SHIPLEY – 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.’”

A match made in heaven

Church attendance in the U.K. has been declining for decades, and the 2021 census found that less than half of people in England and Wales now consider themselves Christian. Those who say they have no religion rose from 25% to 37% in a decade.

That has led churches to get creative in order to survive.

“You’ve got to take a few risks,” said the Rev. Natasha Thomas, the priest in charge at St. Peter’s. She acknowledged that 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 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.”

Wrestling was a lifeline

Thompson, whose wrestling moniker is Gareth Angel, both wrestles and presides over the organized mayhem. He’s a mix of preacher and ringmaster, wearing a T-shirt that says “Pray, eat, wrestle, repeat.”

He’s loved wrestling since it provided solace and release during a troubled upbringing that saw him survive childhood sexual abuse and a period of homelessness as a teenager.

“I could watch Shawn Michaels and the Rock and Stone Cold (Steve Austin) and I could be like, I want to be like them,” he said. “So it’s always been an escape for me, and a release and a way to get away from stuff. But then God has obviously turned that around now and it’s become this passion.”

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 U.K. 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, donned knee pads and laced up their many-holed boots, he said it’s 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.’”

Kiara, Kingdom Wrestling’s reigning women’s champion, said the organization has helped her bring her Catholic faith into her wrestling life.

“It’s thanks to Kingdom Wrestling that I’ve had the confidence to pray in the locker room now before matches,” said Kiara, 26, known outside the ring as Stephanie Sid. “I invite my opponent to pray with me, pray that we have a safe match, pray that there’s no injuries and pray that we entertain everybody here.”

Going for growth

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.

There has long been overlap between Christianity and wrestling in the U.S., where figures like Thompson’s hero Shawn Michaels proudly proclaim their faith. But Britain is a less religious place, and Shipley, a former mill town 175 miles (280 kilometers) north of London, is a long way from the Bible Belt.

Thompson, though, is unfazed by doubters.

“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.”

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.