The rise and fall of the British cult that hid in plain sight
The Guardian4 days ago
Until she was six, Philippa Barnes was surrounded by things that were hers. She had a favourite pair of red-and-white-striped dungarees and a long garden with a strawberry patch. She had a close-knit family: a mum, dad, two brothers and a sister, and grandparents who lived near the family home in Surrey. When her mum made lemon meringue pie, she would pass the curd pan out of the window to where Philippa was playing so she could lick it clean.
One day, when Philippa was about two years old, a couple stopped by the family's church. They, along with their three sons, were on their way to join the Jesus Fellowship, a Christian community in Northamptonshire led by Noel Stanton, a charismatic, white-haired pastor. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and Philippa's family started visiting the fellowship a few times a year.
At first, Philippa and her siblings loved these trips. Photos from that time of Cornhill Manor, one of the fellowship's properties, show high windows looking out over green fields, airy communal kitchens, and a grand ballroom with a sprung dancefloor, where members of the community slept on mattresses. It was a far cry from Woking, where the family lived opposite a noisy train line. Although Philippa had to spend long religious meetings under her parents' chairs, shushed and desperately bored, the rest of the weekend could be spent playing outside.
When Philippa was five, on one of these weekends with the fellowship, something shifted. One evening, she and her two-year-old brother, as the two youngest siblings, were put to bed with a baby monitor while her parents went to a prayer meeting downstairs. 'The message was, 'We can hear you, but we don't want to hear you,'' Philippa recalled. She had never before been afraid to disturb her parents, but when her brother started having diarrhoea and then both siblings began to vomit, she had to call for them. 'My parents came, and my dad wasn't too pleased,' she said. 'Looking back, I can see they didn't want to be embarrassed by being disturbed – they were newbies to the community.' But the lesson stuck: this new church was more important than she was.
In 1984, Philippa's parents told the children that the family was moving to the East Midlands to be nearer the fellowship. For her parents, the move made sense. Philippa's father was a senior scientific officer for the Ministry of Defence and had to travel regularly for work, meaning her mother was often looking after the children alone. In Northamptonshire, they had been exposed to a new way of life, one based around simplicity and community, where music was played nightly, meals were communal and children were able to enjoy the outdoors.
The Barnes family bought a house in the village of Bugbrooke and regularly attended fellowship meetings and worship sessions led by Stanton. Then, in 1987, just before Philippa's ninth birthday, the family moved into what the fellowship called 'community': a farmhouse named Shalom, where about 20 people would live at any given time. Moving in meant surrendering proceeds from their house sale and Philippa's father's wages into the 'common purse'. Most who lived in community were employed in the fellowship's businesses, and Philippa's father got a job at their builders' merchant. All possessions, even down to items of clothing, were shared.
In some ways, this life offered a new kind of freedom. The younger Barnes children spent time going for walks or picnics, or looking after the fellowship's livestock. To her delight, Philippa was allowed to help with lambing. She and her brother would run riot away from adult eyes. They once built a petrol bomb using a milk bottle and blew up a wasp's nest.
There were also privations. Almost all of the children's toys were taken away. 'Cuddlies, gadgets or competitive toys' appeared on a list of things deemed 'worldly' – and therefore unacceptable – by Stanton. The list of banned items changed according to his whims, but over the years it included secular TV, pop music, makeup, sporting events, restaurants, buffets, weight training, holidays, zoos, coffee, sunbathing, celebrating Christmas, swimming 'for pleasure' and crisps.
The children attended a local comprehensive school, but making friends outside the group was difficult. They were not allowed to eat school dinners, so every lunchtime they would troop to a fellowship house nearby. 'The other children knew to avoid us, so we stuck together,' Philippa said.
Of all the strangeness in their new life, Philippa found the fellowship's approach to family hardest. Under Stanton's rules, communal living meant renouncing your 'natural family' in favour of the fellowship's 'spiritual family'. Women were called 'sisters', men were 'brothers' and leaders were 'elders'. Philippa's parents, instead of just being responsible for their family unit, were given other duties: helping to cook and clean for the other Shalom residents, or finding new recruits. When Philippa turned 12, she was moved from the room she shared with her younger brother into a dormitory with women of all ages.
Explaining this approach, Stanton would point to a passage from Matthew 10, in which Jesus said: 'I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother … A man's enemies will be members of his own household.' In the absence of the 'natural family', any adult could be responsible for disciplining children. Many did so through 'rodding' – hitting children as young as two with sticks. 'He who spares the rod hates his son,' Stanton would say, quoting from Proverbs. Exorcisms were also performed on children. When Philippa was caught drawing stick figures with breasts and genitals at a meeting, she was taken into a private room so an elder could pray for her 'unclean spirit' and anoint her with oil.
Philippa missed her parents. She managed to spend some time with her mum by helping in the garden and the kitchen, where they would skim cream off bottles of milk to make choux buns and eclairs, a welcome relief from bland meals of pork chops and boiled vegetables. But it never felt like enough: other girls her age were going shopping for clothes with their mums, watching TV as a family or going to the cinema or the zoo. In the communal house, doors were hung with curtains, and Philippa remembers hiding between her parents' bedroom door and the curtain, hearing the murmur of their voices as they talked, laughed or argued; longing to be closer to them.
Dressed in brightly coloured shirts and patterned ties, with his signature swirl of backcombed white hair, Stanton looked more like a magician than a man of the church. A Baptist pastor born on Christmas Day, he had founded the fellowship in his small local chapel in 1969 after a 'life-changing' spiritual experience that led him to embrace exuberant worship sessions, speaking in tongues, exorcisms and communal living. From the fellowship's early days, these practices attracted attention. In a 1974 Thames Television documentary, The Lord Took Hold of Bugbrooke, one local woman complained she couldn't open her windows on Sundays because of the noise.
Through the 1970s, young people and families flocked to Bugbrooke to join this new church, attracted by the stories of spiritual revelation and a thriving Christian community. There were two main levels of membership: some lived in their own home and attended worship and meetings; the hardcore lived in one of the fellowship's communal houses. As all members living in community had to hand over their assets, the fellowship flourished financially. In 1984, it bought a nearby manor house, which it renamed New Creation Hall. By the early 80s, it owned at least 10 country houses in the area, and membership in communal houses was up to about 450. It was operating a chain of health food shops, a clothing shop and a building supply company. In 1982, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo described it as 'the new aristocracy of the East Midlands'.
The fellowship was a strict hierarchy, with Stanton at the top, a leadership circle below him, and an elder running each communal house. Only men were permitted to occupy these roles. Women were subordinate to men. (If a man was driving a car, women were expected to sit in the back.) Favoured members were given 'virtue names' reflecting their most valued qualities: Valiant, Zealous, Forthright or, in one young woman's case, Submission. Celibacy, especially among the male leadership, was encouraged as the highest ideal.
The fellowship's first decade was punctuated by a series of strange incidents. In December 1976, a 26-year-old member, David Gavin Hooper, was found dead in a field on fellowship property, his socks and shirt folded neatly next to him. The death was put down to exposure, but the coroner, Michael Collcutt, noted that it was 'extraordinary' that he should have gone out with no coat on such a cold morning. Less than 18 months later, 19-year-old Stephen Orchard was found decapitated on a nearby railway line, having told his parents he was considering leaving the fellowship. (His virtue name was 'Faithful'.) The same coroner returned an open verdict, but noted his 'concern' about the two strange deaths and the letters he had received from parents of young people in the fellowship, who were worried about their children's safety. These incidents were closely reported by local media but never became national news. (When Philippa's family were living in Woking and first encountering the fellowship, they hadn't heard about them.)
There were always explanations for the bad press: it was the product of misinformation or disgruntled former members who couldn't be trusted. But after a string of negative stories, in 1986 – two years after the Barnes family moved into community – the Baptist Union of Great Britain voted to expel the fellowship, saying it had caused them 'embarrassment'. The fellowship no longer fulfilled a requirement of Baptist churches: governance by the whole congregation. Stanton may have preached equality in the eyes of God, but within the fellowship some were more equal than others.
