In August 1995 a reporter posing as a victim rang a helpline run by the Diocese of Sheffield.¹ It had been set up for people harmed by one of the diocese’s priests, Chris Brain, the leader of a congregation called the Nine O’Clock Service (NOS).

The counsellor who answered spent some time explaining how gruelling it could be to give evidence to the police about sexual matters. Then came the advice:

The only offence you can commit is rape and if that’s not what we’re talking about, then there may not be an offence against the law.

The advice was wrong. It ignored indecent assault, which was also a crime.² Three decades later, two juries convicted Brain of rape and of indecent assaults committed between 1981 and 1995.^3,4

NOS was a rave-style Church of England congregation in Sheffield, in the north of England, and Brain had founded it. On 2 October a jury at Inner London Crown Court convicted him of raping a woman in his congregation and of four indecent assaults on three other women. With the verdicts of his first trial in August 2025, he now stands convicted of 22 sexual offences against 13 women.⁵

Senior clergy in Sheffield had been warned about Brain since 1990.⁶ When the abuse came out in 1995, one of the women who came forward was told it was a church matter, not a police matter.⁷

South Yorkshire Police began receiving allegations only in 2020.⁸ So why did it take 25 years for the case to reach the police?

Three months after the helpline opened, BBC One broadcast a filmed interview with Brain. Breach of Faith, an Everyman documentary special, went out on Sunday 26 November 1995.⁹ Early in the film, he made an admission.

For a priest in a church setting, I’d have to say I was involved in improper sexual conduct with a number of women.¹⁰

He spoke of misconduct by a priest. He did not speak of a crime.

At his first trial, in 2025, Brain told the jury he had “over accepted responsibility” in the programme.¹¹ At his retrial a year later, jurors were again told of the interview.¹² Both juries convicted him.

The convictions rest on evidence tested in court. What the diocese was told, and when, comes from the trials and from the record of the 1990s.

“He should be given some slack”

NOS began in 1984. Robert Warren, vicar of St Thomas’s church in the Sheffield suburb of Crookes, gave Brain and his friends a Sunday slot at 21:00. Within a few years it was drawing hundreds of young people every week.¹³

Church leaders were delighted. In 1990 George Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury-elect, met Brain to discuss his methods. The Bishop of Sheffield, David Lunn, said NOS had a “permanent significance”.¹⁴

Lunn confirmed 96 NOS members at a single service. Warren told the 2025 trial it was “the largest group that we had ever confirmed in one church”.

That enthusiasm carried Brain into the priesthood. The court heard that the Diocese of Sheffield fast-tracked his ordination, and that he became a priest a year after beginning training, against the usual three or four.

The first recorded warning came from the woman who taught him. The Revd Dr Marilyn Parry was Brain’s personal tutor on the Northern Ordination Course, which trained clergy across the north of England, in 1990 and 1991. She told the jury that his phone “always seemed to be answered by a group of young women who seemed to be protecting him”.

Once she was told he could not come to the phone because a female member of his team was giving him a massage. She was “very shocked”.

Parry took her concerns to senior tutors and to the diocese. She was told “he should be given some slack”. Stephen Lowe, then Archdeacon of Sheffield, the senior cleric who helped the bishop run the diocese, went further.

Lowe “told me I should stop voicing my concerns”, Parry told the court. Brain, she was told, “was doing very important work with young people who were not usually coming to church”. She refused to sign off his ordination, and the principal of the course signed it himself.

“The bishop’s policeman”

Others at St Thomas’s were uneasy. In 1992 a financial administrator at the church raised the “negative optics” of “scantily clad Lycra-wearing pretty young women” going in and out of Brain’s house to do his housework. He asked at a staff meeting whether there was “anything untoward”, and “got a roasting”.

That account came from the Revd Dr Mark Stibbe, then a curate at St Thomas’s, who gave evidence at the 2025 trial. Staff took the view, he said, that if Warren was not going to intervene, “then we had no business doing so”.¹⁵

The same year a member of NOS went to the bishop. She is identified only as Mel. In 2025 she said she had taken Lunn a written list of concerns about how Brain controlled and bullied people, especially the young women who looked after him at home.

That group was known as the homebase team. According to Mel, Lunn took no action after someone in NOS told him she was “a drug addict, an alcoholic and a mentally ill person”. Lunn has since died.

I went to the Church three years before anyone else with my concerns. Had they listened to me, something could have been done to stop the abuses much earlier.¹⁶

The diocese had answered that charge before. A 1995 BBC film told how Mel had gone to the bishop in 1992.¹⁷ The diocesan spokesman, the Revd Roy Arnold, said her complaints had been general.

