Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle.
This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley.
It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience.
Photo: AP
The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit naturally with a Christian message, Thompson said.
“Boil it down to the basics, it’s good versus evil,” he said. “When I became Christian, I started seeing the wrestling world through a Christian lens. I started seeing David and Goliath. I started seeing Cain and Abel. I started seeing Esau having his heritage stolen from him — and I’m like: ‘We could tell these stories,’” he said.
Church attendance in the UK has been declining for decades, and a 2021 census found that fewer than half of people in England and Wales consider themselves Christian. Those who said they have no religion rose from 25 percent to 37 percent in a decade.
Photo: AP
That has led churches to get creative to survive.
“You’ve got to take a few risks,” said the Reverend Natasha Thomas, the priest in charge at St Peter’s.
She said she “wasn’t entirely sure what it was I was letting myself in for” when she agreed to host wrestling events.
“It’s not church as you would know it. It’s certainly not for everyone,” she said. “But it’s bringing in a different group of people, a different community, than we would normally get.”
At a Wrestling Church evening, almost 200 people — older couples, teenagers, pierced and tattooed wrestling fans, parents with excited young children — packed into chairs around a ring erected under the vaulted ceiling of the century-old church.
After a short homily and prayer from Thomas, it was time for two hours of smackdowns, body slams and flying headbutts. The atmosphere grew cheerfully raucous, as fans waved giant foam fingers and hollered “knock him out” at participants.
Some longtime churchgoers have welcomed the infusion of energy.
“I think it’s absolutely wonderful,” said Chris Moss, who married her husband in St Peter’s almost 50 years ago.
“You can look at some of the wrestlers and think,” she said, scrunching her face in distaste.
However, talking to them made her realize “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”
Thompson, whose wrestling moniker is Gareth Angel, wrestles and presides over the organized mayhem. He is a mix of preacher and ringmaster, wearing a T-shirt that says “Pray, eat, wrestle, repeat.”
He found Christianity in 2011, ran his first Wrestling Church event in a former nightclub-turned-church in 2022, and moved to St Peter’s last year.
As well as the monthly Saturday night shows, his charity Kingdom Wrestling runs training sessions for adults and children in a back room of the church, along with women’s self-defense classes, a men’s mental health group and coaching for children who have been expelled from school.
For many in the close-knit community of British wrestlers and fans, religion is a new ingredient, but not an unwelcome one.
“I’m mainly here for the wrestling,” said 33-year-old Liam Ledger, who wrestles as Flamin’ Daemon Crowe.
Sitting in a pungent changing room as wrestlers discussed fight plans, he said it was a bit “surreal” when baptisms are held between bouts.
“It works both ways,” he said. “There’s people that come here that are big on religion, and they’re here for all of that sort of stuff, and then they go: ‘Oh, actually this wrestling is sort of fun.’”
Only a handful of people have gone from watching the wrestling to attending Sunday-morning services, but Wrestling Church baptized 30 people in its first year.
Thompson is unfazed by doubters in the format.
“People say: ‘Oh, wrestling and Christianity, they’re two fake things in a fake world of their own existence,’” he said. “If you don’t believe in it, of course you will think that of it, but my own personal experience of my Christian faith is that it is alive and living, and it is true. The wrestling world, if you really believe in it, you believe that it’s true and you can suspend your disbelief.
“You suspend it because you want to get lost in it. You want to believe in it. You want to hope for it,” he said.
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