After its expulsion, the fellowship went on the offensive. In 1987, in a bid to recruit hundreds of new members, it launched a new campaigning arm, which it called the Jesus Army. Stanton dreamed up a uniform for his troops: bomber jackets, in 'army green, red for the blood of Jesus, white for purity, black for the darkness and gold for God's glory'. On the jackets were embroidered the words LOVE, POWER AND SACRIFICE. Community houses were rebranded 'battle stations', money for campaigning was collected in a 'war fund', and the campaign to recruit new members was run by Jawbone, the Jesus Army War Battle Operations Network.
The Jesus Army's mission was to fight 'economic recession, family breakdown and moral decay', according to a 1997 Stanton-approved history of the fellowship. Homelessness in Britain had doubled between 1979 and 1986, driven by rising unemployment, government cuts and high inflation. Against this bleak backdrop, the fellowship's troops travelled into city centres around the UK in colourful, Jesus Army-branded doubledecker buses, wearing their bomber jackets and camouflage trousers (for men only – trousers were banned for women). They would seek out homeless people and drug addicts, offering them a place to stay for the night, or longer. Back at the communal houses, these new recruits would sleep in the same dormitories as children as young as 12.
The Jesus Army did wonders for the fellowship's public image, projecting a young, hopeful, anti-capitalist version of Christianity, dedicated to helping vulnerable people. 'We [broke] through to the 'forgotten people,'' the authors of the 1997 history wrote proudly. 'Street kids, addicts, the poor, the homeless.' From the late 80s, the Jesus Army was a regular presence at Glastonbury, doubledecker bus in tow. In the 90s, as rave music was becoming popular, troops were sent out to nightclubs to recruit. By the mid-90s, the fellowship's following had increased to nearly 2,000 people, with about 75 community houses, including outposts in London, Liverpool and Milton Keynes. It was fast becoming one of the largest residential Christian communities in Europe.
In 1998, a Jesus Army delegation appeared on an episode of Jon Ronson's Channel 4 talkshow, For the Love Of …, wearing glow-in-the-dark crucifix necklaces ('everyone in the clubs wears them, because they're cool') and bemoaning 'misrepresentations' of the church. They prayed as a group over Ronson: 'I'm a factual person, but the second you put your hand on my foot, it stopped itching,' he marvelled.
At 16, Philippa became a covenant member of the church. After a full immersion baptism, she swore a vow of lifelong commitment. By now, her days were entirely ruled by the group: she sang in the worship band, and worked as an administrator at the group's GP surgery, on top of the busy schedule of meetings, worship, and weekends spent evangelising. As a child, she had loved art and crafts, but there was no time for that now. The fellowship saw the pursuit of individual passions as too individualistic.
Despite her outward commitment, Philippa had a growing feeling that something wasn't right. From when she was about 13, an adult man in the fellowship had begun following her home on his motorbike and staring at her in meetings, which escalated to sending her love letters and telling her they should get married. His attentions would have been obvious to other adults, yet no one stopped him. To protect herself, she asked a friend's brother to say he was her boyfriend, despite Stanton's ban on flirting and dating.
While her stalker went unchallenged, Philippa was hemmed in by the fellowship's endless rules. Once, she was publicly chastised by her house elder for getting a haircut in town, using £10 her grandmother had sent her. 'I could feel that rebellion inside me. Like, what does it really matter? It's just hair.'
When she was 17, her father gave her some news that would crystallise her growing distrust of the organisation that had raised her. A friend of Philippa's, Marie*, had gone to the police with some information and it was now being investigated. He didn't say more than that. That night, Philippa lay in bed turning this over and over in her mind. Marie had been her closest friend. She and her family had left the fellowship with no warning, which meant they were cut off from all contact with the group. Philippa had felt so hurt that she had burned Marie's letters. Yet she knew what the police report must be about. To Philippa, it felt like Marie was reaching out for help.
Philippa went to her dad and told him the truth. From the age of 13, on her regular visits to see Marie at the fellowship's house in Acton, Philippa had been forced to act as a lookout while a 24-year-old man in the household abused Marie in the basement. She had remained silent, believing it wasn't her story to tell. Now Marie had reported her abuser, and Philippa wanted to corroborate her story.
Philippa and her father approached the elder of her household, who took the matter to Stanton. When the alleged perpetrator was questioned, he insisted the two girls were lying. Stanton accused Philippa and Marie of being 'in cahoots', as if their friendship was in itself cause for suspicion. Although Philippa's father had lived for almost a decade in a community where family loyalty was considered sinful and hierarchy was everything, he stood by his daughter. So did her house elder, who insisted that he believed her. Philippa and her father were told to wait until the end of the week for a final decision about whether the information should be passed to the police.
To Philippa, it wasn't up to the fellowship to decide. So, feeling like fugitives, she and her father bypassed the leadership. To avoid being overheard, they found a phone in a rarely used outbuilding where Jesus Army merchandise was spray-painted, and called the police. After Philippa was asked to give a statement, they secretly travelled to London.
The case made it to court, and Philippa was called as a witness. Her older brother, who was by now in his late 20s and living in a fellowship house in Eastbourne, was summoned by elders to a meeting, where he was told his sister was lying, and that she was set on destroying the church. Like his father, he supported her, in spite of the pressure. Stanton held further meetings, condemning the whole family. When Philippa arrived at Isleworth crown court to give her testimony, the room was filled with fellowship members. They were there to support the accused.
On 4 April 1997, a jury found the perpetrator guilty of two counts of sexual assault of a minor, for touching Marie's breasts and trying to kiss her. The judge jailed him for three months, noting that the offence had taken place years earlier, and that the man may have struggled under the church's 'strict regime', alluding to the limitations Stanton placed on sex and dating. 'You were living in a society where your frustrations may well have built up,' the judge said. After the verdict, Marie told the Northampton Chronicle and Echo that the fellowship inflicted 'constant mental abuse' on its members.
Few outside the Acton house even knew that the perpetrator had been convicted. After his release, he was welcomed back to the fellowship with open arms.
In 1979, John Everett, a student at Warwick University, began a sociological study of the Jesus Fellowship for his doctoral thesis. He had joined the group in the summer of 1977, experiencing it as a 'pocket of utopian escape from a chaotic, frenetic, unsympathetic world', something 'very close to a classless society' where people of all kinds were accepted. Now, he had been commissioned by Stanton himself to go and study its unique makeup. Yet as he conducted his research, examining the group's structure and practices through an academic lens, he began to reach a devastating conclusion: that the church was a cult.
As Everett writes in War and Defeat, a history of the organisation that he self-published this year, he couldn't escape the fact that the authority structure and separation from the rest of the world were hallmarks of cultic groups. 'It would have taken a huge amount of self-deceit to deny what I could plainly see: the key characteristics of a cult were in our DNA,' he writes.
There is a school of sociology that rejects the term 'cult', arguing that it has been used to dismiss unusual groups that challenge social norms, and preferring the category 'new religious movements'. Many other scholars and survivors disagree, arguing that the methods cults use to control their members are distinct. Alexandra Stein, a British psychologist and survivor of a political cult, says that whether religious or non-religious, cults are remarkably similar: 'If you've seen one car, you know what machinery is in another car, even if it's a different colour.'
In the popular imagination, cults are closed-off entities, physically removing their members from the outside world. The fellowship claimed to work differently: members were free to go to school, work, and live outside of community houses. But just as an abusive partner might exert influence over every aspect of a victim's life, Stanton had built a system of mental and emotional control that relied on a common cultic tactic: gradually severing members' attachments to the rest of society, to family members and even to one another. Those broken connections were replaced by a single reference point: the fellowship. With nowhere else to go, any feelings of fear and stress provoked by life in the organisation would only serve to drive members closer to it.
This helps explain why, after the trial and their condemnation by the leadership, Philippa and her parents stayed in the fellowship. 'Really, we should have left at that point,' she said. 'But it didn't occur to us. We had made a lifelong commitment.' Their homes, jobs, friendships and assets were entirely tied to the group. Anyone who left was shunned – members were banned from speaking or writing to them, and songs were sung at worship sessions about their betrayal.