Once serious complaints arrived in 1995, Arnold said, the diocese had “investigated them straightaway and blew the whistle on Mr Brain”.¹⁸

Stibbe moved to another Sheffield parish in 1993. The court heard that after attending a NOS service at Ponds Forge, a leisure centre in the city where the congregation then met, he wrote to Lunn. He told the jury he had seen “extremely disturbing” services, with “scantily clad young girls gyrating”.

I remember stating to him that if he didn’t step in and truly discern what was going on in the community there would be disaster in one year.

The bishop’s answer was “a reprimand, a rebuke”, Stibbe said. Lunn told him the diocese did not conduct witch hunts. “So I really had my ecclesiastical wrists slapped,” Stibbe told the court.¹⁹

He was also told that Lowe was overseeing NOS and that “that should be enough for me”.²⁰

Roland Howard, a journalist who wrote a 1996 book on NOS built on interviews with former members and clergy, dates the letter to October 1994. His account was never tested in court.

That same month, according to Howard, Lowe was invited to celebrate communion at a NOS service and told the congregation:

Originally I was sent to keep my eyes open on you lot, to act as the bishop’s policeman. But now I’m a complete convert to what you’re doing here, your theology makes sense to me.²¹

The next warning came from Brain’s own family. In October 1994 his mother-in-law, Shirley Taylor, told her local vicar in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, that Brain had turned her daughter Winnie, his wife, into a “zombie”.^22,23

The vicar took the concern to Lowe. The archdeacon dismissed their concerns as exaggerated.²⁴

A month later, according to Howard, a former member told Warren that Brain had been having an affair with his wife, and that others close to Brain might have been in similar situations. Warren has no memory of others being mentioned.

The information was given to him in confidence, and he had no responsibility for NOS, so he “took no action”, Howard wrote.²⁵ At the 2025 trial Warren said the allegations of sexual abuse had come as “a total shock”.²⁶

“Like a cult”

In April 1995 a former member, called Suzanne in Howard’s book, complained to Lunn. She described abuse years earlier by a member of the NOS leadership and an attempt by Brain to kiss her. She wanted NOS stopped, Howard wrote, because it was “like a cult”.

Lunn passed her to Lowe. The archdeacon “warned her about a possible legal action if she wasn’t careful about what she said”, according to Howard. Brain, back from a trip to New York, received “a formal warning” about putting himself in “situations which could be misinterpreted”.²⁷

Four months later, in August 1995, the congregation broke apart.²⁸ A former member had warned Lowe that NOS had become a cult in which Brain was abusing his congregation. Followers, the whistleblower said, had been putting him to bed and giving him sexual favours.

Lowe told the court he confronted Brain with claims that he had had sexual relationships with up to 40 women. Brain is said to have replied: “I thought it was more.”²⁹

That week the diocesan spokesman, Arnold, used the word cult himself:

I would prefer not to use that word cult, but it is the word that does naturally spring to mind. There was cult-like control over people and over their lives, and in this instance involving sexuality.³⁰

The Archbishop of York, John Habgood, senior bishop of the Church’s northern province, barred Brain from ministering anywhere in the Church of England until the allegations had been investigated. Brain was admitted to Cheadle Royal Hospital near Manchester for psychiatric treatment.³¹

Lunn’s response was theological. “Sin is with us always,” he said in 1995. “We live in an age of extraordinarily loose sexual morals.”³²

“A church matter”

The diocese opened its helpline in the middle of that turmoil.³³ The diocese said a team of 30 to 40 people was counselling victims.³⁴

What callers heard became public within days. A Christian music magazine reported that staff on the line were guiding people “away from the police with misinformation that only rape was a matter for the police and sexual interference wasn’t”.³⁵

By 27 August the church authorities faced public criticism for not telling complainants to go to the police.³⁶

The women who had blown the whistle heard the same message in person. One of them said in 2025 that two senior officials called them together that August. “They were like a mafia cleaning crew,” she said, there “to make it go away”.

They told us it wasn’t a matter for the police; they said, ‘this isn’t a police matter, it’s a church matter’. … They said ‘don’t talk to the press, we’ll talk to them. We don’t want this to be the CofE’s Waco’.

Waco was the 1993 siege of a cult compound in Texas. The woman made a “tentative” complaint to South Yorkshire Police, but did not pursue it after being told her anonymity could not be guaranteed.

