I am very torn about this piece. I don't like the idea of a vodka-sponsored rave in a cathedral, yet as the vicar of a grade-1 listed church I am all too aware of the amount of money you have to raise to keep the show on the road. In our case it's £2500 a week. For a cathedral it will be much more. I don't think it's right to discuss this as if it were an act of worship because it's clearly a way of paying the bills. Having said that I wouldn't want it in my own church, even if fixed pews allowed it.
I also think that the distinction between charismatic and formal worship is to some extent a false one, perhaps akin to the (in my view) false dichotomy between introverted and extroverted personality types. The Holy Spirit is active in any worship that is whole-hearted, reverent, Christ-centred and involving body and soul. The person sitting with unbidden tears in the back pew, or with unexpectedly lifted heart as they sing a hymn, or who murmurs 'thank you' as they receive the sacrament -- those are charismatic experiences just as much as speaking in tongues or raising your arms in worship.
It's hard to get away from the 'if everyone in the church did the thing I like, everyone else would come to church' fallacy. For myself, I have to hope that reverent worship, care with and commitment to the sacraments, serious preaching and determination to grow in devotion and holiness will be enough, and that God will do the rest.
Come on now Nicola Brown ...the spirit that was in Christ is in all of us ...and goes by various names under various religions ...the spirit drives the feeling of community on the dance floor ....leave the pews ...perfect for a rest in between boogies ....the church was developed as a way of taxing the spirit and controlling the people ...all churches should be open to raving ahead of the Sunday service ...perfect collaboration really ...be bold Nicola.
That has made me think. I went to Canterbury for Eucharist on Sunday and was so appalled at the HR-speak sermon that I very nearly got up in my pew and said something in protest. Canterbury did a disco thing too last year. I hated the whole idea. Durham had something similar going on last weekend. But you are right. Religion serves many purposes. I went to an Elim "get to know you" event. Loads of young women. All stressed that it was the social side that had brought them into the church. The comfort and solidarity of a crowd of fellow believers. None of them had heard of Maundy Thursday or the Stations of the Cross. We all need and take different things from faith. I want awe, majesty, a connection to the spiritual history of this country, not a coffee morning and some hippy dippy singing. But religion is a vast and complex thing that involves individual conscience, making sense of the infinity of the universe, building and sustaining community on earth, giving a society some moral coherence, keeping alive a cultural identity and much much more. if the Pentecostals can bring more people to God, good luck to them. I'll stick with the bells and smells and Latin chants and all the young fogey boys who are filling up Great St Barts.
I mean it as a term of endearment. I'm much more pro them than the Elim girls. They look like Oxford and Cambridge graduates who now work for the civil service or right wing policy groups. Under 30. Usually gorgeous pre Raphaelite girlfriends. And dressed sort of tweedy. Come to Barts and see for yourself. The place is so packed they are putting on extra services starting next month. Marcus Walker is single handedly saving Anglicanism IMHO
Awesome, thanks for the detail, I'd just never heard that term before. I'd love to visit but having young children makes venturing further than the local parish in our countryside village difficult. So we've got the choice of the traditional service with the actual old, old fogeys or the low church, mental health, liberal, rock band, huge TV screen, cheesy tunes, family service. We usually go for the traditional service.
We are onto our second "churching" of a woman who has given birth very soon. Incredibly traditional stuff. Loads of marriage banns published. It was one of the locations in 4 Weddings
Interesting reflection today Mary. Bewildering times, as ever.
Today in the Catholic world it is the feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena, who famously said: ‘become who you are meant to be and you will set the world on fire’.
Not sure what St Catherine would have to say about ‘Come on baby light my fire’ being howled in the hallowed vaults of Bristol Cathedral, but being a Third Order Dominican, it might be something on the lines of: ‘Who is the baby you sing to? What will you do with such fire? Who is this rowdy ritual glorifying?
If you need glitterballs and music, you're not seeking communion with Christ, you're seeking an escape from your humanity. As a Catholic who left the faith for fifteen years to practice a form of new age nature magic and reject all things conventional, what I've discovered since returning is that the Mass and prayer are a dance with God and the closer that relationship gets, the more embodied I become. Also, the more connected to others and the community. It's not a vibe or an event, it's a lifestyle of service and devotion. Not boring or stodgy, on the contrary it's very alive but it's not a disco. It's every minute of life. From age 35-50 I rejected it. Now I yearn for God and the Church. I don't think the church needs to change to get us to participate. It needs to hold the space and wait for us to grow up, finish our rebellion, and return for the communion it has to offer.