Over time, though, Philippa felt that same flicker of rebellion that had allowed her to speak up for her friend. She had never felt fully spiritually moved in the group's worship sessions. She never heard God speaking to her, or felt a genuine desire to speak in tongues. And now, as she sat through Stanton's sermons about traitors and liars, knowing they were directed at her, she became more and more uncertain about the religion that governed her life.
She was haunted by the contradictions her experience had exposed: a Christian community that claimed to preach the truth was persecuting her for her honesty. She had been taught that the 'natural family' was meaningless, but her father and brother had been the ones to stand up for her. She struggled with depression, developed a stammer and began having stress-induced seizures. The leadership moved her to a fellowship house in Oxford, ostensibly to recuperate, though Philippa believes Stanton didn't want her 'anywhere near him'.
The distance from Stanton and the church headquarters meant the community was more relaxed, and she got a non-fellowship job, working as an administrator at a pharmaceutical company. For the first time, she was given money from the common purse to buy clothes of her own, for work, that wouldn't be shared communally. She bought a couple of pencil skirts and a couple of blouses. Work, too, opened her mind. 'I was meeting people who were compassionate towards me, more so than the Christians I'd lived with all my life,' she said. 'I was shocked, I suppose, that that was able to happen.'
Those who spend their childhoods in cults, Stein said, can find leaving particularly hard: 'They struggle to know what is the self, and what is the cult. It's very complex to try to untangle that.' In 1999, Philippa reached a decision: she would move out of the fellowship house, though she would continue to attend services.
With her own income, she was able to move into a big shared rental in central Oxford. Everything was new. She had to set up a bank account for the first time. Shopping for food and cooking for herself was a revelation. 'I'd go to the shops almost every day, and I used to have stir-fries nearly every night because I couldn't believe the variety, and how good vegetables could taste after all those years of boiled carrots and cabbage,' she said.
When she attended fellowship meetings and worship sessions, it felt different. She was now an outsider, a second-tier member. Her parents had moved out from their communal house shortly before she did. On top of the toll of the court case, her father was having health problems and couldn't keep up with the schedule of near-daily meetings. Unlike Philippa, her parents had fully left the fellowship, and they could see that her half-in, half-out status seemed only to be worsening her depression.
Three months after Philippa moved out, she was about to set off for a fellowship meeting when her mum said she didn't want her to go. Philippa sat and cried for hours, knowing this really was the end. 'It was a visceral severing of all those relationships, all those friendships – your spiritual family.' Even decades later, she felt she hadn't fully escaped.
Noel Stanton died in 2009, aged 82. His funeral procession attracted huge crowds on to the streets of Northampton, where screens beamed out footage of his fire-and-brimstone baptisms. By then, the church had about 3,500 members around the UK, as well as drop-in 'Jesus Centres' in Coventry and Northampton, which offered services to homeless people, asylum seekers and sex workers. Before his death, Stanton had become a distant figure, spending much of his time alone at New Creation Farm, handing down his rules through the network of elders, appointing five leaders called the Apostolic Group, who took over after his death.
Stanton's death did not mark a clean break with the past: the culture he created endured, and the darker aspects of the Jesus Fellowship's history would not go away. In 2010, a volunteer gardener described by a judge as a 'relentless paedophile' was found guilty of indecent assault against three young boys while living in the fellowship in the late 1990s. He had previous child sexual abuse convictions, and it became clear in the course of the investigation that the fellowship had not been conducting proper background checks.
It seemed plausible that similar cases might emerge. Public awareness of historic abuse was rising, especially after revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012. Concerned about the future costs of legal battles with former members, in 2013 the company that insured the fellowship and its businesses requested that the leadership take an unusual step: to ask its members for stories of abuse. (In the same year, the Methodist church started a similar process.) The leadership began gathering their responses in a file.
Separately, the following year, police received two safeguarding referrals in quick succession that highlighted welfare concerns within the fellowship. They arranged a meeting on 2 December 2014, to discuss one of them with the group's leadership. This was the kind of routine meeting that would normally be attended only by a junior officer, but two referrals from a single organisation raised a red flag for DI Ally White, so he decided to come along. At the meeting, White spotted a thick stack of papers: 133 responses sent in by fellowship members. He asked if he could take a look, and, flicking through, was shocked by what he saw. The papers contained allegations of everything from emotional abuse to serial sexual abuse: 'That's a crime, that's a crime, that's a rape, that's another crime,' he remembered thinking. He told the leadership the police would need to take the forms back to the station, and they agreed.
White set a detective to work cataloguing them, and in early 2015 Northamptonshire police launched Operation Lifeboat, with five officers working under his supervision. 'I had never seen anything like it,' White said of the scale of the allegations. 'But then I don't know of any other organisation like the Jesus Fellowship.' At the time, on a national level, the fellowship was generally looked upon as an odd, but largely benevolent organisation that helped vulnerable people. Only months earlier, the Jesus Army had featured on a Grayson Perry series about contemporary Britain, described as a 'strong community' that helped homeless people. Perry said his evening with the group had been 'like a 1950s family Christmas'.
DC Mark Allbright, who worked on Operation Lifeboat, grew up in Northamptonshire, and knew the Jesus Army by sight: 'Multicoloured camouflage-type jackets, colourful vans. You'd cross the street to avoid them in the town centre, that sort of thing.' Yet the contents of the file still came as a shock, both because of the sheer number of alleged victims and the fact that the majority of them had been children. 'The culture was a recipe for disaster,' Allbright told me. It was also clear to him that when abuse was reported, it wasn't dealt with: 'The accused was pretty much asked to say sorry to the person, and then that was that.'
As police tracked down members and looked for evidence of crimes, Allbright's impression was that while some of the leadership wanted to 'root this out', others had 'shall we say, selective memories'. After another appeal by police, the number of reports had almost doubled, but most came from people who had seen or heard about abuse rather than experienced it themselves. Some alleged victims couldn't be traced; others, when contacted, denied that anything had happened, or didn't want police action to be taken.
In total, only five people were convicted as part of Operation Lifeboat. The details of those convictions were disturbing: four of the five perpetrators had targeted children under the age of 16, and several were shown to be prolific. The fellowship commissioned an independent review into its safeguarding practices in 2015, yet it continued to blame these cases on a criminal minority, rather than a wider culture of abuse. The Jesus Army, they implied, had simply had the misfortune of attracting a few bad apples.
In the two decades after she left the fellowship, Philippa built herself a life, plank by plank. She married, had children and lived in Germany for a year. Moving on had meant blocking out thoughts and news of the fellowship – she didn't even know Operation Lifeboat had taken place – but the cult still cast a shadow. She found it hard to stand up for herself, having had it drummed into her that individual wants were sinful.
By 2017, she had moved back to Northamptonshire and was raising her two boys as a single mother, working as an administrative assistant in a school. Having noticed that a few other former members were living in the area, Philippa had an idea. Her older sister, who also lived nearby, struggled to connect with people who didn't share their history, but maybe, Philippa thought, she would feel more comfortable with people who did. In 2017, Philippa created a Facebook group, as a place where those who had also been in the fellowship as children could catch up and socialise. Within a week, more than 100 people had joined. As members reconnected and shared their memories, the tone quickly grew darker, as individuals began to share stories of abuse they had experienced while in the fellowship. So many allegations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse were being shared that Philippa and a few other group members set up a spreadsheet to keep track of them.
A few months after the group was created, some of the members went out for dinner to catch up. 'We were just talking and getting to know each other again,' Philippa recalls. But through the evening, the conversation kept returning to the same themes: that former fellowship members needed more support, and that something had to be done about the abuse allegations. Based on what they were hearing now, Operation Lifeboat had barely scratched the surface.
In 2018, 10 people from the group, including Philippa, launched the Jesus Fellowship Survivors Association, aiming to expose the truth about the church, support survivors and get justice for those who had been abused. Instead of pushing for a public inquiry or trying to bring multiple cases to court, a solicitor suggested that they should pressure the church to set up a 'redress scheme', like the one launched in response to abuse allegations at Lambeth children's homes. The Jesus Fellowship was believed to be worth about £58m, and a scheme like this would allow former members to apply for compensation without having to pursue a criminal case.
