Link/Archive
On a slow Saturday afternoon in Yeovil, the only real things to do are get drunk in the Wetherspoons or try to find God. Twenty of us — all men — have opted for the latter. We’re gathered in a musty Methodist church, a place whose pews haven’t been full for nearly half a century, and which now serves mostly as a weekday crèche.
This weekend, it has been repurposed for a slightly different purpose. A rainbow-coloured Pride insignia, promising that “Everyone is welcome”, is being hurriedly dismantled. From an electric piano manned by a lanky, dour teenager with a surprisingly angelic voice, an ethereal harmony floats across the room.
Men, young and middle-aged, raise their hands, get on their knees and praise God. Behind me, someone starts to talk in biblical tongues. This is Fathers Arise, a spiritual weekend for Christian men that has something for everyone: from advice on how to get along better with your wife, to tips about the coming spiritual war in Britain between the forces of good and evil.
My journey to Fathers Arise began with an encounter with the devil outside the Greggs in Guildford on a Friday afternoon. Max, 34, a man built for road construction work with a sleeve tattoo, had just finished work and travelled into town to meet Ollie Sabatelli and Jesse Ngoma, a pair of Instagram street preachers who between them have more than 650,000 followers.
“Release him Satan, in the name of Jesus, all the fear that the devil has placed in your life,” Olly bellowed into his microphone, one hand planted firmly on Max’s chest. A few weeks before, the preacher from Croydon had announced that the Holy Spirit had instructed him to go to Guildford declaring — to the surprise of its residents — that the terminally dull Surrey commuter town was “full of demons”.
Other itinerant preachers soon followed, descending from across the country to denounce everything from consumerism to the malign cultural influence of Ed Sheeran, who had once attended the town’s music academy.
Over the following weeks, I travelled back and forth to Guildford, watching a steady, awkward pilgrimage take shape. Young men were baptised in the River Wey, watched on by bewildered pensioners and ducks. There was Stephos, the 19-year-old who had heard the voice of God while homeless and sleeping under a scaffold. There was Emmanuel, a care worker from Ghana, who had come to Guildford believing that he was fulfilling a prophecy given to him at the age of 15: that he would one day return to the land of John Wesley, whose preaching had sparked Britain’s last great Christian revival in the 18th century.
“Britain had once been ordained by God for great things,” Emmanuel told me outside the town’s TK Maxx before preparing to preach. Since arriving in England two years ago, however, he admitted the trappings of this divine glory had faded. One day it might return. But before the light, he told me in a gentle lilt, there is always darkness.
***
Since the pandemic, talk of a Christian revival in Britain has become a minor press genre. Much of it rests on a statistic from the Bible Society that shows Church attendance has risen slightly since the pandemic. The largest increase has been among Gen Z and in Catholic and Pentecostal congregations — a trend also shaped by immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. This has produced a run of heartening, if faintly glib, stories of young men vox-popped outside London churches, explaining their conversions in the language of wellbeing and improved mental health.
But since the summer, what’s unfolded in Guildford and other provincial towns suggests a more spiritually-charged, unashamedly evangelical, masculine and righteously angry side to this “quiet revival”. And it's one that is determined to save modern Britain, gradually fragmenting into waywardness and sin, from the fiery pits of hell.
In the weeks that followed my time in Guildford, I took the advice of the newly saved and immersed myself in their world. On my phone, God’s work was never more than a scroll away: live feeds of men speaking in tongues on Friday nights; rowdy debates at Speakers’ Corner between Muslims and Turning Point UK’s premier evangelist, Young Bob. Faith here is very far from hymns and pews. It’s more a street battle with an eye to algorithmic virality, using scripture against everyone from Brighton’s gay community to Lib Dem dads armed with their half-remembered Dawkins.
There are many sects and creeds of this revival, from a fervent belief in the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk to the conviction that the true test of a Christian comes in his ability to preach to a slow crowd on Aldershot high street, where the council recently attempted to ban preachers for causing “alarm and distress”. But all are united by the idea of the born-again divine revelation, and by a shared contempt for what they see as the decadence of late liberalism. (Yoga, pornography, feminism, and the LGBT movement all come under scriptural scrutiny.) Converts are often urged towards a single line from John’s Gospel: “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
Before rebirth, however, comes something like hell.
The testimonies offered in the run-up to salvation form a grimy patchwork of small-town England: the guilt and shame of porn addiction, Friday nights drinking cheap lager, failed university courses, the disenchanted, aching drift of life. Christianity, adherents like to note, took hold among a similar crowd in the first century across the listless backwaters of the Roman Empire. A place, they say, that has much in common with the high street of any given English town on a slow afternoon.