The last vestige. The church. And all that it should represent.
The commodification of 'the temple' becomes complete. Both inner and outer space. The internet reflects the same.
Jesus was furious at the merchants, selling, buying and making money 'inside the temple'. It represents the very moment we are in.
There is now no 'sacred spaces' left. We have now commodified everything. The internet and culture is after the very souls of all human beings.
I believe there is a deeper reason for the moment we are in and why the chuch has lost The Way.
In my opinion, it is missing a vital ingredient all along, the divine feminine.
Without both, it all lacks.
Im not in any way shape or form an evangelist. I only in recent times l in trepidation tip toed back to sitting in a pew again.
At its best, as a child l use to walk into a church locally in its quietness, outside of mass and wonder in awe. There was something about it. Not human. Spoke to something greater. Nothing to do with priests, sermons or any of those things. It was 'the space'.
I live in Melbourne, Australia. When l was a child, we had vast stretches of paddocks and fields and bush to explore on the fringes of what once was a much smaller city. This is impossible now. Even the park close to me its hard to find a quiet space thats not infiltrated with 'noise'.
Our world has gotten much too loud. Everywhere. Even the library.
My uncle raised his family Pentecostal. The amount of adultery and divorce in that community was OFF THE CHARTS. Guess what happened to his marriage. I've always thought, you know, it's something to be grateful for that he found a place he could feel close to God. But at the same time, when what brings a load of people together is this intense emotional experience and emotions are elevated above any other part of human experience as the means of contacting the divine, what else besides a lot of adultery is going to happen?
The repressed will always find a way to express themselves eh? Then let them! In the Aphrodite temples where they belong.
Just because passions for public orgy are inflamed in the porn-addled brains of our men and women today, does not mean we need to start playing with the idea of the having 'priestesses' lounging about in the dark corners of our nave awaiting the next soul to bring to a climactic 'communion' experience.
We may all scoff and roll our eyes at my statement above and treat it as hyperbolic nonsense; but no serious adult in 2026 is ignorant to the reasons one attends a rave, or 'hits the club'.
Don't be a bunch of damn fools and think for one minute we are meant to pander to the debaucherous masses by letting them have their public foreplay, and their Jesus on the same plate. Sacrilege is apt, but maybe insufficient to the spiritually numb heart in 2026 to describe the gravity of the misstep this foolishness is.
"They are growing fast! They must be doing something right!" Oooh yes! In 2026 the spiritual compass of the zeitgeist is so True that licking your finger testing the societal wind is the best way to find the True Path that Christ laid out for us! While we're at it, let's start inviting the Wicca covens to partake of our sacred cup.
I do not know you personally Mary, I do not know where your heart lies on the Tradition passed down to us from His Apostles; but please do not use your platform to mislead some of the well-meaning readers you have to believe that this new aberration arising out of the dust of our own folly is anything more than passion filled heresy; mingling His sacred blood with the perfume of a Coachella whore.
To answer your question: Elim is a Pentecostal church and thus is descended theologically from US Methodism which itself descended from Wesleyan and with a side helping of prosperity gospel. So the table is symbolic. They are not Anglo Catholic.
That must mean that the Church of England is Elim’s grandparent as John Wesley avowed he would live and die as a member of the Church of which he was an ordained priest.
Sort of: formal theology yes. The Pentecostal movement started in California in African Methodist Churches. However, like the baptists, there is much variety in what is taught and believed. For good and for ill: some of the early Pentcostal people went well off the path of the orthodox.
After my 40-plus year lapse from the ways of Cathol, I have reverted back to the Church in the most traditional way possible: By attending daily Matins & Lauds, Mass and rosary at a small Benedictine abbey with 11 monks an hour inland from Boston, Mass. I am now working on becoming an oblate of the abbey to bind myself more closely to the community there, and to God.