One of the women who played a vital role in the fight for compensation was Becky Ayers. She had been brought into the fellowship as a seven-year-old child in 1976 and left in her 20s. Now, with one or two other members of the survivors' association, she began attending gruelling monthly meetings in a nondescript office block in Northampton, in which they tried to convince the fellowship's trustees to set up a redress scheme. At one meeting, Ayers presented a 'Truth Document', compiled by the survivors' association, which set out all the allegations that had been made on the Facebook page. She pushed the trustees to show it to the fellowship's membership. They refused.
'They were all completely entrenched,' Ayers said. She is an articulate, confident speaker, but in those meetings, she would freeze up, lose her words, even wonder if she had it all wrong. But the sheer number of survivors' stories, along with therapy sessions from a cult specialist, kept her going. Frustrated by the slow progress on a redress scheme, the survivors' association also began planning a group civil claim for 'sexual, physical and psychological harm' against children who lived in community houses.
By this point, the fellowship was coming under pressure from all sides. In 2017, leaders had been forced to acknowledge at the church's AGM that there were 'serious allegations' against Stanton of financial, spiritual and sexual abuse. Later that year, the Apostolic Five stepped down, pending an independent investigation into their handling of abuse allegations. (In a recent statement, the Apostolic Five said they 'continue to hold out an unreserved apology to anyone who has been affected by abuse and failings of any kind in the Jesus Fellowship'.) Meanwhile, membership had dwindled to fewer than 1,000 people and was ageing rapidly, which was hitting the group's finances. As a senior leader told a new BBC documentary, Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army, there was a growing feeling that the fellowship was 'too broken to fix'.
On 26 May 2019, at the recommendation of the church's leadership team, the fellowship's members voted to revoke the church's constitution: to shut the church down. The Jesus Fellowship Community Trust would be tasked with winding it up and moving ahead with a redress scheme.
After years of fighting, this should have been a landmark moment for the survivors' association. But Philippa remembers it differently: 'There was never a point where we went: 'Yay, they're closing down!' It was a big achievement, but it was a side-effect of the fact they were going to have to pay out to people who they'd abused. That's not a happy thing.'
The redress scheme was finally launched in September 2022. Former members could apply for compensation for emotional, physical or sexual abuse by submitting a statement via a solicitor. Kathleen Hallisey, who represented some of the claimants, believes the scheme would never have come about, nor had the reach it did, without the survivors' association. Previous appeals to speak had come from the church itself, or police. This time, it came from fellow survivors. The redress scheme received applications from 601 people, almost three times the number of complaints received by Operation Lifeboat.
Claimants could also apply for a 'community adverse experiences' payment, which didn't require a solicitor's input. These payments were compensation for the group's 'systemic failings' – separating children from their parents, denying social interaction, treating women as subordinates – rather than specific acts of abuse. It was an acknowledgment that the fellowship environment was, in itself, harmful. (In UK law, there is no clear way to hold cults to account for their systems of control and exploitation. Hallisey, Stein and members of the survivors' association are pushing for the most applicable crime, coercive control, to be extended to cover groups, rather than just intimate or family relationships.)
The redress scheme's final report, published in September 2024, was staggering. It found that there were 264 alleged abusers within the fellowship, of whom more than half were leaders. One in six children who lived in community was estimated to have been abused between 1969 and 2019. Over 30 allegations related to Stanton himself. The trustees wrote: 'Harm and abuse were not limited to a handful of leaders, a particular period of time, or geographical locations. It was widespread and systematic.'
Of applicants to the scheme, 96% received some form of redress. Yet for some, the process, which involved reliving their abuse in order to make statements, was bruising. 'The scheme was horrific to go through,' Philippa said. 'After all that work, when it came to it, it was very, very hard.' Payments ranged from £2,000 for corporal punishment to £50,000 for incidents of rape. Philippa received a total of £22,000. Despite the size of the fellowship's assets, at the time of the report the redress scheme had paid out £7.7m, compared with more than £100m paid out by the Lambeth scheme, which received only twice as many applicants.
Others felt that the structure of the scheme didn't reflect the reality of their experience. Sasha Feaver-Roche knew Philippa as a child, and was part of the fellowship for decades, yet because she hadn't lived in community for the required three months, she didn't qualify for this adverse experience payment. This meant that she had to apply only for individual redress, and demonstrate that she had suffered abuse, rather than receiving an acknowledgment that daily life in the cult – where she was branded a 'Jezebel', told to submit to her husband, and singled out by Noel Stanton for being Black – was harmful in itself. It was 'a bitter pill to swallow', she said. 'Because the fellowship's control – that was the worst bit. That's the bit I'm still trying to live with today.'
The D3 bus from Northampton winds past fields of sunflowers and sandstone houses, down into Bugbrooke, past the chapel where the Jesus Fellowship began, past New Creation Hall, past the road to New Creation Farm and Shalom farmhouse, and on to Daventry, where Philippa lives now. 'Sometimes it feels surreal, being back here,' she told me recently, as we sat in her living room. 'There are lots of ghosts. But I realised I had been running away for a long time, and I wanted to be near my family again.'
I first spoke to Philippa in 2022. The fellowship had closed, the redress scheme had just launched, and yet she still didn't feel she'd entirely left the cult. 'Living in it was like living under Big Brother,' she told me then. 'I still don't think I have completely uncoupled from that eye that was watching you all the time. And I don't know whether I ever will.'
Three years on, she no longer felt that way. 'In the past few years, I feel I have properly mentally left,' she said. 'I've made more progress in the past eight months than I have in the past decade.' Trauma therapy helped. Another factor was realising that she has been a good parent. 'My sons can cry, or can say when something's not right, and we can chat about it.' That knowledge has healed some of the pain she carried from childhood of being told not to ask for help from her parents, of being told that her parents were not her parents any more. Last month, along with other survivors, Philippa attended a screening in Sheffield of the BBC's new documentary on the fellowship, which she participated in. 'The feeling of relief was immense,' she said of seeing the story play out on screen. 'I had been carrying that burden by myself for all that time.'
These days, Philippa is a bubbly, friendly presence, fond of bright colours and quick to smile. Upstairs in her house, she showed me the craft room she set up earlier this year, and her artworks, made using pebbles found on the beach, pressed flowers, the foil from chocolate coins, the bells from Lindt bunnies. On an enormous canvas, the tail of a peacock was forming, each feather a recycled wrapper: Rowntree's, Jack Wills, pain relief patches. 'I take old things to make new things,' she said. 'I suppose I have a knack for that.'
Some of the fellowship's congregations continue to operate as independent churches, and there are still those who look back on it fondly. On Facebook groups called 'Jesus Army 'The Good Times'' and 'Jesus People Alumni', former members swap stories and faded photos of group meals and worship sessions. Not long ago, I spoke with a member of one of these groups, Aidan. The fellowship had its flaws, he said – it was 'too trusting', and he took part in the redress scheme based on some of his own experiences – but he was saddened by the idea of it being remembered as wholly negative. 'Living in community really broadened your horizons,' he said. 'I feel massively enriched by the people that I met.' He pointed to those it had helped: 'The people helped out of addiction, the lonely brought into the family.' Even fierce critics of the fellowship sometimes struck a wistful or ambivalent note when speaking about it. 'As much as I hate the place, there's that feeling of community that you miss,' said Feaver-Roche. 'That feeling of belonging.'
She and Philippa reconnected during the redress scheme, and now they live around the corner from one another. They often meet up for coffee and talk about the fellowship, or other aspects of their lives: 'For me, it's been really important to hang on to these friendships. They're a reminder that what happened to us wasn't normal,' Feaver-Roche said. When she sees ex-members, 'We'll make little inside jokes about The Handmaid's Tale, because the language was so similar.'
Over the years, Philippa has returned again and again to that moment when she decided to testify on behalf of her friend. 'I'm really proud of that 17-year-old self, who went to court and had the courage to tell the truth,' she said. Philippa still wonders where she found that conviction to stand up to the leadership, after years of indoctrination so deep it has taken a lifetime to undo.
The answer, Stein suggested, lies in the kinds of reciprocal, human connections the cult did its best to smother, like the one Philippa had with Marie, or her dad, or her brother or, later, with other survivors. 'Cults can have very powerful control, but they can't turn people into robots,' Stein said. 'We're still human. And even in the worst of circumstances, we create these little niches of humanity.' In Philippa's kitchen, a red and white sign hangs by the sink. 'In this home,' it reads, 'we are family.'
