The Nine O’Clock Service, otherwise known as ‘NOS’, emerged as a radical Christian collective in Sheffield, England during the mid-1980s. A group of young evangelical musicians, including one Chris Brain, had begun attending St Thomas’s, Crookes, a thriving evangelical Anglican church led by Revd Robert Warren (see Evangelical Christianity). While embracing its charismatic spirituality (see Charismatic Movements), they criticized its middle class values as complicit in the power, greed and consumerism rife in the wider church and contemporary culture. Seeking to challenge this, and following a model of radical Christian living popularized by David Watson, they styled themselves as the Nairn St. Community. Remaining a fellowship group within St Thomas’s, they lived communally in local houses, were supported by a common purse and followed Brain as spiritual leader.
In 1985, John Wimber brought his ‘signs and wonders’ theology to a conference in Sheffield City Hall. The Nairn St. fellowship attended the meetings and from then on embraced the charismatic teachings of the Vineyard ministries. At the same time, Robert Warren claimed to have received a prophecy from God, urging the Nairn St. community to draw more young people into the church. It was decided that the community would run a new service at nine o’clock each Sunday, aimed at fostering orthodox Christianity among unchurched youth aged 18-30. NOS would also be multimedia, employing the audio-visual technology common to dance night clubs and using music that would appeal to the young clubbers.
Regular attendances at NOS trebled in its first year and by the late 1980s, hundreds travelled to Sheffield each week to take part in its cutting edge worship. Some made a more radical commitment by moving to Sheffield and becoming full-time members of the community. They typically tithed a portion of their salaries, in addition to offering their services for the good of the project and submitting themselves to a strict and highly regimented organizational structure. Many were disillusioned charismatics who had become tired of the jaded, complacent and triumphalistic tone of the evangelical mainstream. By contrast, NOS offered a vision that challenged the complacency of culture, and worship that appealed to the aesthetic tastes of youth. By 1988 there were 400 members, and the following year, Rt Revd David Lunn, the Bishop of Sheffield, confirmed almost 100 young people at a special NOS service. The hierarchy of the Church of England was forced to take note of NOS as an innovative and highly successful initiative in youth evangelism.
In the early 1990s, there was a marked shift in the theology of NOS, from Wimber and the Vineyard tradition to the creation spirituality of Matthew Fox (see Fox, Matthew). Around the same time, the community moved from St Thomas’s to hold their services in the underground rotunda at the Ponds Forge Leisure Centre in the centre of Sheffield, becoming the first Anglican Extra-Parochial parish. It was in this vast arena that NOS held its weekly Planetary Mass, an alternative celebration of Holy Communion. The Planetary Mass used images inspired by the environmental crisis and echoed Fox’s attacks on sexism, patriarchy, and ecological apathy, while calling for a renewed mysticism in a post-modern church. Some church leaders expressed concern that NOS was verging on the boundaries of Neo-paganism and the ‘New Age Movement’. Controversy also surrounded the group’s Passion in Global Chaos set, performed at the Green-belt festival in 1992, particularly its use of erotic lyrics and bikini-clad dancers. The NOS leadership explained this as a ‘post-modern’ attempt to engage with the intuitive and sexual alongside rational media.
In August 1995, several members approached diocesan authorities about a longstanding abuse of power at NOS. The leadership team were confronted and resigned, and the service collapsed. Chris Brain—by now an ordained clergyman—was at the centre of the accusations, and eventually admitted intimate and improper contact with twenty female members. His abuse was evidently more widespread, as eighty members, mostly women under 35, sought counselling from a special team set up by the Church. Investigations by the Church of England found no financial improprieties. Rather, the problems of NOS were identified as a lack of accountability within its leadership and the manipulative conduct of Chris Brain, who later resigned as an Anglican priest.
After NOS collapsed, many of its members became disillusioned with Christianity and abandoned the church. However, some of the survivors have continued to meet on a more low-key basis, as the Nine O’Clock Community (NOC). While its abuses are universally deplored, the positive innovations of NOS also live on in the alternative worship movement, a widespread network of groups which practise creative, multimedia worship geared to a post-modern culture.