I was born in 1963, in the San Francisco Bay Area, next to Berkeley. I was largely formed in the 1970s. My family was very Catholic, but our church slowly succumbed to the waves of liberality wrought by Vatican II. The laissez-faire liberality of Berkeley during the 1960s afterglow period (the 1970s) was a constant lure away from the altar, even though our church tried to liberalize itself to keep me there. They introduced a guitar mass, replete with bongo drums. We literally sang Kumbaya, leaving Bach long behind.
But it didn't work. Not for me, and many like me. I left the Church anyway.
Now that I am immersed in 6th Century Benedictine tradition—such as chanting the Psalms in Latin—I realize what went wrong back in the late 1970s: The inside of the Church became just like the outside world. Going to mass seemed indistinguishable from attending a secular concert. People came strolling in wearing shorts and flip-flops. The music became cringe.
In short: The Church traded solemnity for materialistic worldliness, borrowing heavily from secular humanism to keep the lights on.
What was lost by all the Vatican II liberalization was the sense of 'otherness' that the earlier Church had. It bulldozed it all for mere popularity and pop values.
So... glitterballs and Jesus? Rave Anglicanism? It's more of the same insistent outside world. It's an abomination that will keep yearning souls yearning.
British 90s rave culture for many was totally a spiritual experience, and no need to temper or apologize on that one. It also was indeed hedonistic, full of drugs, and fleeting - people woke up on the grey Monday and plodded on. I share your mixed feelings about trying to get this into service, or mass. Love your writing Mary.
I think it is entirely appropriate for cathedrals to host a range of cultural events. The question is, where to draw the line? For some, it seems, nothing is too gimmicky. Having worked in an Anglican cathedral myself, I know that there is often a very permissive attitude towards anything that 'gets people through the door', in the hope that some might then come back for the 'right reasons'. In my experience, the success of this strategy is limited...
Agreed, I have heard this very often, and in my view it's both a fantasy and an excuse not to do evangelism. Better to be honest and say we're doing these events to earn some money.
It's not so much the singing and dancing aspect of a rave in a cathedral but for me the partnering with a vodka brand that feels off, and I say this as an atheist. I just feel that members of my family that are Christian would find this extremely jarring but apparently not The Church if they are financially compensated.
Like most Protestants, Pentecostals would see communion as symbolic.
I’d push back a bit on your point that the Pentecostals are using cathedral-disco energy; there’s a huge difference. This is not a bait-and-switch situation (lure you in with vodka and raves, send you out with Jesus) and more of them just being honest.
They’re excited about the difference Jesus has made in their lives and they express that in lots of different ways. I’ve been involved in these kinds of churches my whole life and what I would say is whilst we (in the low church) lack the reverence and the order of the High church, we don’t lack the love for Jesus. It’s more of an Acts 4:13 thing. We’re ordinary uneducated folks who have met with Jesus.
Seems like it's too adjacent to worship of Dionysis like u said. Raving and substances and sexual foreplay all go hand in hand to me. Could it be that some don't partake in any of that while there? Yes. But I think it's way more common, and fun, if u do. So, no. I don't think a church is the proper place to hold such events. It's sad that they need so much funding now due to lack of interest in the traditional service.
I'm Catholic, so I find this appalling, but I also line in America in the buckle of the Bible Belt, and I'm pretty sure that many of the proddies surrounding me would be pretty upset by this, but then be told "Oh, it's just a worship service" and never question what was being worshiped. That's how it happened in the charismatic churches back in the 80s and 90s. It's a way for the Pharisees to get a foothold back in the Temple when I think about it.
I fear it’s an empty attempt, maybe even a conscious counterfeit to the infilling of the Holy Spirit. I love the term “cringemaxxing”. I started cringemaxxing in 1989 when I got “born again” and went from being so far left I was almost right. I began to go to a nondenominational Spirit-filled church then. Now I’m satisfied with cringe as a lifestyle. Only the real Presence of God will make real believers.
I am very torn about this piece. I don't like the idea of a vodka-sponsored rave in a cathedral, yet as the vicar of a grade-1 listed church I am all too aware of the amount of money you have to raise to keep the show on the road. In our case it's £2500 a week. For a cathedral it will be much more. I don't think it's right to discuss this as if it were an act of worship because it's clearly a way of paying the bills. Having said that I wouldn't want it in my own church, even if fixed pews allowed it.