* Name has been changed
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One day, when Philippa was about two years old, a couple stopped by the family's church. They, along with their three sons, were on their way to join the Jesus Fellowship, a Christian community in Northamptonshire led by Noel Stanton, a charismatic, white-haired pastor. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and Philippa's family started visiting the fellowship a few times a year.
At first, Philippa and her siblings loved these trips. Photos from that time of Cornhill Manor, one of the fellowship's properties, show high windows looking out over green fields, airy communal kitchens, and a grand ballroom with a sprung dancefloor, where members of the community slept on mattresses. It was a far cry from Woking, where the family lived opposite a noisy train line. Although Philippa had to spend long religious meetings under her parents' chairs, shushed and desperately bored, the rest of the weekend could be spent playing outside.
When Philippa was five, on one of these weekends with the fellowship, something shifted. One evening, she and her two-year-old brother, as the two youngest siblings, were put to bed with a baby monitor while her parents went to a prayer meeting downstairs. 'The message was, 'We can hear you, but we don't want to hear you,'' Philippa recalled. She had never before been afraid to disturb her parents, but when her brother started having diarrhoea and then both siblings began to vomit, she had to call for them. 'My parents came, and my dad wasn't too pleased,' she said. 'Looking back, I can see they didn't want to be embarrassed by being disturbed – they were newbies to the community.' But the lesson stuck: this new church was more important than she was.
In 1984, Philippa's parents told the children that the family was moving to the East Midlands to be nearer the fellowship. For her parents, the move made sense. Philippa's father was a senior scientific officer for the Ministry of Defence and had to travel regularly for work, meaning her mother was often looking after the children alone. In Northamptonshire, they had been exposed to a new way of life, one based around simplicity and community, where music was played nightly, meals were communal and children were able to enjoy the outdoors.
The Barnes family bought a house in the village of Bugbrooke and regularly attended fellowship meetings and worship sessions led by Stanton. Then, in 1987, just before Philippa's ninth birthday, the family moved into what the fellowship called 'community': a farmhouse named Shalom, where about 20 people would live at any given time. Moving in meant surrendering proceeds from their house sale and Philippa's father's wages into the 'common purse'. Most who lived in community were employed in the fellowship's businesses, and Philippa's father got a job at their builders' merchant. All possessions, even down to items of clothing, were shared.
In some ways, this life offered a new kind of freedom. The younger Barnes children spent time going for walks or picnics, or looking after the fellowship's livestock. To her delight, Philippa was allowed to help with lambing. She and her brother would run riot away from adult eyes. They once built a petrol bomb using a milk bottle and blew up a wasp's nest.
There were also privations. Almost all of the children's toys were taken away. 'Cuddlies, gadgets or competitive toys' appeared on a list of things deemed 'worldly' – and therefore unacceptable – by Stanton. The list of banned items changed according to his whims, but over the years it included secular TV, pop music, makeup, sporting events, restaurants, buffets, weight training, holidays, zoos, coffee, sunbathing, celebrating Christmas, swimming 'for pleasure' and crisps.
The children attended a local comprehensive school, but making friends outside the group was difficult. They were not allowed to eat school dinners, so every lunchtime they would troop to a fellowship house nearby. 'The other children knew to avoid us, so we stuck together,' Philippa said.
Of all the strangeness in their new life, Philippa found the fellowship's approach to family hardest. Under Stanton's rules, communal living meant renouncing your 'natural family' in favour of the fellowship's 'spiritual family'. Women were called 'sisters', men were 'brothers' and leaders were 'elders'. Philippa's parents, instead of just being responsible for their family unit, were given other duties: helping to cook and clean for the other Shalom residents, or finding new recruits. When Philippa turned 12, she was moved from the room she shared with her younger brother into a dormitory with women of all ages.
Explaining this approach, Stanton would point to a passage from Matthew 10, in which Jesus said: 'I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother … A man's enemies will be members of his own household.' In the absence of the 'natural family', any adult could be responsible for disciplining children. Many did so through 'rodding' – hitting children as young as two with sticks. 'He who spares the rod hates his son,' Stanton would say, quoting from Proverbs. Exorcisms were also performed on children. When Philippa was caught drawing stick figures with breasts and genitals at a meeting, she was taken into a private room so an elder could pray for her 'unclean spirit' and anoint her with oil.
Philippa missed her parents. She managed to spend some time with her mum by helping in the garden and the kitchen, where they would skim cream off bottles of milk to make choux buns and eclairs, a welcome relief from bland meals of pork chops and boiled vegetables. But it never felt like enough: other girls her age were going shopping for clothes with their mums, watching TV as a family or going to the cinema or the zoo. In the communal house, doors were hung with curtains, and Philippa remembers hiding between her parents' bedroom door and the curtain, hearing the murmur of their voices as they talked, laughed or argued; longing to be closer to them.
Dressed in brightly coloured shirts and patterned ties, with his signature swirl of backcombed white hair, Stanton looked more like a magician than a man of the church. A Baptist pastor born on Christmas Day, he had founded the fellowship in his small local chapel in 1969 after a 'life-changing' spiritual experience that led him to embrace exuberant worship sessions, speaking in tongues, exorcisms and communal living. From the fellowship's early days, these practices attracted attention. In a 1974 Thames Television documentary, The Lord Took Hold of Bugbrooke, one local woman complained she couldn't open her windows on Sundays because of the noise.
Through the 1970s, young people and families flocked to Bugbrooke to join this new church, attracted by the stories of spiritual revelation and a thriving Christian community. There were two main levels of membership: some lived in their own home and attended worship and meetings; the hardcore lived in one of the fellowship's communal houses. As all members living in community had to hand over their assets, the fellowship flourished financially. In 1984, it bought a nearby manor house, which it renamed New Creation Hall. By the early 80s, it owned at least 10 country houses in the area, and membership in communal houses was up to about 450. It was operating a chain of health food shops, a clothing shop and a building supply company. In 1982, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo described it as 'the new aristocracy of the East Midlands'.
The fellowship was a strict hierarchy, with Stanton at the top, a leadership circle below him, and an elder running each communal house. Only men were permitted to occupy these roles. Women were subordinate to men. (If a man was driving a car, women were expected to sit in the back.) Favoured members were given 'virtue names' reflecting their most valued qualities: Valiant, Zealous, Forthright or, in one young woman's case, Submission. Celibacy, especially among the male leadership, was encouraged as the highest ideal.
The fellowship's first decade was punctuated by a series of strange incidents. In December 1976, a 26-year-old member, David Gavin Hooper, was found dead in a field on fellowship property, his socks and shirt folded neatly next to him. The death was put down to exposure, but the coroner, Michael Collcutt, noted that it was 'extraordinary' that he should have gone out with no coat on such a cold morning. Less than 18 months later, 19-year-old Stephen Orchard was found decapitated on a nearby railway line, having told his parents he was considering leaving the fellowship. (His virtue name was 'Faithful'.) The same coroner returned an open verdict, but noted his 'concern' about the two strange deaths and the letters he had received from parents of young people in the fellowship, who were worried about their children's safety. These incidents were closely reported by local media but never became national news. (When Philippa's family were living in Woking and first encountering the fellowship, they hadn't heard about them.)
There were always explanations for the bad press: it was the product of misinformation or disgruntled former members who couldn't be trusted. But after a string of negative stories, in 1986 – two years after the Barnes family moved into community – the Baptist Union of Great Britain voted to expel the fellowship, saying it had caused them 'embarrassment'. The fellowship no longer fulfilled a requirement of Baptist churches: governance by the whole congregation. Stanton may have preached equality in the eyes of God, but within the fellowship some were more equal than others.
After its expulsion, the fellowship went on the offensive. In 1987, in a bid to recruit hundreds of new members, it launched a new campaigning arm, which it called the Jesus Army. Stanton dreamed up a uniform for his troops: bomber jackets, in 'army green, red for the blood of Jesus, white for purity, black for the darkness and gold for God's glory'. On the jackets were embroidered the words LOVE, POWER AND SACRIFICE. Community houses were rebranded 'battle stations', money for campaigning was collected in a 'war fund', and the campaign to recruit new members was run by Jawbone, the Jesus Army War Battle Operations Network.