I heard this story repeatedly, including from Alistair Knight, the founder of Jesus Pulse, who plans to raise the capital to fund 8,000 preachers — first in Guildford, and then across the world. “It can sound crazy,” he tells me, as he describes the “demonic strongholds” he’s seen around Britain, where “abominations” such as witchcraft, LGBT groups and Islam have taken hold.
But this gospel, he insists, comes from love: every night they pray for these groups. To be born again and not fervently spread God’s message, no matter how fallen the recipient, is itself a sin. Knight recounts the night when, after another debauched and dull university party, he was visited by five angels. “The heaviness that I’ve carried all my life, I just felt it sort of dissipate and loosen,” he says. He returned to his room and cried — not from fear, but from the feeling of deliverance from his past life. This is the experience he is determined to bring to the rest of Britain.
***
Back in Yeovil, Dominic Muir, the organiser of Fathers Arise, takes to the stage. Fatherly, serious and theatrically enigmatic, he sits somewhere between a Victorian churchman and a repentant hipster. I first came across Muir through the King’s Army, a regimented column of believers who were filmed marching outside Buckingham Palace in matching black tracksuits. It’s his “warfare discussion” that I’ve come in for. I’m curious as to whether the men gathered, from tree surgeons to salesmen, are really prepared for a spiritual crusade in 21st-century Britain.
Muir tells us that he once lived the life sold to us by modern society: a well-paid job in London, nights of revelry on the King’s Road. But, he warns, that man is no longer fit for what lies ahead. “The work we are doing this weekend is lifesaving,” he says. “We stand at a critical juncture in our nation. Western Christendom is crumbling. I see every demonic ideology in that nation jostling to fill that space. I see Islam, I see Roman Catholicism, I see witchcraft. And I ask: where is the church?”
The music starts up again and we are encouraged to confess. Around the room, men crumple into sudden and unexpected distress. From nowhere come admissions of the wives they have let down, the children they have neglected. At the back of the room, a young man pipes up. “I confess, I am angry about the people destroying this country. They’re malevolent and cunning and I feel powerless to organise against them and it makes me angry.”
In the afternoon, we head into Yeovil to spread the good news of Fathers Arise. Yeovil is almost a parody of England’s small-town decline. It sits where two A-roads meet, whose constant flow of traffic gives the impression of being trapped in limbo. From the slight incline at the top of the high street, you can glimpse a softer English arcadia. It recalls the town’s last charismatic religious figure, the Reverend George Rodgers, who in 1873 persuaded a sizeable group of locals to emigrate and found a Christian colony in Minnesota. It collapsed within a year.
At the top of the high street, a man calling himself Jon Pilgrim preaches into the mid-afternoon void. He looks like a figure from that older England: a rustic beard and almost childlike eyes full of biblical hope. He spent five years in Pakistan preaching the gospel and claims a fatwa was issued against him. Still, he insists, preaching in England can be a harder gig. He was recently arrested for an alleged hate crime in the Cheshire market town of Congleton. Parts of England, he says, can be a “spiritually dark place” full of entitlement among those who insist they do not need the gospel.
I confess a sin of my own. As a lapsed Christian, I tell him I struggle to believe that the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, the righteous anger of Fathers Arise, could ever win over the modern Englishman en masse. He looks at me as if I am mad. Behind us, outside a vape shop, some locals are arguing with members of Fathers Arise about some obscure theology of salvation. Perhaps that old idea of English reserve is already starting to fray.
***
There is another opening in Britain’s secular hold, one that is more overtly political. Jon Pilgrim attended the first Unite the Kingdom march in September, the demonstration organised by Tommy Robinson that saw 100,000 people take to the streets of London and prompted a national reassessment of what role Christianity might play in Britain’s politics over the next decade.
I ask if he thinks there is a genuine revival. He pauses for a moment. “I will never condemn anyone interested in the word of God,” he replies. “But I have a sense that in time, these people will come to be exploited.”
One of the organisers of Unite the Kingdom was Minister Ricki Doolan. Like many of the street preachers and born-again Christians I meet, Doolan’s faith follows a turbulent past: homelessness in Manchester, drug addiction, and eventual redemption through Christianity. He believes that this history has also shaped his close friendship with Tommy Robinson, whom he visited in HMP Woodhill, where he says he personally read him the prayer of salvation.
“Tommy has always felt that there is a higher power that's driving him,” Doolan tells me. “Especially in times of persecution. Because he is one of the most wrongly persecuted men in Britain.”