Mel said a senior cleric met her in London and asked her not to give her written complaint to the media. “He said we had to protect the bishop,” she said.³⁷

Not every churchman thought the police had no part to play. The Revd Graham Cray, principal of Ridley Hall theological college and an early NOS supporter, told the Greenbelt Christian arts festival that month:

There ought to be criminal charges against him but the emotional manipulation and collusion here will make it very difficult.³⁸

On 28 August the poet and critic James Fenton, writing in a national newspaper, set out the case against the diocese. The rape advice on the helpline, he wrote, “came in the context of a caution against going to the police”. He saw a pattern in the diocese’s handling, and listed the public airing of the allegations, the “misleading advice being given in private” on the helpline and Brain’s move into a psychiatric hospital.

The tendency of these outcomes, whether by accident or by strategy, is to make it difficult to prosecute the Rev Brain and to get any kind of redress.³⁹

Stibbe then went public. Writing in the Anglican weekly Church Times, he blamed Lunn and Lowe for letting NOS run out of control.

It is clear now that the authorities failed to see that something alarmingly ‘cult-like’ was growing in their midst.

Warren called Stibbe’s intervention “trial by media”.⁴⁰ Carey, by then Archbishop of Canterbury, said in September that he felt “crushed and let down”.⁴¹

“Good luck to them”

On Saturday 25 November, the eve of the broadcast, the diocese announced that Brain had resigned as a priest. His solicitors had sent the resignation.

Lowe said Brain had made the right decision “for himself, for the good of the Church”. “His main offence was the abuse of power,” the archdeacon added.⁴²

The resignation meant officials “wouldn’t have to investigate the complicated legal process of unfrocking him”, Howard wrote. Unfrocking is the formal removal of a priest from holy orders. Howard quotes Lowe as saying the resignation would “satisfy the demand for justice” from NOS members.⁴³

The film went out the next night.

In the film Brain described his conduct in his own terms. Sexual activity, he said, had followed “a long period of developing a close relationship”.⁴⁴ He would “never use anybody”, he said, and “it was in the area of just closeness and affection and friendship”.⁴⁵

The film set his words against those of the women. Margaret Kennedy, of Christian Survivors of Sexual Abuse, described his method as grooming: “if I get you to consent then you will not see it as abuse”.⁴⁶

She also explained why the women had not spoken sooner. It was “almost impossible to report a minister who’s molesting you”, she said.⁴⁷

Brain spoke of repentance, not punishment. What the Christian community would want to see, he said, “is somebody who is repentant”.⁴⁸ If people felt his resignation “would be some symbol of that”, he said, “I think I’m prepared to resign”.⁴⁹

Matt, a member of the NOS leadership, asked for more. He told the film the Church should take part in “a suitable and proper inquiry into all the events that led up to this tragedy”.⁵⁰ The bishop was asked about an inquiry too.

If people want to set up an investigation, good luck to them. I don’t myself believe it would serve any useful purpose. I think we know what happened.⁵¹

In a statement Lunn also criticised the BBC for treating “the problems of a single congregation in a single diocese” as “a management crisis of mega-proportions for the Church of England”.⁵² No inquiry was set up in 1995.⁵³

A quarter of a century

By February 1996 Brain had left for the United States. He had gone, according to one report, because he was “less well-known there than here”.⁵⁴

At Easter that year NOS was relaunched at a Sheffield chapel. Lowe led the service. Women who had called a telephone hotline, it was reported, “were told the matter would almost certainly be dealt with within the church and only be passed on to the police if there was an allegation of rape”.⁵⁵

The diocese sent the Archbishop a report on NOS. According to Howard, it proposed personality profiling before ordination, professional supervision of clergy, elected church councils and new powers for bishops and archdeacons to hold priests to account. Howard records no recommendation about the police.⁵⁶

No police investigation was launched at the time.⁵⁷ As the scandal faded from the front pages, Brain changed his name and disappeared from public view. By 2021 he was running a design consultancy in Wilmslow, Cheshire.⁵⁸

One former member, called Marion in Howard’s book, had seen where the line was drawn. “The NOS scandal wasn’t to do with sex, it was about the abuse of power,” she told Howard.

The Church would never have reacted if we’d gone to complain that NOS was a cult and Chris was a cult leader (people had complained for years, and been ignored). Of course if it’s sex, then they react in 24 hours.⁵⁹

What the jury heard

South Yorkshire Police began receiving allegations in 2020 and arrested Brain in April 2021, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.⁶⁰ In July 2021 the present Bishop of Sheffield, Pete Wilcox, confirmed that a group of survivors had contacted the Church of England. He said their “harrowing testimonies” were being taken “very seriously”.

One survivor explained why so many had stayed silent for so long.