The Jesus Army's mission was to fight 'economic recession, family breakdown and moral decay', according to a 1997 Stanton-approved history of the fellowship. Homelessness in Britain had doubled between 1979 and 1986, driven by rising unemployment, government cuts and high inflation. Against this bleak backdrop, the fellowship's troops travelled into city centres around the UK in colourful, Jesus Army-branded doubledecker buses, wearing their bomber jackets and camouflage trousers (for men only – trousers were banned for women). They would seek out homeless people and drug addicts, offering them a place to stay for the night, or longer. Back at the communal houses, these new recruits would sleep in the same dormitories as children as young as 12.
The Jesus Army did wonders for the fellowship's public image, projecting a young, hopeful, anti-capitalist version of Christianity, dedicated to helping vulnerable people. 'We [broke] through to the 'forgotten people,'' the authors of the 1997 history wrote proudly. 'Street kids, addicts, the poor, the homeless.' From the late 80s, the Jesus Army was a regular presence at Glastonbury, doubledecker bus in tow. In the 90s, as rave music was becoming popular, troops were sent out to nightclubs to recruit. By the mid-90s, the fellowship's following had increased to nearly 2,000 people, with about 75 community houses, including outposts in London, Liverpool and Milton Keynes. It was fast becoming one of the largest residential Christian communities in Europe.
In 1998, a Jesus Army delegation appeared on an episode of Jon Ronson's Channel 4 talkshow, For the Love Of …, wearing glow-in-the-dark crucifix necklaces ('everyone in the clubs wears them, because they're cool') and bemoaning 'misrepresentations' of the church. They prayed as a group over Ronson: 'I'm a factual person, but the second you put your hand on my foot, it stopped itching,' he marvelled.
At 16, Philippa became a covenant member of the church. After a full immersion baptism, she swore a vow of lifelong commitment. By now, her days were entirely ruled by the group: she sang in the worship band, and worked as an administrator at the group's GP surgery, on top of the busy schedule of meetings, worship, and weekends spent evangelising. As a child, she had loved art and crafts, but there was no time for that now. The fellowship saw the pursuit of individual passions as too individualistic.
Despite her outward commitment, Philippa had a growing feeling that something wasn't right. From when she was about 13, an adult man in the fellowship had begun following her home on his motorbike and staring at her in meetings, which escalated to sending her love letters and telling her they should get married. His attentions would have been obvious to other adults, yet no one stopped him. To protect herself, she asked a friend's brother to say he was her boyfriend, despite Stanton's ban on flirting and dating.
While her stalker went unchallenged, Philippa was hemmed in by the fellowship's endless rules. Once, she was publicly chastised by her house elder for getting a haircut in town, using £10 her grandmother had sent her. 'I could feel that rebellion inside me. Like, what does it really matter? It's just hair.'
When she was 17, her father gave her some news that would crystallise her growing distrust of the organisation that had raised her. A friend of Philippa's, Marie*, had gone to the police with some information and it was now being investigated. He didn't say more than that. That night, Philippa lay in bed turning this over and over in her mind. Marie had been her closest friend. She and her family had left the fellowship with no warning, which meant they were cut off from all contact with the group. Philippa had felt so hurt that she had burned Marie's letters. Yet she knew what the police report must be about. To Philippa, it felt like Marie was reaching out for help.
Philippa went to her dad and told him the truth. From the age of 13, on her regular visits to see Marie at the fellowship's house in Acton, Philippa had been forced to act as a lookout while a 24-year-old man in the household abused Marie in the basement. She had remained silent, believing it wasn't her story to tell. Now Marie had reported her abuser, and Philippa wanted to corroborate her story.
Philippa and her father approached the elder of her household, who took the matter to Stanton. When the alleged perpetrator was questioned, he insisted the two girls were lying. Stanton accused Philippa and Marie of being 'in cahoots', as if their friendship was in itself cause for suspicion. Although Philippa's father had lived for almost a decade in a community where family loyalty was considered sinful and hierarchy was everything, he stood by his daughter. So did her house elder, who insisted that he believed her. Philippa and her father were told to wait until the end of the week for a final decision about whether the information should be passed to the police.
To Philippa, it wasn't up to the fellowship to decide. So, feeling like fugitives, she and her father bypassed the leadership. To avoid being overheard, they found a phone in a rarely used outbuilding where Jesus Army merchandise was spray-painted, and called the police. After Philippa was asked to give a statement, they secretly travelled to London.
The case made it to court, and Philippa was called as a witness. Her older brother, who was by now in his late 20s and living in a fellowship house in Eastbourne, was summoned by elders to a meeting, where he was told his sister was lying, and that she was set on destroying the church. Like his father, he supported her, in spite of the pressure. Stanton held further meetings, condemning the whole family. When Philippa arrived at Isleworth crown court to give her testimony, the room was filled with fellowship members. They were there to support the accused.
On 4 April 1997, a jury found the perpetrator guilty of two counts of sexual assault of a minor, for touching Marie's breasts and trying to kiss her. The judge jailed him for three months, noting that the offence had taken place years earlier, and that the man may have struggled under the church's 'strict regime', alluding to the limitations Stanton placed on sex and dating. 'You were living in a society where your frustrations may well have built up,' the judge said. After the verdict, Marie told the Northampton Chronicle and Echo that the fellowship inflicted 'constant mental abuse' on its members.
Few outside the Acton house even knew that the perpetrator had been convicted. After his release, he was welcomed back to the fellowship with open arms.
In 1979, John Everett, a student at Warwick University, began a sociological study of the Jesus Fellowship for his doctoral thesis. He had joined the group in the summer of 1977, experiencing it as a 'pocket of utopian escape from a chaotic, frenetic, unsympathetic world', something 'very close to a classless society' where people of all kinds were accepted. Now, he had been commissioned by Stanton himself to go and study its unique makeup. Yet as he conducted his research, examining the group's structure and practices through an academic lens, he began to reach a devastating conclusion: that the church was a cult.
As Everett writes in War and Defeat, a history of the organisation that he self-published this year, he couldn't escape the fact that the authority structure and separation from the rest of the world were hallmarks of cultic groups. 'It would have taken a huge amount of self-deceit to deny what I could plainly see: the key characteristics of a cult were in our DNA,' he writes.
There is a school of sociology that rejects the term 'cult', arguing that it has been used to dismiss unusual groups that challenge social norms, and preferring the category 'new religious movements'. Many other scholars and survivors disagree, arguing that the methods cults use to control their members are distinct. Alexandra Stein, a British psychologist and survivor of a political cult, says that whether religious or non-religious, cults are remarkably similar: 'If you've seen one car, you know what machinery is in another car, even if it's a different colour.'
In the popular imagination, cults are closed-off entities, physically removing their members from the outside world. The fellowship claimed to work differently: members were free to go to school, work, and live outside of community houses. But just as an abusive partner might exert influence over every aspect of a victim's life, Stanton had built a system of mental and emotional control that relied on a common cultic tactic: gradually severing members' attachments to the rest of society, to family members and even to one another. Those broken connections were replaced by a single reference point: the fellowship. With nowhere else to go, any feelings of fear and stress provoked by life in the organisation would only serve to drive members closer to it.
This helps explain why, after the trial and their condemnation by the leadership, Philippa and her parents stayed in the fellowship. 'Really, we should have left at that point,' she said. 'But it didn't occur to us. We had made a lifelong commitment.' Their homes, jobs, friendships and assets were entirely tied to the group. Anyone who left was shunned – members were banned from speaking or writing to them, and songs were sung at worship sessions about their betrayal.
Over time, though, Philippa felt that same flicker of rebellion that had allowed her to speak up for her friend. She had never felt fully spiritually moved in the group's worship sessions. She never heard God speaking to her, or felt a genuine desire to speak in tongues. And now, as she sat through Stanton's sermons about traitors and liars, knowing they were directed at her, she became more and more uncertain about the religion that governed her life.