I also think that the distinction between charismatic and formal worship is to some extent a false one, perhaps akin to the (in my view) false dichotomy between introverted and extroverted personality types. The Holy Spirit is active in any worship that is whole-hearted, reverent, Christ-centred and involving body and soul. The person sitting with unbidden tears in the back pew, or with unexpectedly lifted heart as they sing a hymn, or who murmurs 'thank you' as they receive the sacrament -- those are charismatic experiences just as much as speaking in tongues or raising your arms in worship.
It's hard to get away from the 'if everyone in the church did the thing I like, everyone else would come to church' fallacy. For myself, I have to hope that reverent worship, care with and commitment to the sacraments, serious preaching and determination to grow in devotion and holiness will be enough, and that God will do the rest.
Come on now Nicola Brown ...the spirit that was in Christ is in all of us ...and goes by various names under various religions ...the spirit drives the feeling of community on the dance floor ....leave the pews ...perfect for a rest in between boogies ....the church was developed as a way of taxing the spirit and controlling the people ...all churches should be open to raving ahead of the Sunday service ...perfect collaboration really ...be bold Nicola.
🤣
Well said. We all find Christ in different ways and our individual path is what makes it meaningful.
That has made me think. I went to Canterbury for Eucharist on Sunday and was so appalled at the HR-speak sermon that I very nearly got up in my pew and said something in protest. Canterbury did a disco thing too last year. I hated the whole idea. Durham had something similar going on last weekend. But you are right. Religion serves many purposes. I went to an Elim "get to know you" event. Loads of young women. All stressed that it was the social side that had brought them into the church. The comfort and solidarity of a crowd of fellow believers. None of them had heard of Maundy Thursday or the Stations of the Cross. We all need and take different things from faith. I want awe, majesty, a connection to the spiritual history of this country, not a coffee morning and some hippy dippy singing. But religion is a vast and complex thing that involves individual conscience, making sense of the infinity of the universe, building and sustaining community on earth, giving a society some moral coherence, keeping alive a cultural identity and much much more. if the Pentecostals can bring more people to God, good luck to them. I'll stick with the bells and smells and Latin chants and all the young fogey boys who are filling up Great St Barts.
What, may I ask, is a young fogey boy?
I mean it as a term of endearment. I'm much more pro them than the Elim girls. They look like Oxford and Cambridge graduates who now work for the civil service or right wing policy groups. Under 30. Usually gorgeous pre Raphaelite girlfriends. And dressed sort of tweedy. Come to Barts and see for yourself. The place is so packed they are putting on extra services starting next month. Marcus Walker is single handedly saving Anglicanism IMHO
Awesome, thanks for the detail, I'd just never heard that term before. I'd love to visit but having young children makes venturing further than the local parish in our countryside village difficult. So we've got the choice of the traditional service with the actual old, old fogeys or the low church, mental health, liberal, rock band, huge TV screen, cheesy tunes, family service. We usually go for the traditional service.
“Mental health”…. lol! Not a sentence you want to hear in church.
Come for All Hallows or one of the Christmas services
Why not become Roman Catholic?
I hope the Pre-Raphaelite girlfriends graduate to marriage and motherhood!
We are onto our second "churching" of a woman who has given birth very soon. Incredibly traditional stuff. Loads of marriage banns published. It was one of the locations in 4 Weddings
Why not become Roman Catholic?
Why not become Eastern Catholic?
https://www.ucc-gb.com/
https://eparchyofgreatbritain.org/
hehe
Interesting reflection today Mary. Bewildering times, as ever.
Today in the Catholic world it is the feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena, who famously said: ‘become who you are meant to be and you will set the world on fire’.
Not sure what St Catherine would have to say about ‘Come on baby light my fire’ being howled in the hallowed vaults of Bristol Cathedral, but being a Third Order Dominican, it might be something on the lines of: ‘Who is the baby you sing to? What will you do with such fire? Who is this rowdy ritual glorifying?
