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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The
RSS