As a new BBC documentary airs about the Jesus Army in Northampton, we look at how embedded the church and its followers became in the society of Northamptonshire for decades – updated below.
WHEN we moved house in 2003, me heavily pregnant with our third son, we met the neighbours living in a huge converted dentists’ surgery next door.
There were lots of them living there, from children to pensioners, all living in a communal house with an enormous, well-tended garden. Each Sunday morning, we’d hear them singing hymns – sometimes we’d laugh at the audible contrast of the religious singing with the loud drum & bass blasting out of the hostels at the bottom of the street.
The neighbours at Dayspring, as they’d named the house, seemed welcoming, and mostly quiet – apart from one time when they had their windows smashed overnight. We knew why.
Before we even moved in we knew of them, as both my partner Steve and I, as journalists on the local daily paper, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, had written numerous stories about them – they were members of the Jesus Army. Most of Northampton knew of them, because it was difficult to live here and not be in contact with the vast organisation that had existed for decades across the town.
The Jesus Army, or JA, seemed to own everything, like a religious multinational corporation, with money and investments everywhere. Big Victorian houses scattered across the area, from Kingsley to Kingsthorpe, Semilong to St James and villages beyond were home to followers. All of whom, we were told, had given up everything, their houses, their salaries, even ownership of their cars and bank accounts, to this huge cult-like organisation. But they looked, if you’ll forgive the clumsy generalisation, like they didn’t have two pennies to rub together. Clothes were second hand, cars were battered, all food was shared.
Yet, the church had huge amounts of money, enough to threaten the newspaper with legal action every time we were about to run a story and asking for their right of reply. If you know how cash-strapped local papers were, you’ll understand why this often made editors reluctant to publish. Their press officer and latterly the safeguarding lead, a man called John Campbell, was the only liaison we had. Noel Stanton, the Jesus Army’s founder, was never available and rumours abounded about his life at New Creation Farm, surrounded by young male acolytes. Campbell had a particular beef about the newspaper calling the Jesus Army a ‘cult’ and regularly threated court action for defamation. But it had all the hallmarks of that definition – a charismatic central leader, extreme devotion to that leader or cause, high pressure recruitment and a tendency to isolate members from the wider world. It all seemed very odd, to outsiders like us, that this organisation seemed to have so much invested in the town without much apparent scrutiny.
Nether Heyford, one older reporter in the newsroom told me, was ‘the village of the damned’ since the Jesus Army had made it another of their bases. As well as the farm, they owned land in Bugbrooke where the church had started, a camping shop called White and Bishop in Northampton, a builders’ merchants called Skaino Services, a wholefood shop, a vehicle repair company, even a jeans shop – their members were recognisable by the large red plastic crosses they wore around their necks or logoed t-shirts. When Steve and I started work at the newspaper in the 1990s, some of the staff were members of the JA, in the on-site printing press they were visible because of the plastic crosses – including van drivers and newspaper vendors who had apparently handed over their worldly possessions to be part of this communal army of non-conforming Christians.
When our kids went to school they became friends with children who lived in Jesus Army houses and they seemed to have a lot more freedom, like being allowed to roam and stay out later than any of ours were, and yet they weren’t allowed to come for tea or stay over. I remember one rainy day going to pick up one of our sons who had been soaked in a downpour with one JA friend, and insisted on putting his friend’s bike in the back of my car and dropping him home because no one from his house was coming to get him. He asked to be dropped a little further up the street than his house on Kettering Road. My son said he didn’t think his family would approve of him being given a lift. He must have been about 11-years-old.
In the mid-1990s, I had a call on the newsdesk from a teenaged girl who wanted to talk about her life in the Jesus Army. She told me how her parents had given up everything and moved into a Jesus Army house with their children when she was very young, and that she’d hated it, and had tried to leave as soon as she was old enough. She was frightened, and spoke of being followed by members of the church’s authorities and threatened for trying to leave, that she’d never be allowed to see her siblings or parents and that she wouldn’t get a job or survive without them. She had left, and had indeed been isolated, and missed her siblings who had stayed in the organisation. I often wonder what happened to her.