She was haunted by the contradictions her experience had exposed: a Christian community that claimed to preach the truth was persecuting her for her honesty. She had been taught that the 'natural family' was meaningless, but her father and brother had been the ones to stand up for her. She struggled with depression, developed a stammer and began having stress-induced seizures. The leadership moved her to a fellowship house in Oxford, ostensibly to recuperate, though Philippa believes Stanton didn't want her 'anywhere near him'.
The distance from Stanton and the church headquarters meant the community was more relaxed, and she got a non-fellowship job, working as an administrator at a pharmaceutical company. For the first time, she was given money from the common purse to buy clothes of her own, for work, that wouldn't be shared communally. She bought a couple of pencil skirts and a couple of blouses. Work, too, opened her mind. 'I was meeting people who were compassionate towards me, more so than the Christians I'd lived with all my life,' she said. 'I was shocked, I suppose, that that was able to happen.'
Those who spend their childhoods in cults, Stein said, can find leaving particularly hard: 'They struggle to know what is the self, and what is the cult. It's very complex to try to untangle that.' In 1999, Philippa reached a decision: she would move out of the fellowship house, though she would continue to attend services.
With her own income, she was able to move into a big shared rental in central Oxford. Everything was new. She had to set up a bank account for the first time. Shopping for food and cooking for herself was a revelation. 'I'd go to the shops almost every day, and I used to have stir-fries nearly every night because I couldn't believe the variety, and how good vegetables could taste after all those years of boiled carrots and cabbage,' she said.
When she attended fellowship meetings and worship sessions, it felt different. She was now an outsider, a second-tier member. Her parents had moved out from their communal house shortly before she did. On top of the toll of the court case, her father was having health problems and couldn't keep up with the schedule of near-daily meetings. Unlike Philippa, her parents had fully left the fellowship, and they could see that her half-in, half-out status seemed only to be worsening her depression.
Three months after Philippa moved out, she was about to set off for a fellowship meeting when her mum said she didn't want her to go. Philippa sat and cried for hours, knowing this really was the end. 'It was a visceral severing of all those relationships, all those friendships – your spiritual family.' Even decades later, she felt she hadn't fully escaped.
Noel Stanton died in 2009, aged 82. His funeral procession attracted huge crowds on to the streets of Northampton, where screens beamed out footage of his fire-and-brimstone baptisms. By then, the church had about 3,500 members around the UK, as well as drop-in 'Jesus Centres' in Coventry and Northampton, which offered services to homeless people, asylum seekers and sex workers. Before his death, Stanton had become a distant figure, spending much of his time alone at New Creation Farm, handing down his rules through the network of elders, appointing five leaders called the Apostolic Group, who took over after his death.
Stanton's death did not mark a clean break with the past: the culture he created endured, and the darker aspects of the Jesus Fellowship's history would not go away. In 2010, a volunteer gardener described by a judge as a 'relentless paedophile' was found guilty of indecent assault against three young boys while living in the fellowship in the late 1990s. He had previous child sexual abuse convictions, and it became clear in the course of the investigation that the fellowship had not been conducting proper background checks.
It seemed plausible that similar cases might emerge. Public awareness of historic abuse was rising, especially after revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012. Concerned about the future costs of legal battles with former members, in 2013 the company that insured the fellowship and its businesses requested that the leadership take an unusual step: to ask its members for stories of abuse. (In the same year, the Methodist church started a similar process.) The leadership began gathering their responses in a file.
Separately, the following year, police received two safeguarding referrals in quick succession that highlighted welfare concerns within the fellowship. They arranged a meeting on 2 December 2014, to discuss one of them with the group's leadership. This was the kind of routine meeting that would normally be attended only by a junior officer, but two referrals from a single organisation raised a red flag for DI Ally White, so he decided to come along. At the meeting, White spotted a thick stack of papers: 133 responses sent in by fellowship members. He asked if he could take a look, and, flicking through, was shocked by what he saw. The papers contained allegations of everything from emotional abuse to serial sexual abuse: 'That's a crime, that's a crime, that's a rape, that's another crime,' he remembered thinking. He told the leadership the police would need to take the forms back to the station, and they agreed.
White set a detective to work cataloguing them, and in early 2015 Northamptonshire police launched Operation Lifeboat, with five officers working under his supervision. 'I had never seen anything like it,' White said of the scale of the allegations. 'But then I don't know of any other organisation like the Jesus Fellowship.' At the time, on a national level, the fellowship was generally looked upon as an odd, but largely benevolent organisation that helped vulnerable people. Only months earlier, the Jesus Army had featured on a Grayson Perry series about contemporary Britain, described as a 'strong community' that helped homeless people. Perry said his evening with the group had been 'like a 1950s family Christmas'.
DC Mark Allbright, who worked on Operation Lifeboat, grew up in Northamptonshire, and knew the Jesus Army by sight: 'Multicoloured camouflage-type jackets, colourful vans. You'd cross the street to avoid them in the town centre, that sort of thing.' Yet the contents of the file still came as a shock, both because of the sheer number of alleged victims and the fact that the majority of them had been children. 'The culture was a recipe for disaster,' Allbright told me. It was also clear to him that when abuse was reported, it wasn't dealt with: 'The accused was pretty much asked to say sorry to the person, and then that was that.'
As police tracked down members and looked for evidence of crimes, Allbright's impression was that while some of the leadership wanted to 'root this out', others had 'shall we say, selective memories'. After another appeal by police, the number of reports had almost doubled, but most came from people who had seen or heard about abuse rather than experienced it themselves. Some alleged victims couldn't be traced; others, when contacted, denied that anything had happened, or didn't want police action to be taken.
In total, only five people were convicted as part of Operation Lifeboat. The details of those convictions were disturbing: four of the five perpetrators had targeted children under the age of 16, and several were shown to be prolific. The fellowship commissioned an independent review into its safeguarding practices in 2015, yet it continued to blame these cases on a criminal minority, rather than a wider culture of abuse. The Jesus Army, they implied, had simply had the misfortune of attracting a few bad apples.
In the two decades after she left the fellowship, Philippa built herself a life, plank by plank. She married, had children and lived in Germany for a year. Moving on had meant blocking out thoughts and news of the fellowship – she didn't even know Operation Lifeboat had taken place – but the cult still cast a shadow. She found it hard to stand up for herself, having had it drummed into her that individual wants were sinful.
By 2017, she had moved back to Northamptonshire and was raising her two boys as a single mother, working as an administrative assistant in a school. Having noticed that a few other former members were living in the area, Philippa had an idea. Her older sister, who also lived nearby, struggled to connect with people who didn't share their history, but maybe, Philippa thought, she would feel more comfortable with people who did. In 2017, Philippa created a Facebook group, as a place where those who had also been in the fellowship as children could catch up and socialise. Within a week, more than 100 people had joined. As members reconnected and shared their memories, the tone quickly grew darker, as individuals began to share stories of abuse they had experienced while in the fellowship. So many allegations of physical, sexual and emotional abuse were being shared that Philippa and a few other group members set up a spreadsheet to keep track of them.
A few months after the group was created, some of the members went out for dinner to catch up. 'We were just talking and getting to know each other again,' Philippa recalls. But through the evening, the conversation kept returning to the same themes: that former fellowship members needed more support, and that something had to be done about the abuse allegations. Based on what they were hearing now, Operation Lifeboat had barely scratched the surface.
In 2018, 10 people from the group, including Philippa, launched the Jesus Fellowship Survivors Association, aiming to expose the truth about the church, support survivors and get justice for those who had been abused. Instead of pushing for a public inquiry or trying to bring multiple cases to court, a solicitor suggested that they should pressure the church to set up a 'redress scheme', like the one launched in response to abuse allegations at Lambeth children's homes. The Jesus Fellowship was believed to be worth about £58m, and a scheme like this would allow former members to apply for compensation without having to pursue a criminal case.
One of the women who played a vital role in the fight for compensation was Becky Ayers. She had been brought into the fellowship as a seven-year-old child in 1976 and left in her 20s. Now, with one or two other members of the survivors' association, she began attending gruelling monthly meetings in a nondescript office block in Northampton, in which they tried to convince the fellowship's trustees to set up a redress scheme. At one meeting, Ayers presented a 'Truth Document', compiled by the survivors' association, which set out all the allegations that had been made on the Facebook page. She pushed the trustees to show it to the fellowship's membership. They refused.