I mention Jon Pilgrim’s unease about the sincerity of the movement's Christianity. “The people of Britain have always believed in the word of God,” he replies. “Heaven and hell have been seen as truth for thousands of years. And only in the last three generations did the governments decide to almost erase it from the public consciousness. Now it is coming back through its own means.”
***
On a Saturday afternoon in December, the low winter sun casts an apocalyptic ember over Whitehall. Metal barriers delineate two paths: to the left, an anti-Digital ID protest headed by David Icke, to the right, Tommy Robinson’s carol service. Beneath the old statues of Westminster, the gaudy chaos of crosses and social-media influencers is finding its voice.
It’s a mixed crowd. Believers in both God and Tommy Robinson. The latter’s fans are sipping lager, and politely waving away Nigerian pastors handing out leaflets about the Second Coming.
One of those handing out leaflets is Lee from Twickenham, who works on a construction site. He’s here with some friends he calls the “Holy Spirit Hooligans”, former Chelsea Headhunters who are now born-again Christians. “This isn’t really about Tommy,” he tells me, explaining his own conversion. Two years ago, he says, he sensed a coming upheaval in Britain and beyond, and decided it was time to become a servant of Christ. He observes the Sabbath and wears biblical tzitzit tassels on his hoodie, in imitation of the first followers of Christ.
Lee asks if he can pray for me. For the first time, after months of politely declining, I agree. He leans into me, closes his eyes and places his hand on my chest. “God wanted this to happen,” he says. “Keep looking out for that sign brother,” he adds, before disappearing into the crowd.
The carol service passes without incident. Around 1,000 people turn up to watch Dominic Muir remind us of the reality of hell. A family of Spanish tourists hovers at the edges, uncertain whether to join in. It’s Tommy Robinson’s brief appearance at the end that animates the crowd. “Jesus would have stood against the establishment," he tells them. “Jesus stood with the sinners.”
Near the stage, I find Ricki Doolan. “I’ve never seen Tommy like that," he says, almost tearful himself. Nearby, chants of “stop the boats” have broken out. Other attendees offer their theological assessments of the service. A drunken man asks: “What would happen if Jesus were to return tomorrow?” He then provides his own answer: “I think he would say Keir Starmer’s a wanker.”
A few days later, I receive a message. Not from God, but on WhatsApp. It’s Lee, letting me know that he’s praying for me.
On a slow Saturday afternoon in Yeovil, the only real things to do are get drunk in the Wetherspoons or try to find God. Twenty of us — all men — have opted for the latter. We’re gathered in a musty Methodist church, a place whose pews haven’t been full for nearly half a century, and which now serves mostly as a weekday crèche.
This weekend, it has been repurposed for a slightly different purpose. A rainbow-coloured Pride insignia, promising that “Everyone is welcome”, is being hurriedly dismantled. From an electric piano manned by a lanky, dour teenager with a surprisingly angelic voice, an ethereal harmony floats across the room.
Men, young and middle-aged, raise their hands, get on their knees and praise God. Behind me, someone starts to talk in biblical tongues. This is Fathers Arise, a spiritual weekend for Christian men that has something for everyone: from advice on how to get along better with your wife, to tips about the coming spiritual war in Britain between the forces of good and evil.
My journey to Fathers Arise began with an encounter with the devil outside the Greggs in Guildford on a Friday afternoon. Max, 34, a man built for road construction work with a sleeve tattoo, had just finished work and travelled into town to meet Ollie Sabatelli and Jesse Ngoma, a pair of Instagram street preachers who between them have more than 650,000 followers.
“Release him Satan, in the name of Jesus, all the fear that the devil has placed in your life,” Olly bellowed into his microphone, one hand planted firmly on Max’s chest. A few weeks before, the preacher from Croydon had announced that the Holy Spirit had instructed him to go to Guildford declaring — to the surprise of its residents — that the terminally dull Surrey commuter town was “full of demons”.
Other itinerant preachers soon followed, descending from across the country to denounce everything from consumerism to the malign cultural influence of Ed Sheeran, who had once attended the town’s music academy.
Over the following weeks, I travelled back and forth to Guildford, watching a steady, awkward pilgrimage take shape. Young men were baptised in the River Wey, watched on by bewildered pensioners and ducks. There was Stephos, the 19-year-old who had heard the voice of God while homeless and sleeping under a scaffold. There was Emmanuel, a care worker from Ghana, who had come to Guildford believing that he was fulfilling a prophecy given to him at the age of 15: that he would one day return to the land of John Wesley, whose preaching had sparked Britain’s last great Christian revival in the 18th century.