If you need glitterballs and music, you're not seeking communion with Christ, you're seeking an escape from your humanity. As a Catholic who left the faith for fifteen years to practice a form of new age nature magic and reject all things conventional, what I've discovered since returning is that the Mass and prayer are a dance with God and the closer that relationship gets, the more embodied I become. Also, the more connected to others and the community. It's not a vibe or an event, it's a lifestyle of service and devotion. Not boring or stodgy, on the contrary it's very alive but it's not a disco. It's every minute of life. From age 35-50 I rejected it. Now I yearn for God and the Church. I don't think the church needs to change to get us to participate. It needs to hold the space and wait for us to grow up, finish our rebellion, and return for the communion it has to offer.
The last vestige. The church. And all that it should represent.
The commodification of 'the temple' becomes complete. Both inner and outer space. The internet reflects the same.
Jesus was furious at the merchants, selling, buying and making money 'inside the temple'. It represents the very moment we are in.
There is now no 'sacred spaces' left. We have now commodified everything. The internet and culture is after the very souls of all human beings.
I believe there is a deeper reason for the moment we are in and why the chuch has lost The Way.
In my opinion, it is missing a vital ingredient all along, the divine feminine.
Without both, it all lacks.
Im not in any way shape or form an evangelist. I only in recent times l in trepidation tip toed back to sitting in a pew again.
At its best, as a child l use to walk into a church locally in its quietness, outside of mass and wonder in awe. There was something about it. Not human. Spoke to something greater. Nothing to do with priests, sermons or any of those things. It was 'the space'.
I live in Melbourne, Australia. When l was a child, we had vast stretches of paddocks and fields and bush to explore on the fringes of what once was a much smaller city. This is impossible now. Even the park close to me its hard to find a quiet space thats not infiltrated with 'noise'.
Our world has gotten much too loud. Everywhere. Even the library.
I now grieve what l once took for granted.
Too too much to say here. So lll end here.
My uncle raised his family Pentecostal. The amount of adultery and divorce in that community was OFF THE CHARTS. Guess what happened to his marriage. I've always thought, you know, it's something to be grateful for that he found a place he could feel close to God. But at the same time, when what brings a load of people together is this intense emotional experience and emotions are elevated above any other part of human experience as the means of contacting the divine, what else besides a lot of adultery is going to happen?
The repressed will always find a way to express themselves eh? Then let them! In the Aphrodite temples where they belong.
Just because passions for public orgy are inflamed in the porn-addled brains of our men and women today, does not mean we need to start playing with the idea of the having 'priestesses' lounging about in the dark corners of our nave awaiting the next soul to bring to a climactic 'communion' experience.
We may all scoff and roll our eyes at my statement above and treat it as hyperbolic nonsense; but no serious adult in 2026 is ignorant to the reasons one attends a rave, or 'hits the club'.
Don't be a bunch of damn fools and think for one minute we are meant to pander to the debaucherous masses by letting them have their public foreplay, and their Jesus on the same plate. Sacrilege is apt, but maybe insufficient to the spiritually numb heart in 2026 to describe the gravity of the misstep this foolishness is.
"They are growing fast! They must be doing something right!" Oooh yes! In 2026 the spiritual compass of the zeitgeist is so True that licking your finger testing the societal wind is the best way to find the True Path that Christ laid out for us! While we're at it, let's start inviting the Wicca covens to partake of our sacred cup.
I do not know you personally Mary, I do not know where your heart lies on the Tradition passed down to us from His Apostles; but please do not use your platform to mislead some of the well-meaning readers you have to believe that this new aberration arising out of the dust of our own folly is anything more than passion filled heresy; mingling His sacred blood with the perfume of a Coachella whore.
To answer your question: Elim is a Pentecostal church and thus is descended theologically from US Methodism which itself descended from Wesleyan and with a side helping of prosperity gospel. So the table is symbolic. They are not Anglo Catholic.
That must mean that the Church of England is Elim’s grandparent as John Wesley avowed he would live and die as a member of the Church of which he was an ordained priest.
Sort of: formal theology yes. The Pentecostal movement started in California in African Methodist Churches. However, like the baptists, there is much variety in what is taught and believed. For good and for ill: some of the early Pentcostal people went well off the path of the orthodox.