There were other stories, all detailed in newspaper clippings, the physical archive of printed stories that the Chron had in rows and rows of filing cabinets, disposed of when the paper moved from its huge Upper Mounts site. There was a story from long before I joined the paper about an incident on a railway line where someone had died, one where someone had died from exposure, another about accusations of sexual abuse.
But still the Jesus Army seemed to be a huge part of the town, eventually buying the enormous Deco Theatre, now known as the Old Savoy. In its heyday it hosted the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but now was the fellowship’s central Northampton church, even featuring on a documentary with Grayson Perry who created an ornate money box for the National Portrait Gallery after meeting them for a Channel 4 documentary in 2014 called Who Are You? (I watched this again via an academic archive site, as it’s no longer available online and recognised many members, including our neighbours.)
Jon Ronson made an older debate programme with members of the Jesus Army in 1994 which is uncomfortable viewing, even before the church was wound up in 2020, after Stanton’s death in 2009, amid a deluge of accusations about sexual assaults, coercion and abuse.
When we moved next door to one of the many, many Jesus Army houses 21 years ago, we wondered if that’s why our house had been relatively cheap for the time. People were wary of the Jesus Army, but yet here they were, happily and co-operatively living in a welcoming home they had made their own.
Some residents of Dayspring had been living in Semilong for more than a quarter of a century, eating and living communally in this huge house. Some residents had learning difficulties or were elderly or infirm, and were apparently well-cared for by the dayspring ‘family’. The house ‘elder’, was Ralph – women didn’t hold any power in the Jesus Army and the ‘elders’, as far as we could tell, were all male. Ralph was great at fixing things, and we spoke often. He had a wife, and grown-up kids, who were all in the church, but didn’t seem to live at Dayspring, although they visited. We didn’t really understand then that separation of families was not unusual.
Ralph told us he was fussy about who got to live at Dayspring, as he didn’t want any residents with drug or alcohol issues – despite the Jesus Army targeting homeless and addicted recruits widely, in its enormous double decker bus. I joked with him that it didn’t seem very Christian to reject people, to which he laughed and said that Dayspring wasn’t like some of the other houses.
There was no doubt that Dayspring became an unofficial source of help for overstretched social services in the area, regularly welcoming in some of Semilong’s transient and sometimes troubled community members, and while people came and went, there were a core of residents who we determined probably would have felt lonely and abandoned without the care of their Jesus Army family. They had summer garden parties, and we chatted to members of the church who had felt compelled to join in times of extreme stress, like the former soldier with PTSD who cut our hedge for free, or the lonely gardener who built a potting shed and grew grapes and runner beans that waved bountifully over our wall each summer.
Ralph was the main contact for rebuilding a huge Victorian brick wall that separated our properties, that came down in a huge slab in the night in 2012. For five months our gardens were open to each other as we chipped away, cleaning up bricks and stacking them to be rebuilt. While the residents of Dayspring occasionally helped, they seemed unable to make any decisions without Ralph who gently corralled some into getting involved. We’d had one previous interaction about our properties, when they’d tried to build a new house onto ours, which we’d fought against and won in the planning meeting. There were no hard feelings, as far as we could tell.
We often popped in, to pick up or pass on parcels that either of us had taken in for the others – and I had always been fascinated by the huge murals painted on the walls of one of the living rooms, one depicting the now disgraced Noel Stanton as a literal fisher of men, pulling a man from the water.
When the church was wound up in 2020, after Stanton’s death and hundreds of reports of historic abuse, Dayspring went up for sale, along with other Jesus Army houses across the town, to pay for the millions of pounds for the redress scheme for former members.