“Britain had once been ordained by God for great things,” Emmanuel told me outside the town’s TK Maxx before preparing to preach. Since arriving in England two years ago, however, he admitted the trappings of this divine glory had faded. One day it might return. But before the light, he told me in a gentle lilt, there is always darkness.
***
Since the pandemic, talk of a Christian revival in Britain has become a minor press genre. Much of it rests on a statistic from the Bible Society that shows Church attendance has risen slightly since the pandemic. The largest increase has been among Gen Z and in Catholic and Pentecostal congregations — a trend also shaped by immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. This has produced a run of heartening, if faintly glib, stories of young men vox-popped outside London churches, explaining their conversions in the language of wellbeing and improved mental health.
But since the summer, what’s unfolded in Guildford and other provincial towns suggests a more spiritually-charged, unashamedly evangelical, masculine and righteously angry side to this “quiet revival”. And it's one that is determined to save modern Britain, gradually fragmenting into waywardness and sin, from the fiery pits of hell.
In the weeks that followed my time in Guildford, I took the advice of the newly saved and immersed myself in their world. On my phone, God’s work was never more than a scroll away: live feeds of men speaking in tongues on Friday nights; rowdy debates at Speakers’ Corner between Muslims and Turning Point UK’s premier evangelist, Young Bob. Faith here is very far from hymns and pews. It’s more a street battle with an eye to algorithmic virality, using scripture against everyone from Brighton’s gay community to Lib Dem dads armed with their half-remembered Dawkins.
There are many sects and creeds of this revival, from a fervent belief in the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk to the conviction that the true test of a Christian comes in his ability to preach to a slow crowd on Aldershot high street, where the council recently attempted to ban preachers for causing “alarm and distress”. But all are united by the idea of the born-again divine revelation, and by a shared contempt for what they see as the decadence of late liberalism. (Yoga, pornography, feminism, and the LGBT movement all come under scriptural scrutiny.) Converts are often urged towards a single line from John’s Gospel: “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
Before rebirth, however, comes something like hell.
The testimonies offered in the run-up to salvation form a grimy patchwork of small-town England: the guilt and shame of porn addiction, Friday nights drinking cheap lager, failed university courses, the disenchanted, aching drift of life. Christianity, adherents like to note, took hold among a similar crowd in the first century across the listless backwaters of the Roman Empire. A place, they say, that has much in common with the high street of any given English town on a slow afternoon.
I heard this story repeatedly, including from Alistair Knight, the founder of Jesus Pulse, who plans to raise the capital to fund 8,000 preachers — first in Guildford, and then across the world. “It can sound crazy,” he tells me, as he describes the “demonic strongholds” he’s seen around Britain, where “abominations” such as witchcraft, LGBT groups and Islam have taken hold.
But this gospel, he insists, comes from love: every night they pray for these groups. To be born again and not fervently spread God’s message, no matter how fallen the recipient, is itself a sin. Knight recounts the night when, after another debauched and dull university party, he was visited by five angels. “The heaviness that I’ve carried all my life, I just felt it sort of dissipate and loosen,” he says. He returned to his room and cried — not from fear, but from the feeling of deliverance from his past life. This is the experience he is determined to bring to the rest of Britain.
***
Back in Yeovil, Dominic Muir, the organiser of Fathers Arise, takes to the stage. Fatherly, serious and theatrically enigmatic, he sits somewhere between a Victorian churchman and a repentant hipster. I first came across Muir through the King’s Army, a regimented column of believers who were filmed marching outside Buckingham Palace in matching black tracksuits. It’s his “warfare discussion” that I’ve come in for. I’m curious as to whether the men gathered, from tree surgeons to salesmen, are really prepared for a spiritual crusade in 21st-century Britain.
Muir tells us that he once lived the life sold to us by modern society: a well-paid job in London, nights of revelry on the King’s Road. But, he warns, that man is no longer fit for what lies ahead. “The work we are doing this weekend is lifesaving,” he says. “We stand at a critical juncture in our nation. Western Christendom is crumbling. I see every demonic ideology in that nation jostling to fill that space. I see Islam, I see Roman Catholicism, I see witchcraft. And I ask: where is the church?”
The music starts up again and we are encouraged to confess. Around the room, men crumple into sudden and unexpected distress. From nowhere come admissions of the wives they have let down, the children they have neglected. At the back of the room, a young man pipes up. “I confess, I am angry about the people destroying this country. They’re malevolent and cunning and I feel powerless to organise against them and it makes me angry.”