After my 40-plus year lapse from the ways of Cathol, I have reverted back to the Church in the most traditional way possible: By attending daily Matins & Lauds, Mass and rosary at a small Benedictine abbey with 11 monks an hour inland from Boston, Mass. I am now working on becoming an oblate of the abbey to bind myself more closely to the community there, and to God.
I was born in 1963, in the San Francisco Bay Area, next to Berkeley. I was largely formed in the 1970s. My family was very Catholic, but our church slowly succumbed to the waves of liberality wrought by Vatican II. The laissez-faire liberality of Berkeley during the 1960s afterglow period (the 1970s) was a constant lure away from the altar, even though our church tried to liberalize itself to keep me there. They introduced a guitar mass, replete with bongo drums. We literally sang Kumbaya, leaving Bach long behind.
But it didn't work. Not for me, and many like me. I left the Church anyway.
Now that I am immersed in 6th Century Benedictine tradition—such as chanting the Psalms in Latin—I realize what went wrong back in the late 1970s: The inside of the Church became just like the outside world. Going to mass seemed indistinguishable from attending a secular concert. People came strolling in wearing shorts and flip-flops. The music became cringe.
In short: The Church traded solemnity for materialistic worldliness, borrowing heavily from secular humanism to keep the lights on.
What was lost by all the Vatican II liberalization was the sense of 'otherness' that the earlier Church had. It bulldozed it all for mere popularity and pop values.
So... glitterballs and Jesus? Rave Anglicanism? It's more of the same insistent outside world. It's an abomination that will keep yearning souls yearning.
British 90s rave culture for many was totally a spiritual experience, and no need to temper or apologize on that one. It also was indeed hedonistic, full of drugs, and fleeting - people woke up on the grey Monday and plodded on. I share your mixed feelings about trying to get this into service, or mass. Love your writing Mary.
I think it is entirely appropriate for cathedrals to host a range of cultural events. The question is, where to draw the line? For some, it seems, nothing is too gimmicky. Having worked in an Anglican cathedral myself, I know that there is often a very permissive attitude towards anything that 'gets people through the door', in the hope that some might then come back for the 'right reasons'. In my experience, the success of this strategy is limited...
Agreed, I have heard this very often, and in my view it's both a fantasy and an excuse not to do evangelism. Better to be honest and say we're doing these events to earn some money.
Yes, quite!
It's not so much the singing and dancing aspect of a rave in a cathedral but for me the partnering with a vodka brand that feels off, and I say this as an atheist. I just feel that members of my family that are Christian would find this extremely jarring but apparently not The Church if they are financially compensated.
hang on ...they already give away "free" wine in church
Oh I thought that was the blood 😉
Like most Protestants, Pentecostals would see communion as symbolic.
I’d push back a bit on your point that the Pentecostals are using cathedral-disco energy; there’s a huge difference. This is not a bait-and-switch situation (lure you in with vodka and raves, send you out with Jesus) and more of them just being honest.
They’re excited about the difference Jesus has made in their lives and they express that in lots of different ways. I’ve been involved in these kinds of churches my whole life and what I would say is whilst we (in the low church) lack the reverence and the order of the High church, we don’t lack the love for Jesus. It’s more of an Acts 4:13 thing. We’re ordinary uneducated folks who have met with Jesus.
Seems like it's too adjacent to worship of Dionysis like u said. Raving and substances and sexual foreplay all go hand in hand to me. Could it be that some don't partake in any of that while there? Yes. But I think it's way more common, and fun, if u do. So, no. I don't think a church is the proper place to hold such events. It's sad that they need so much funding now due to lack of interest in the traditional service.
I'm Catholic, so I find this appalling, but I also line in America in the buckle of the Bible Belt, and I'm pretty sure that many of the proddies surrounding me would be pretty upset by this, but then be told "Oh, it's just a worship service" and never question what was being worshiped. That's how it happened in the charismatic churches back in the 80s and 90s. It's a way for the Pharisees to get a foothold back in the Temple when I think about it.
I fear it’s an empty attempt, maybe even a conscious counterfeit to the infilling of the Holy Spirit. I love the term “cringemaxxing”. I started cringemaxxing in 1989 when I got “born again” and went from being so far left I was almost right. I began to go to a nondenominational Spirit-filled church then. Now I’m satisfied with cringe as a lifestyle. Only the real Presence of God will make real believers.