap. I think another weakness in the documentary is that it omits much of the detail of people's motivation and experience in joining the service. You wouldn't know it from the documentary but to join this church you would have to fill in an application form, and would be refused if you didn't fit in with the ravey, clubby, culture of the church. Even many of those who were accepted were obliged to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe of clothes to fit in. There is so much more wild stuff to this story than sex, and I don't think enough of it gets into the documentary.
I would say that if you actually want to find out more about the Nine O'Clock Service, the book published at the time is the perfect complement to the documentary. It brings out in far more detail the descent of an experiment into cultic control, the complex nature of people's reactions and feelings about the group afterwards, the monetary abuse as well as the sexual abuse (it was very expensive indeed to stage essentially a rave every Sunday evening) . The book gives a much more nuanced account of events and blame. In fact Brain comes across as even more of a monster, with the additional details a book can give of his living arrangements, and so on. In the book we find a more nuanced reaction to the rapid collapse of the group: shockingly there were members who were adamant that the Nine O'Clock Service was a fine experiment in Christian community and that Brain was wrongly blamed by jealous people. Strangely, this doesn't come across as these people being under the influence of cult mind control at all, and I can only guess that they were probably more peripherally involved in the service and had quite a different experience from the team of women who literally tucked Brain up in bed every night. The book also gives a more nuanced view of the Church of England's reaction: it concurs with the documentary in recording an initial reaction of unconditional enthusiasm, however it also brings out that the church's actions after the group's collapse were surely very supportive and professional.
The further details about the service which are omitted by the documentary are all in the book, and honestly it's a shcoking read.
The final media I have to refer to, we have because luckily as an up to the minute experimental church a recording of one of their services (the Planetary Mass, I'm not making this up) remains on the internet and you can listen to it here: https://jonny-baker.com/2012/03/planetary-mass.html
It's not often you can listen to a service by a cult when you've just been watching the obligatory documentary, and it's absolutely fascinating. In fact parts of it in video form are used in the documentary if you can't face the whole thing, but I have a few things to say about it.
The first is that the service opens with Chris Brain welcoming people to the Nine O'Clock Service at Pond's Forge in the Diocese of Sheffield. Now I've been to a few church services of all sorts of denominations in my time and have never heard a minister feel the need to state the diocese like that right at the start of the service. The name of the bishop quite often comes later in the service, but this feels odd and out of place. I would suggest that this introduction is a way of trying to provide respectability by saying who their ecclesiastical superiors were right at the start. I think it's also suspicious: I'm sure every other group in the diocese of Sheffield didn't feel the need to say it at the start in case anyone wondered about them. It was also unnecessary, because this experiment was famous. It's odd, and rings alarm bells in my opinion.
I don't know whether the recording is the whole thing but it's only 45 minutes and frankly I think the congregation, used to the all-night raves of the nineties, would be wondering where the rest of it was. I have no idea of whether the mass was the only thing they would do on an evening or whether it went on beyond what is on the recording. Still, not what you'd expect.
As a service the planetary Mass is also interesting. I gather from the book that the Church of England gave them permission to use it as an experimental liturgy. However I'm sure there were people who were really not happy. Liturgically it draws partly from the then liturgy of the Church of England and otherwise makes a point of being completely different, which can only be described as peculiar. The Nine O'Clock Service drew heavily on the creation spirituality of Matthew Fox and on their reading of Jurgen Moltmann's theology - I put it that way because it's been decades since I've read any Moltmann but I'm fairly sure that whatever he had in mind, it was not this.
The recording of the Planetary Mass is hugely valuable in my opinion because it actually takes us as observers into the experience of the cult, which is an experience you virtually never get in the huge mountain of literature about cults which has amassed over the past decades. And for me the effect is especially striking, in that I can't for the life of me see how Chris Brain did it. It's a really strange experience to be reading about a cult leader who could get huge numbers of people to do extraordinary things and yet just be completely unimpressed with him in reality. He doesn't strike me as magnetic in any way, the service strikes me as being a lot of poncey affected nonsense like any undergraduate theology student messing about. It absolutely mystifies me that I just can't see the attraction either of Brain or the Nine O'Clock Service.
Of course it's possible that this is because I wouldn't have been in its target demographic, even when I was much younger and more impressionable. I was never in the trendy, ravey, clubby, crowd that were the core group for NOS, and so it's possible that my own personality wasn't what Brain was looking for. Of course I'm also not a woman, but men were equally caught in the Nine O'Clock Service, they just didn't get the pleasure of tucking Brain up in bed at night.
The documentary, book and recording leave this question, which I wasn't expecting to arise, unanswered for me personally. However otherwise they are together an impressive record of an ecclesiastical experiment which went horribly wrong. As I say above, the documentary is far from poor, although its linear journalistic approach makes it omit details which the book does have room for and it's another documentary which I would highly recommend for its technique, whether you're interested in the subject or not.
Finally, it is of course this week that President Donald tRump is coming for his unprecedented second State Visit and of course my official position is that it shouldn't be happening. Regular readers will of course be unsurprised that I don't have any time for diplomacy, however even I can see that there is a strange diplomatic sense in which a state banquet is a sort of insult. Contrast this picture of that time when President Zelenskyy went straight from sitting in Churchill's place in the cabinet room to see the king. The first thing to say of course is that while that is obviously still a very grand house, it isn't Buckingham Palace; that is Sandringham, which doesn't belong to the Crown Estate but to the king personally. So we see President Zelenskyy in front of the king's own hearth and if you think the angle of the picture is slightly strange, on the far right it includes a photo of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the king's grandmother. So what we have is President Zelenskky going straight to the king's own personal home and pictured in front of his own fire amongst the family portraits. Even I can see that in comparison to this, a state banquet is nothing. Diplomatically, this is saying that some people are family, something tRump can never aspire to, despite receiving the pomp of state grandeur. I expect the queen isn't pictured because she was darning his socks at the time.
This blog is mirrored at
culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)
Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an incomplete index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog
There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about