In the afternoon, we head into Yeovil to spread the good news of Fathers Arise. Yeovil is almost a parody of England’s small-town decline. It sits where two A-roads meet, whose constant flow of traffic gives the impression of being trapped in limbo. From the slight incline at the top of the high street, you can glimpse a softer English arcadia. It recalls the town’s last charismatic religious figure, the Reverend George Rodgers, who in 1873 persuaded a sizeable group of locals to emigrate and found a Christian colony in Minnesota. It collapsed within a year.
At the top of the high street, a man calling himself Jon Pilgrim preaches into the mid-afternoon void. He looks like a figure from that older England: a rustic beard and almost childlike eyes full of biblical hope. He spent five years in Pakistan preaching the gospel and claims a fatwa was issued against him. Still, he insists, preaching in England can be a harder gig. He was recently arrested for an alleged hate crime in the Cheshire market town of Congleton. Parts of England, he says, can be a “spiritually dark place” full of entitlement among those who insist they do not need the gospel.
I confess a sin of my own. As a lapsed Christian, I tell him I struggle to believe that the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, the righteous anger of Fathers Arise, could ever win over the modern Englishman en masse. He looks at me as if I am mad. Behind us, outside a vape shop, some locals are arguing with members of Fathers Arise about some obscure theology of salvation. Perhaps that old idea of English reserve is already starting to fray.
***
There is another opening in Britain’s secular hold, one that is more overtly political. Jon Pilgrim attended the first Unite the Kingdom march in September, the demonstration organised by Tommy Robinson that saw 100,000 people take to the streets of London and prompted a national reassessment of what role Christianity might play in Britain’s politics over the next decade.
I ask if he thinks there is a genuine revival. He pauses for a moment. “I will never condemn anyone interested in the word of God,” he replies. “But I have a sense that in time, these people will come to be exploited.”
One of the organisers of Unite the Kingdom was Minister Ricki Doolan. Like many of the street preachers and born-again Christians I meet, Doolan’s faith follows a turbulent past: homelessness in Manchester, drug addiction, and eventual redemption through Christianity. He believes that this history has also shaped his close friendship with Tommy Robinson, whom he visited in HMP Woodhill, where he says he personally read him the prayer of salvation.
“Tommy has always felt that there is a higher power that's driving him,” Doolan tells me. “Especially in times of persecution. Because he is one of the most wrongly persecuted men in Britain.”
I mention Jon Pilgrim’s unease about the sincerity of the movement's Christianity. “The people of Britain have always believed in the word of God,” he replies. “Heaven and hell have been seen as truth for thousands of years. And only in the last three generations did the governments decide to almost erase it from the public consciousness. Now it is coming back through its own means.”
***
On a Saturday afternoon in December, the low winter sun casts an apocalyptic ember over Whitehall. Metal barriers delineate two paths: to the left, an anti-Digital ID protest headed by David Icke, to the right, Tommy Robinson’s carol service. Beneath the old statues of Westminster, the gaudy chaos of crosses and social-media influencers is finding its voice.
It’s a mixed crowd. Believers in both God and Tommy Robinson. The latter’s fans are sipping lager, and politely waving away Nigerian pastors handing out leaflets about the Second Coming.
One of those handing out leaflets is Lee from Twickenham, who works on a construction site. He’s here with some friends he calls the “Holy Spirit Hooligans”, former Chelsea Headhunters who are now born-again Christians. “This isn’t really about Tommy,” he tells me, explaining his own conversion. Two years ago, he says, he sensed a coming upheaval in Britain and beyond, and decided it was time to become a servant of Christ. He observes the Sabbath and wears biblical tzitzit tassels on his hoodie, in imitation of the first followers of Christ.
Lee asks if he can pray for me. For the first time, after months of politely declining, I agree. He leans into me, closes his eyes and places his hand on my chest. “God wanted this to happen,” he says. “Keep looking out for that sign brother,” he adds, before disappearing into the crowd.
The carol service passes without incident. Around 1,000 people turn up to watch Dominic Muir remind us of the reality of hell. A family of Spanish tourists hovers at the edges, uncertain whether to join in. It’s Tommy Robinson’s brief appearance at the end that animates the crowd. “Jesus would have stood against the establishment," he tells them. “Jesus stood with the sinners.”
Near the stage, I find Ricki Doolan. “I’ve never seen Tommy like that," he says, almost tearful himself. Nearby, chants of “stop the boats” have broken out. Other attendees offer their theological assessments of the service. A drunken man asks: “What would happen if Jesus were to return tomorrow?” He then provides his own answer: “I think he would say Keir Starmer’s a wanker.”
A few days later, I receive a message. Not from God, but on WhatsApp. It’s Lee, letting me know that he’s praying for me.
