The manic beach preachers
Published: August 14, 2005
Sexy, pierced and tattooed, they hate President Bush and love Ibiza’s dance scene. But one thing sets these club kids apart - their mission to convert the island’s ravers to Christianity. Kimberley Sevcik spends a summer with the party preachers.
By their eighth night in the West End, Ibiza’s nightlife district, the 24-7 Prayer team doesn’t flinch at anything they see: not at the woman lifting her skirt to ask a group of men what colour knickers she’s wearing; not at the guy mooning the girl who just spurned his advances; or the one across the street, pulling his penis out of his trousers and flopping it on the table, for the viewing pleasure of two horrified, delighted young blondes.
They press through the crowds, four sober people among the drunken masses, looking for openings: a friendly face who wouldn’t mind a little unsolicited chat; a swerving body that could use a steady arm to help it home. The bar promoters are the easiest ones to approach. They’ll talk to anyone - most of them work on commission, and every conversation is a potential sale.
A guy with spiky hair in a FCUK T-shirt calls out to two of the missionaries, Lorraine Joslin and Charli Franklin. “Hey ladies, what you doing later? Stop by for a drink?”
“Sorry, we’re not drinking tonight,” says Charli, a throaty-voiced 23-year-old with a tiny rhinestone stud in her nose. This elicits protests and confusion from the tout.
“We’re praying,” she says.
He looks even more confused.
Charli and Lorraine introduce themselves, and so does he. His name is Mark.
“Is there anything we can pray about for you, Mark?” Lorraine asks. She’s 25, a witty brunette with Cleopatra eyes who gets a kick out of belching in people’s faces.
He thinks for a minute, then grins. “Yeah,” he says. “Pray that I live until September.”
“All right,” Lorraine says. She sounds a little uncertain. “What makes you think you won’t make it until September?”
“I’ll probably die from all the drugs I’m doing.” He turns toward another group of women, stuttering past on high heels. “Ladies: can I interest you in a drink tonight?”
The missionaries are headed for the Bull Bar, a sour-smelling grotto with a reflex tester on the bar that rewards low scorers with a free drink. The Bull Bar serves as the base of operations for the 24-7 Prayer mission team on Tuesday and Friday nights. While 24-7s very own DJ, 22-year-old Matt Riley, mixes acid-house music for a crowd that would rather be gyrating to Beyoncé, the rest of the team passes out free fruit to patrons. As they see it, handing out fruit is a way of doing something generous in a place where most people are bent on maximising their own pleasure. It’s also a way of warming people up to talk about Jesus.
Matt’s been DJing since he was 15, when he took a workshop with a Christian youth group. He was hooked from day one. He felt as if God had ordained him to DJ, to lead worship through the decks. There was only one problem: becoming a good DJ required hours of practice, and hours of practice required buying his own decks. But decks cost about £800 each, and Matt didn’t have that kind of money. He wrote to church members and family friends saying, “I’m really feeling this is from God, and to get good at this, I have to get my own decks.” Within a couple months, he had £1,000 in donations. “It was good,” says Matt, “because they weren’t really my decks, were they? They were God’s. So I had to come through for him.”
The Bull Bar isn’t exactly a dream gig for a DJ looking to build a career. But Matt says he’s not playing at the Bull Bar to advance his reputation. “There’s a need for 24-7 in the West End,” he says. “If Jesus were in Ibiza, he’d be at the Bull Bar.”
Ibiza is the clubbing capital of the world and its excesses are legendary. Club kids, models and playboys come to Ibiza to dance at the altars of DJs like Pete Tong and Roger Sanchez and take cocaine or ecstasy - or both. Around 6am, everyone takes, a taxi over to a day rave, where they continue to dance until two or three in the afternoon, then pass out on the beach for a few hours before doing the whole thing again.
Across town, in the West End, soccer hooligans and builders spend their evenings downing pitchers of Sex on the Beach, gawking at the abundance of cleavage on display and making clumsy attempts to appropriate it for the night, before staggering home alone, only to wake up face down in a gutter.
You would expect the typical evangelical Christian to be horrified by Ibiza. But the 24-7 Prayer missionaries aren’t your typical evangelicals. They tend to be pierced and tattooed, anti-war and pro-fair trade, and the minute they get off prayer duty, they’re going to go clubbing until noon the next day. They might even have a drink or two. Like all missionaries, they want to be down with the people who they’re preaching to but, in the case of 24-7, they’re not faking it. The primary difference between the average Ibiza clubber and a 24-7 missionary is what gets them off. “To know that the God who made the heavens and the Earth loves me and wants to know me - that’s an amazing high that lasts much more than a few hours,” says Bruce Gardiner-Crehan, a 24-7 missionary.
