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’s the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who says he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience.
Thompson says the outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit naturally with a Christian message.
“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.’”
...
At a recent 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 Mike in St. Peter’s almost 50 years ago.
“You can look at some of the wrestlers and think” — she scrunched her face in distaste. But talking to them made her realize “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”
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Only a handful of people have gone from watching the wrestling to attending Sunday-morning services at St. Peter’s, but Wrestling Church baptized 30 people in its first year. Thompson, whose brand of born-again Christianity is more muscular than many traditional Anglicans’, plans to expand to other British cities. One day, he says, he may start his own church.
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