Religion in Britain. It's There If You Look

The British are considered to be irreligious, with both the established Church of England and the Catholic Church
experiencing steady decline. But there is life in the world of religion, as
Danny Kruger reports from
Pontins, a British holiday camp where folks will be attending
“the annual evangelical jamboree organised by Holy Trinity, Brompton.”

Christianity in London radiates out in concentric black and white rings.
In the middle is Kensington Temple, near Notting Hill Gate, a vast Pentecostal congregation
of West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans led by a hyperactive former ballet dancer called Colin Dye,
who does the splits on the podium. A little further out are the posh white churches of central
London, like [Holy Trinity, Brompton].

In outer London are more huge black churches, some of them clearly crazy
but most safely orthodox. Beyond, round the M25, are the white suburban mega-churches
of Britain’s Bible Belt.

Mega-churches? In Britain. Well now. There’s more.

In black neighbourhoods, in particular, the church is perhaps the most
cohesive social agent there is, the one cultural force that keeps families intact and
steers young men into lives of responsibility and purpose.

As for rich whites like me, what is prompting the evangelical surge? It is partly the
churches themselves, which have shrugged off the flummery of established religion. Charles
Moore, on this page on Saturday, quoted John Buchan on radical Muslims: “They want to live face
to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priest-craft.” So do we. The same desire
for integrity and openness that produced Protestantism in the first
place is stoking a new revival, casual in style but solid in substance.

A hundred years ago, Britain featured the muscular Christianity of Eric Liddell, the Chariots of
Fire athlete who perished in a Japanese internment camp in China in 1945. Two hundred years ago
the “posh whites” of the time got together in the Clapham Sect and helped end the slave trade. Two hundred and
fifty years ago the Wesley brothers brought Methodism and its simple message of “work all you
can, save all you can, give all you can” to British mechanics.

Stay tuned.