Our neighbours, many of whom had lived there for three decades, were devastated, vulnerable and frightened. By summer 2022, they were given notice to leave. One woman who had a disabled daughter and elderly mother, cried as she told me she had no idea where she could go without her daughter being put into care and her mum into a home, as had been suggested by social services.
They had invited me in, one last time, to see the murals on the walls, the packed up boxes and to offer me a striking German-made vase as a gift. Ralph also gave me an enormous metal plant support which stands proudly in my back garden. He was going abroad, furious, he said, at the actions of others who had seen his lifelong faith tested and his ‘family’ dispersed.
Since the residents of Dayspring left, some to other former Jesus Army houses in other parts of the country, some to homes they’d bought with their ‘share’ of the redress scheme, the house has been sold to a developer and has fallen into disrepair, the garden now overgrown and paintwork flaking into the street. It temporarily housed some overseas workers but has lain empty for months, with addicts and dealers the only people who frequent the overgrown alleyway which the Jesus Army kept clear. Some irony here as the Dayspring residents were so opposed to drink and drugs.
There will be much said about the cult of the Jesus Army as a new BBC documentary investigation airs tonight (27/07/25). I can’t be the only resident of Northampton who is conflicted about the demise of the Jesus Army, sad for those vulnerable people who found themselves thrown out by the ‘family’ who many believed saved them, but furious about those who manipulated those same people for their own perversions and to make a hugely rich cult – and it was a cult – who appeared to act without scrutiny by the authorities for so many decades, across the town and beyond.
Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army is available on iPlayer here
UPDATE: Having now seen the BBC documentary in full, I’m left feeling very sad for those innocent people who committed their lives to the Jesus Fellowship, later the Jesus Army, and the ripping apart of their community. But it had to happen and should have happened sooner.
The level of abuse and coercion found by the formal investigation across years is shocking, 539 members accused of abuse, approximately one in six children sexually abused, only 11 people convicted.
The idea that it wasn’t known about until the death of Stanton is misleading – people knew something wasn’t right. Some members of the church knew, the police knew, the council knew and the press knew, but ‘knowing something wasn’t right’ and being able to prove something beyond reasonable doubt are very different things. Especially as the church leadership was very rich, very controlling, and very litigious. I don’t believe for a moment all of the ‘rotten apples’ have been dealt with by the law, and there are victims whose lives have been wrecked by their involvement in an organisation they believed was good.
However, the sense of loss for those who had little to do with the leadership of the Jesus Army, except for joint evangelical worship, projects to help those in need and shared housing co-operatives, is still keenly felt.
Some still blame victims who made legitimate and brave reports about what was going on, so blind is their faith in an organisation into which they invested decades of their lives. This is unfair and blinkered, but perhaps not surprising. If you have been taught to have total faith in something you feel transcends everything else, its difficult to admit you were so wrong.
John Everett, a former member who made reports to the Chron back in the 1980s, has spent 40 years unearthing the activities of the Jesus Army and features in the BBC documentary. He has written about how the fellowship started as one of many evangelical Christian communes in the 1970s, focused on peace and love and spirituality. As his book synopsis states: “Sadly, utopian experiments rarely stand the test of time, and the JFC proved no exception.”
Some members of the Jesus Army still miss it very much, and one might argue that beyond those brave victims who came forward to reveal the abuse, there were other innocent people whose lives were torn apart by the behaviour of this cult. They lived as families, supported one another and gave help to many vulnerable people, including food, companionship and signposting to help from authorities. One might even argue today there are people living on the streets, and strangled by addictions, for whom the Jesus Army would have been a lifeline, had they still been operating. But despite all of the good things they did, there is no excuse for the bad, however strong your faith.
It is incredible to think how this institution went from being such a huge visible part of the landscape of Northampton, both in terms of people and buildings, to nothing. The visible impact of their absence is also significant – the damage they have done to people can never be compensated by the community work they appeared to have done – but there are people who must still suffer having been transplanted to Northampton and now somewhat abandoned.