The Church told them at the time that they should keep silent, don’t talk about it, the press will destroy you.⁶¹

Brain was charged in January 2024.⁶² When his first trial opened in July 2025 he faced one count of rape and 36 of indecent assault against 13 women, all between 1981 and 1995.⁶³

The police case was built from interviews with victims and statements from witnesses, the CPS said. Women described the homebase team, mainly young women who had to care for Brain at home, including attending on him before he went to sleep, “which is when many of the offences occurred”.⁶⁴

Written instructions for the team were shown to jurors.⁶⁵ Clergy who had known NOS, Parry and Stibbe among them, gave evidence about the warnings they had raised.⁶⁶

Jurors also heard that in Breach of Faith Brain had admitted sexual activity with women in NOS but “denied that it was abuse”.⁶⁷ His defence rested on consent. The prosecution proved that he used his spiritual authority “to control, isolate and sexually abuse women he had made dependent on his approval”, the CPS said.⁶⁸

After seven weeks, a jury of eight men and three women convicted him of 17 indecent assaults on nine women and acquitted him of 15.⁶⁹ It could not agree on four further indecent assaults and the rape. A retrial on those five counts ended in convictions on all of them on 2 October.⁷⁰

No sentencing date has been set. Judge Freya Newbury said victims would be able to give impact statements at a hearing likely to last two days.⁷¹

One diocese, its own rules

Lunn had spoken of a single diocese. In safeguarding, that is how the Church was still run in 2024. Each of the Church of England’s 42 dioceses is led by its own bishop, and in safeguarding they are “virtually autonomous”.

That finding came from Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), the statutory inquiry for England and Wales. In The Future of Church Safeguarding, a report commissioned by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and published in February 2024, she found “no effective means of compelling bishops to implement safeguarding arrangements in a particular way”.

The Church’s system of operational safeguarding is not compatible with best practices whilst its management and accountability remains within the 42 dioceses.⁷²

IICSA had already concluded in 2020 that diocesan safeguarding officers, “not clergy”, were “best placed to decide which cases to refer to the statutory authorities”.⁷³ It also described a pattern in the Church’s senior ranks.

Senior clergy often declined to report allegations to statutory agencies, preferring to manage those accused internally for as long as possible. This hindered criminal investigations and enabled some abusers to escape justice.⁷⁴

The Church’s first independent watchdog, the Independent Safeguarding Board, was set up in 2021. In June 2023 the Archbishops’ Council, the Church’s national executive body, sacked its three members after a dispute.⁷⁵ Jay called the dissolution “a further deterioration in the Church’s relations with victims and survivors”.

Jay recommended two charities, “funded by the Church but structurally independent”, with a legal duty on every Church body to refer all safeguarding matters to them.⁷⁶ In February 2025 the General Synod, the Church’s national assembly, set that model aside for one that kept diocesan safeguarding officers in their existing roles. Jay said the decision would be “devastating for victims and survivors”.

Lucy Duckworth, of the charity the Survivors Trust, said she was speaking “as a survivor of clerical abuse as well as a campaigner and policy adviser who represents survivors”.

It is a devastating blow, not just for the victims and survivors of clerical abuse but for the one million children who attend the 4,600 schools under the Church of England’s power today. This is a shameful disregard for the lifelong suffering that their employees and clergy have caused.⁷⁷

The Synod returned to the question a year later. In February 2026 it voted 345 to one for a new national charity, provisionally called the Independent Safeguarding Authority, with a board that is majority independent of the Church. Local trustees “will remain responsible”, the Synod was told.⁷⁸

What the diocese says now

After the 2025 verdicts Wilcox offered an unreserved apology for what he called “institutional failures”, where concerns raised in the past were not acted on properly.

What happened was an appalling abuse of power and leadership that should never have occurred.

He promised an independent Safeguarding Practice Review to “examine our safeguarding responses, culture, and processes”.⁷⁹ The diocese delayed it so as not to cut across the retrial. After the 2 October verdicts Wilcox said the women had “now given evidence, in full, not once but twice”, and that the review would go ahead.⁸⁰

Richard Scorer, a lawyer representing the women in a civil action against the Church of England, said Brain had been “fast-tracked to ordination, supported, promoted and protected by the Church of England”.

A full accounting of their role in this appalling saga is long overdue and must now follow.⁸¹

“Shame on the Church of England”

After the verdicts one survivor issued a statement through the law firm Slater and Gordon, which represents a number of Brain’s victims.

It’s over 30 years since we went to the Bishop of Sheffield to tell him about Chris Brain and his emotional, financial, spiritual and sexual abuse of us. That it has taken 30 years to get to here should be a cause of great shame for the Church of England.

She placed the blame squarely. The Church of England, she said, had “welcomed him with open arms”.

The Church of England should have also been in the dock with Brain which takes away nothing from his culpability.⁸²

Freedom Times will report on Brain’s sentencing and on the Safeguarding Practice Review. Readers can subscribe to notifications at the foot of this article.

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