It’s not that the 24-7 missionaries don’t see the devil lurking in Ibiza. As born-again Christians, they view the whole world as a battleground between God and Satan; but in Ibiza, the struggle is concentrated. Their role, as they see it, is to wrest the island from Satan’s clutches, and help deposit it safely back in God’s hands. “Ibiza offers a drug option, a sex option, a clubbing option - everything but a God option,” says Vicky Ward, who came to Ibiza with 24-7s first mission team five years ago.
The mission to Ibiza grew out of a prayer movement which was itself inspired by rave culture. The movement was launched in 1999 as a round-the-clock worship session in a warehouse in southern England, with Moby playing on a stereo and 22-year-olds showing up at 3am to dance and pray and shout out to God. The intention was to pray in shifts all day, every day, for a month; it went on for almost four. Today, there are prayer rooms in 55 countries, including 130 in the US.
“We had a sense that people would be more excited about praying at 3am on a Thursday than they would at 11am on a Sunday,” says Pete Greig, the 35-year-old pastor who helped found the 24-7 Prayer movement. “Young people are drawn to extremes.” Greig himself isn’t a raver, he’s a family man, vaguely bookish in his wire-rimmed glasses. But he and his 24-7 colleagues are doing their best to make Jesus feel relevant, through trendy gear (dog tags and hoodies inscribed with fragments of scripture), seminars offering tips for praying on-line; and missions to what Greig calls the “high places of youth culture”. For the past six years, 24-7 missionaries have been taking the gospel to skate parks and music festivals in the UK, as well to party destinations around the world.
For the moment, though, 24-7 is primarily a European movement - which may be why their form of evangelism seems looser than the US Ashcroftian brand that winces at topless statues. Of the two dozen 24-7 missionaries who travelled to Ibiza this summer, only two were American: Heather and Jonah Bailey, a young married couple who provide moral support and guidance to the prayer teams. Even they don’t fall cleanly under the umbrella of American evangelism - both are vehemently anti-Bush.
24-7 Prayer sends two types of prayer teams to Ibiza. Short-term teams come for two weeks, and they take the blitzkrieg approach to evangelism - strolling up to drunk strangers in the West End and offering to pray for them. Long-term team members settle in Ibiza for the whole summer, and they’re less direct about their intentions. Their approach seems inspired by a bit of scripture from Matthew, found on the last page of the 24-7 Prayer Manual that all of the missionaries are encouraged to read. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves,” it says. “Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” They filter through the community, working as club promoters and waitresses, initiating friendships and doing good deeds. Eventually, they hope, they’ll find an opportunity to slip in a few words about Jesus.
When the prayer team reaches the Bull Bar, the rest of the 24-7 missionaries are milling around outside, looking dejected. They’ve just received some bad news: Matt has been sacked, and the fruit hand-out is off. Business has been flagging, so the woman who manages the bar has come up with a new marketing strategy: she’ll be replacing Matt’s music with the cheesy 1980s hits that inspire drunk people to dance.
Ejected from their base of operations, the prayer team trudges down the West End’s sticky cobblestone street to a fountain where a trio of musicians are playing jaunty Balearic folk music. They form a prayer huddle and ask God for some advice. Bruce wonders if they should just give up. “It’s OK if that’s what you want, Lord, it’s really cool.” Katie asks Him to bind up the demons in the Bull Bar, to foil their plans of boosting business by selling sex. Lorraine tries to think positive: “I’m sure you’re up to something cool behind the scenes, God, something that we just can’t see.” She seems less dismayed than the rest of the group.
After about 20 minutes of pleading and questioning and praising, the prayer team is rejuvenated. They set out again, striding purposefully up the West End’s main drag. At the top of the hill, where the herds of party people begin to thin out, they run into Gary.
Before setting out tonight, the team made lists of people they had met previously in the West End whom they hope to encounter tonight: these are their salvation prospects, their unwitting partners in a sort of spiritual buddy system. At the top of Bruce’s list was Gary. He’s a tout for one of the trendy clubs in Ibiza Town, and he’s handsome the way a Ken doll is: well-groomed hair, clean Aryan features. Bruce asks if there’s anything he can pray about for him. Gary shakes his head, polite but reticent. “Don’t think so. It’s all good, thanks.” But Bruce isn’t giving up. “Anything I can get you to help your night go better? You need an ice cream, something to keep up your energy?”
Gary looks surprised. “Sure, that’d be cool.”
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