The rise and fall of the British cult that hid in plain sight
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Until she was six, Philippa Barnes was surrounded by things that were hers. She had a favourite pair of red-and-white-striped dungarees and a long garden with a strawberry patch. She had a close-knit family: a mum, dad, two brothers and a sister, and grandparents who lived near the family home in Surrey. When her mum made lemon meringue pie, she would pass the curd pan out of the window to where Philippa was playing so she could lick it clean.
One day, when Philippa was about two years old, a couple stopped by the family’s church. They, along with their three sons, were on their way to join the Jesus Fellowship, a Christian community in Northamptonshire led by Noel Stanton, a charismatic, white-haired pastor. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and Philippa’s family started visiting the fellowship a few times a year.
At first, Philippa and her siblings loved these trips. Photos from that time of Cornhill Manor, one of the fellowship’s properties, show high windows looking out over green fields, airy communal kitchens, and a grand ballroom with a sprung dancefloor, where members of the community slept on mattresses. It was a far cry from Woking, where the family lived opposite a noisy train line. Although Philippa had to spend long religious meetings under her parents’ chairs, shushed and desperately bored, the rest of the weekend could be spent playing outside.
When Philippa was five, on one of these weekends with the fellowship, something shifted. One evening, she and her two-year-old brother, as the two youngest siblings, were put to bed with a baby monitor while her parents went to a prayer meeting downstairs. “The message was, ‘We can hear you, but we don’t want to hear you,’” Philippa recalled. She had never before been afraid to disturb her parents, but when her brother started having diarrhoea and then both siblings began to vomit, she had to call for them. “My parents came, and my dad wasn’t too pleased,” she said. “Looking back, I can see they didn’t want to be embarrassed by being disturbed – they were newbies to the community.” But the lesson stuck: this new church was more important than she was.
In 1984, Philippa’s parents told the children that the family was moving to the East Midlands to be nearer the fellowship. For her parents, the move made sense. Philippa’s father was a senior scientific officer for the Ministry of Defence and had to travel regularly for work, meaning her mother was often looking after the children alone. In Northamptonshire, they had been exposed to a new way of life, one based around simplicity and community, where music was played nightly, meals were communal and children were able to enjoy the outdoors.
The Barnes family bought a house in the village of Bugbrooke and regularly attended fellowship meetings and worship sessions led by Stanton. Then, in 1987, just before Philippa’s ninth birthday, the family moved into what the fellowship called “community”: a farmhouse named Shalom, where about 20 people would live at any given time. Moving in meant surrendering proceeds from their house sale and Philippa’s father’s wages into the “common purse”. Most who lived in community were employed in the fellowship’s businesses, and Philippa’s father got a job at their builders’ merchant. All possessions, even down to items of clothing, were shared.
In some ways, this life offered a new kind of freedom. The younger Barnes children spent time going for walks or picnics, or looking after the fellowship’s livestock. To her delight, Philippa was allowed to help with lambing. She and her brother would run riot away from adult eyes. They once built a petrol bomb using a milk bottle and blew up a wasp’s nest.
There were also privations. Almost all of the children’s toys were taken away. “Cuddlies, gadgets or competitive toys” appeared on a list of things deemed “worldly” – and therefore unacceptable – by Stanton. The list of banned items changed according to his whims, but over the years it included secular TV, pop music, makeup, sporting events, restaurants, buffets, weight training, holidays, zoos, coffee, sunbathing, celebrating Christmas, swimming “for pleasure” and crisps.
The children attended a local comprehensive school, but making friends outside the group was difficult. They were not allowed to eat school dinners, so every lunchtime they would troop to a fellowship house nearby. “The other children knew to avoid us, so we stuck together,” Philippa said.
Of all the strangeness in their new life, Philippa found the fellowship’s approach to family hardest. Under Stanton’s rules, communal living meant renouncing your “natural family” in favour of the fellowship’s “spiritual family”. Women were called “sisters”, men were “brothers” and leaders were “elders”. Philippa’s parents, instead of just being responsible for their family unit, were given other duties: helping to cook and clean for the other Shalom residents, or finding new recruits. When Philippa turned 12, she was moved from the room she shared with her younger brother into a dormitory with women of all ages.
Explaining this approach, Stanton would point to a passage from Matthew 10, in which Jesus said: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother … A man’s enemies will be members of his own household.” In the absence of the “natural family”, any adult could be responsible for disciplining children. Many did so through “rodding” – hitting children as young as two with sticks. “He who spares the rod hates his son,” Stanton would say, quoting from Proverbs. Exorcisms were also performed on children. When Philippa was caught drawing stick figures with breasts and genitals at a meeting, she was taken into a private room so an elder could pray for her “unclean spirit” and anoint her with oil.
Philippa missed her parents. She managed to spend some time with her mum by helping in the garden and the kitchen, where they would skim cream off bottles of milk to make choux buns and eclairs, a welcome relief from bland meals of pork chops and boiled vegetables. But it never felt like enough: other girls her age were going shopping for clothes with their mums, watching TV as a family or going to the cinema or the zoo. In the communal house, doors were hung with curtains, and Philippa remembers hiding between her parents’ bedroom door and the curtain, hearing the murmur of their voices as they talked, laughed or argued; longing to be closer to them.
Dressed in brightly coloured shirts and patterned ties, with his signature swirl of backcombed white hair, Stanton looked more like a magician than a man of the church. A Baptist pastor born on Christmas Day, he had founded the fellowship in his small local chapel in 1969 after a “life-changing” spiritual experience that led him to embrace exuberant worship sessions, speaking in tongues, exorcisms and communal living. From the fellowship’s early days, these practices attracted attention. In a 1974 Thames Television documentary, The Lord Took Hold of Bugbrooke, one local woman complained she couldn’t open her windows on Sundays because of the noise.
Through the 1970s, young people and families flocked to Bugbrooke to join this new church, attracted by the stories of spiritual revelation and a thriving Christian community. There were two main levels of membership: some lived in their own home and attended worship and meetings; the hardcore lived in one of the fellowship’s communal houses. As all members living in community had to hand over their assets, the fellowship flourished financially. In 1984, it bought a nearby manor house, which it renamed New Creation Hall. By the early 80s, it owned at least 10 country houses in the area, and membership in communal houses was up to about 450. It was operating a chain of health food shops, a clothing shop and a building supply company. In 1982, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo described it as “the new aristocracy of the East Midlands”.
The fellowship was a strict hierarchy, with Stanton at the top, a leadership circle below him, and an elder running each communal house. Only men were permitted to occupy these roles. Women were subordinate to men. (If a man was driving a car, women were expected to sit in the back.) Favoured members were given “virtue names” reflecting their most valued qualities: Valiant, Zealous, Forthright or, in one young woman’s case, Submission. Celibacy, especially among the male leadership, was encouraged as the highest ideal.
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jul/24/jesus-army-fellowship-cult-noel-stanton.
