Chris Brain, who once led an intentional community of neopagan Anglicans, now faces a criminal trial on 36 charges of indecent assault and one charge of rape. Church Times reported that the trial, which has convened at the Inner London Crown Court, could take up to two months.
The community drew a splash of global attention in the early 1990s, when its Nine O’Clock Service (also called the Rave Mass) made appearances at the Greenbelt Festival and at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
By 1995, it came crashing down when multiple women accused Brain of manipulating them into sexual relations with him, purportedly in the name of sexual healing. Brain was deposed from his role as a priest in the Church of England, but no criminal trial occurred then. He has led a quiet life away from the glare of publicity since then. Brain, now 68, denies all the charges against him.
The Diocese of Sheffield keeps a Nine O’Clock Service page for people to report past abuse or to seek help in coping with their memories of the community.
The community began its life as a ministry of St. Thomas’s Crookes, Sheffield, a charismatic parish, but by the time of its global profile its liturgies were far from orthodox on sex and theology. During the Nine O’Clock Service at Grace Cathedral, a video based on Jesus’ warning about false teachers flashed a hackneyed image of a TV evangelist. During the group’s appearance at the Greenbelt Festival, women performed go-go dances in tall cages.
Roland Howard reviewed the community’s sad history in The Rise and Fall of the Nine O’Clock Service: A Cult Within the Church? (Mobray, 1999).
The community was brought to San Francisco by the Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox, a former Dominican priest who fell afoul of the Vatican because of his teachings on what he called Original Blessing, a conscious alternative to Christianity’s historic doctrine of Original Sin. Fox is now a priest of the Diocese of California.
Fox kept the liturgical approach alive in the Cosmic Mass, which met regularly in Oakland, Calif., but made a onetime appearance at Washington National Cathedral in 2018. Under Fox’s leadership, the service often favored oversized papier-mâché puppets to make theological and social points.
Douglas LeBlanc is the Associate Editor for Book Reviews and writes about Christianity and culture. He and his wife, Monica, attend St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Henrico, Virginia.
