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.

Luckily for me, I was a terminally uncool refugee from the Eighties. To my mind, the sudden eruption of electronic dance music at the end of my formative decade was a civilisational catastrophe. I didn’t even want to hear it on the radio, let alone in church.

But in 1992, I was at the Greenbelt Festival (a sort of Anglican Glastonbury), where NOS held what they called a “Planetary Mass”. Press reports at the time focus on the bikini-clad dancers, as well as Chris Brain’s pronouncement that “you don’t have to enter NOS and leave your bollocks outside”. Despite those provocations, what I witnessed wasn’t really a rave at all. Rather, it was a piece of multimedia performance art — and a pretty disturbing one at that. Most church services end with a final hymn and a handshake with the vicar, whereas this one played us out with a looped soundtrack of someone screaming in agony.

I was repulsed by the whole thing, but paradoxically I could see its attraction. This was the decade of “post-evangelicalism”, a movement that took the iconoclastic evangelical tendency to its logical conclusion by questioning evangelicalism itself. Unlike the liberal Protestants of the 19th and 20th centuries, the post-evangelicals didn’t try to rationalise Christianity. Instead, like all good postmodernists, they sought wisdom through the deconstruction of established practice, doctrine and certainty. How thrilling it must have been to see that impulse come to life in the shape of the Nine O’Clock Service.

As we now know — and should have predicted — it ended badly. By 1995, the allegations of abuse were out in the open and NOS was shut down. I hope that today, as well as getting justice for the victims, Christian leaders learn lessons from this. Amid all the talk of a “Quiet Revival” of religious practice in the UK, it’s vital that young people seeking sanctuary within the walls of the church are met by shepherds, not wolves.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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