'They were all completely entrenched,' Ayers said. She is an articulate, confident speaker, but in those meetings, she would freeze up, lose her words, even wonder if she had it all wrong. But the sheer number of survivors' stories, along with therapy sessions from a cult specialist, kept her going. Frustrated by the slow progress on a redress scheme, the survivors' association also began planning a group civil claim for 'sexual, physical and psychological harm' against children who lived in community houses.
By this point, the fellowship was coming under pressure from all sides. In 2017, leaders had been forced to acknowledge at the church's AGM that there were 'serious allegations' against Stanton of financial, spiritual and sexual abuse. Later that year, the Apostolic Five stepped down, pending an independent investigation into their handling of abuse allegations. (In a recent statement, the Apostolic Five said they 'continue to hold out an unreserved apology to anyone who has been affected by abuse and failings of any kind in the Jesus Fellowship'.) Meanwhile, membership had dwindled to fewer than 1,000 people and was ageing rapidly, which was hitting the group's finances. As a senior leader told a new BBC documentary, Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army, there was a growing feeling that the fellowship was 'too broken to fix'.
On 26 May 2019, at the recommendation of the church's leadership team, the fellowship's members voted to revoke the church's constitution: to shut the church down. The Jesus Fellowship Community Trust would be tasked with winding it up and moving ahead with a redress scheme.
After years of fighting, this should have been a landmark moment for the survivors' association. But Philippa remembers it differently: 'There was never a point where we went: 'Yay, they're closing down!' It was a big achievement, but it was a side-effect of the fact they were going to have to pay out to people who they'd abused. That's not a happy thing.'
The redress scheme was finally launched in September 2022. Former members could apply for compensation for emotional, physical or sexual abuse by submitting a statement via a solicitor. Kathleen Hallisey, who represented some of the claimants, believes the scheme would never have come about, nor had the reach it did, without the survivors' association. Previous appeals to speak had come from the church itself, or police. This time, it came from fellow survivors. The redress scheme received applications from 601 people, almost three times the number of complaints received by Operation Lifeboat.
Claimants could also apply for a 'community adverse experiences' payment, which didn't require a solicitor's input. These payments were compensation for the group's 'systemic failings' – separating children from their parents, denying social interaction, treating women as subordinates – rather than specific acts of abuse. It was an acknowledgment that the fellowship environment was, in itself, harmful. (In UK law, there is no clear way to hold cults to account for their systems of control and exploitation. Hallisey, Stein and members of the survivors' association are pushing for the most applicable crime, coercive control, to be extended to cover groups, rather than just intimate or family relationships.)
The redress scheme's final report, published in September 2024, was staggering. It found that there were 264 alleged abusers within the fellowship, of whom more than half were leaders. One in six children who lived in community was estimated to have been abused between 1969 and 2019. Over 30 allegations related to Stanton himself. The trustees wrote: 'Harm and abuse were not limited to a handful of leaders, a particular period of time, or geographical locations. It was widespread and systematic.'
Of applicants to the scheme, 96% received some form of redress. Yet for some, the process, which involved reliving their abuse in order to make statements, was bruising. 'The scheme was horrific to go through,' Philippa said. 'After all that work, when it came to it, it was very, very hard.' Payments ranged from £2,000 for corporal punishment to £50,000 for incidents of rape. Philippa received a total of £22,000. Despite the size of the fellowship's assets, at the time of the report the redress scheme had paid out £7.7m, compared with more than £100m paid out by the Lambeth scheme, which received only twice as many applicants.
Others felt that the structure of the scheme didn't reflect the reality of their experience. Sasha Feaver-Roche knew Philippa as a child, and was part of the fellowship for decades, yet because she hadn't lived in community for the required three months, she didn't qualify for this adverse experience payment. This meant that she had to apply only for individual redress, and demonstrate that she had suffered abuse, rather than receiving an acknowledgment that daily life in the cult – where she was branded a 'Jezebel', told to submit to her husband, and singled out by Noel Stanton for being Black – was harmful in itself. It was 'a bitter pill to swallow', she said. 'Because the fellowship's control – that was the worst bit. That's the bit I'm still trying to live with today.'
The D3 bus from Northampton winds past fields of sunflowers and sandstone houses, down into Bugbrooke, past the chapel where the Jesus Fellowship began, past New Creation Hall, past the road to New Creation Farm and Shalom farmhouse, and on to Daventry, where Philippa lives now. 'Sometimes it feels surreal, being back here,' she told me recently, as we sat in her living room. 'There are lots of ghosts. But I realised I had been running away for a long time, and I wanted to be near my family again.'
I first spoke to Philippa in 2022. The fellowship had closed, the redress scheme had just launched, and yet she still didn't feel she'd entirely left the cult. 'Living in it was like living under Big Brother,' she told me then. 'I still don't think I have completely uncoupled from that eye that was watching you all the time. And I don't know whether I ever will.'
Three years on, she no longer felt that way. 'In the past few years, I feel I have properly mentally left,' she said. 'I've made more progress in the past eight months than I have in the past decade.' Trauma therapy helped. Another factor was realising that she has been a good parent. 'My sons can cry, or can say when something's not right, and we can chat about it.' That knowledge has healed some of the pain she carried from childhood of being told not to ask for help from her parents, of being told that her parents were not her parents any more. Last month, along with other survivors, Philippa attended a screening in Sheffield of the BBC's new documentary on the fellowship, which she participated in. 'The feeling of relief was immense,' she said of seeing the story play out on screen. 'I had been carrying that burden by myself for all that time.'
These days, Philippa is a bubbly, friendly presence, fond of bright colours and quick to smile. Upstairs in her house, she showed me the craft room she set up earlier this year, and her artworks, made using pebbles found on the beach, pressed flowers, the foil from chocolate coins, the bells from Lindt bunnies. On an enormous canvas, the tail of a peacock was forming, each feather a recycled wrapper: Rowntree's, Jack Wills, pain relief patches. 'I take old things to make new things,' she said. 'I suppose I have a knack for that.'
Some of the fellowship's congregations continue to operate as independent churches, and there are still those who look back on it fondly. On Facebook groups called 'Jesus Army 'The Good Times'' and 'Jesus People Alumni', former members swap stories and faded photos of group meals and worship sessions. Not long ago, I spoke with a member of one of these groups, Aidan. The fellowship had its flaws, he said – it was 'too trusting', and he took part in the redress scheme based on some of his own experiences – but he was saddened by the idea of it being remembered as wholly negative. 'Living in community really broadened your horizons,' he said. 'I feel massively enriched by the people that I met.' He pointed to those it had helped: 'The people helped out of addiction, the lonely brought into the family.' Even fierce critics of the fellowship sometimes struck a wistful or ambivalent note when speaking about it. 'As much as I hate the place, there's that feeling of community that you miss,' said Feaver-Roche. 'That feeling of belonging.'
She and Philippa reconnected during the redress scheme, and now they live around the corner from one another. They often meet up for coffee and talk about the fellowship, or other aspects of their lives: 'For me, it's been really important to hang on to these friendships. They're a reminder that what happened to us wasn't normal,' Feaver-Roche said. When she sees ex-members, 'We'll make little inside jokes about The Handmaid's Tale, because the language was so similar.'
Over the years, Philippa has returned again and again to that moment when she decided to testify on behalf of her friend. 'I'm really proud of that 17-year-old self, who went to court and had the courage to tell the truth,' she said. Philippa still wonders where she found that conviction to stand up to the leadership, after years of indoctrination so deep it has taken a lifetime to undo.
The answer, Stein suggested, lies in the kinds of reciprocal, human connections the cult did its best to smother, like the one Philippa had with Marie, or her dad, or her brother or, later, with other survivors. 'Cults can have very powerful control, but they can't turn people into robots,' Stein said. 'We're still human. And even in the worst of circumstances, we create these little niches of humanity.' In Philippa's kitchen, a red and white sign hangs by the sink. 'In this home,' it reads, 'we are family.'
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