A myriad of new 'alternative' worship and outreach events have sprung up all over Britain. In our new series Karl Allison and Francis Blight will be journeying the length of Britain to report on the good, and not so good, initiatives aiming at wrenching Christianity into the 90s.



Continued from page 1

As published in CR22:
THE H SERVICE
Held at Croydon College, Park Lane, Croydon
Saturdays, monthly
Next one: 11 November, 8.30pm

There's a church in Croydon called Follies End Fellowship that runs an alternative worship service. The Pastor of this growing concern is none other than Dave Markee, ex-bass player to Clapton, Armatrading and others. It comes as a mild surprise, then, to discover that this superbly organised service is not the work of our saved session-man bass hero. Rather, it is the work of Chris Roe (who's never met Clapton but once had a tape reviewed by Cummings), with a little help from Vince 'Secret Archives Of The Vatican' Millett.

In many ways, The H Service (it used to be called The Hallelujah Service until they found it off-putting to the very people they were trying to reach) looks and sounds like several other high-energy, multi-media worship events that I've come across. The walls are covered in projected images and the dance floor is full of gleefully cavorting, worshipping bodies. The music is loud and intense.

What makes this service stand out are the themes they explore. Rather than constantly examining the navel of faith itself, they take a resolutely evangelical line on themes such as suffering, the occult and the second coming. It sounds like a heavy programme for a dance event, but it's so slickly presented that they get away with it. The images are expertly matched to the music and sometimes the music suddenly stops to allow a short sketch to be performed. Organiser Chris Roe told me, "We are aiming it more at the unsaved in that we're trying to go jargon-free and have a theme that might emerge in any decent conversation down the pub."

The other striking feature is the quality of the deejaying. They use a mixture of Christian and secular tunes, something I've been critical of in the past. The H Service, however, does it intelligently. Basically, a secular track saying something like "There's a hole in my life" will be followed by a Christian track saying something like "God can fill that hole!"

Chris Roe explained the theory: "I think you can be moved in a spiritual way by a piece of music that wasn't written by a Christian. I think that a lot of people write things from the heart that are very revealing. We just put all that into the right context and, hopefully, make a profound comment from the heart of God."

HOLY JOES
Held at The Plough, Clapham Common
Tuesdays, 9.00pm

Holy Joes might just qualify for the controversial tag 'alternative' as well as any Christian event I've yet found. It takes place in a pub, has little or no formal structure to either it's organisation or events and frequently uses no music whatsoever.

Nevertheless, Holy Joes' creator Dave Tomlinson is not comfortable with the description. "We don't use the word 'alternative', although I think there are legitimate ways in which you can use it. If you can define what the mainstream is then clearly this is different and so it is alternative in that sense. But I think it's terminology that has got problems and it might be better to avoid it and rather see that the church has a wide spectrum."

Dave is a former house church 'apostle' and also helped to pioneer the Harry Festival in Yorkshire. He's moved away from the house church movement because, "For me, something which started out as being incredibly exciting more and more has lost its way and you got the attitude of trying to make something happen yet again. I and many others have described it as seeking for the orgasm. My own interest led me away from gathering Christians from existing churches to join the new supersonic house church to looking more at people who have been a part of a church but have dropped out and at those who have never been near a church."

The search for what sort of environment was best to engage with these people led Dave to the idea of meeting in a pub. Three years later, they're on their fourth pub venue, all around the Clapham area of South London.

"There's a lot of people who feel at ease in a pub who wouldn't go near a church and yet talking about religion in the pub is quite commonplace. So we asked ourselves, 'What does church in a pub culture look like?' We don't have a worship time in every meeting, but one meeting a month is devoted to worship. I think we've been able to develop a style that's appropriate to us. It's viewed by a number of people who've come and looked at it as being quite catholic and that's probably true because the sort of post modern trend in our culture is much more symbol orientated and it's quite interesting to see the church sometimes trying to debunk its symbolism at the very time when the trend is actually going the other way!"

At an average meeting there will be about 40 people present, a size that the leaders are comfortable with. For many, it seems to be a stopping off place, somewhere to go before they move on to a new church, or even back to their old one. Most time is spent in discussion. "Holy Joes is a place where anyone can doubt at any level," says Dave. "No question is taboo. In so many church structures, the group dynamics are geared at keeping people at a fairly naive level in terms of their faith. This anti-hierarchy attitude that you find within youth culture, which I think is impinging on the church through the alternative thing, is actually confronting us with this very challenge. People are not prepared to sit around and take the word from on high. I think it's inevitable that there are going to be questions which go a lot further than a lot of people looking on are comfortable with and I wouldn't for one minute suggest that there won't be mistakes and casualties in that process, but I don't know how you can go forward without taking the risk."

As published in CR23:
THE 8.30 EXPERIENCE
All Saints, Stranton, Hartlepool
Monthly (last Sunday in the month)
Next one: 30 October