This was Pastor Alan Jenkins, who runs a church in Phoenix. But I couldn’t really commit, and when a man who had been walking up and down at the back of the stage, waving and ululating along with the music, went up to the lectern and began to speak, I sat down with relief. I stood up and tried to join in, half-heartedly mumbling along. The lyrics, projected on a giant screen above the stage, spoke of throwing off shame, of overcoming evil, of greeting Jesus with an open heart. The music – a swelling roll of guitars and voices – would continue, with a brief pause during the sermon, for the next two hours. There was a large Black British contingent, but also first-generation immigrants from South America and Eastern Europe. I sat near the back, behind a bank of TVs where three technicians were monitoring the live YouTube feed of the service. There were about two hundred people in the congregation, fanned out in rows around the stage on which a five-piece band noodled worship music. I filed in past a sign promising ‘Prayer for the Sick Every Service’ and was welcomed by an usher called Tashan, who looked me in the eye and shook me by the hand. When I visited Potter’s House last autumn the church was busy. Since then, Mitchell’s followers have ‘seeded’ (as the theological literature puts it) more than two thousand churches across the world, a sort of McDonald’s for the soul. The church was founded in Arizona in the 1970s by a Pentecostal minister called Wayman Mitchell. The largest church in my area, and the only one that seems to be actively recruiting worshippers, is the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship, which operates out of a repurposed cinema on Lea Bridge Road. Half a mile north, on an industrial estate, are three Pentecostal churches whose names – Deliverance Outreach Ministries, Christ United Ministries, the CCC Founder’s Parish UK – feel slightly at odds with their scruffy exteriors. An old school hall on the high street is commandeered every Sunday for long services of singing and impassioned preaching. The other local churches are more entrepreneurial, fly-by-night ventures. The congregation isn’t large, but the organist is good and the sermons are short. Services there are non-committal, in the ‘God, as-it-were’ tradition of contemporary Anglicanism. At the top of a hill to the north of my house is St Andrew’s. Later, two Baptist churches – housed in modern, utilitarian buildings – joined them. When the railway arrived at the end of the 19th century, St Mary’s was joined by several cavernous Victorian redbrick churches, built to serve the burgeoning population of Leyton. I went to a service there a couple of years ago but slunk away when the tambourines were handed round during the first hymn. Ian Nairn described it as a ‘huge surprise in the endless late Victorian bow fronts of London-across-the-Lea … as diverse as the characters in a saloon bar’. The nearest and most interesting, at least architecturally, is St Mary’s, a medieval parish church with a graveyard and alms-houses. Other Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs include the Hell’s Angels, the Pagans, the Vandals, Sin City Disciples and Chosen Few.A ccording to Google Maps there are 23 churches within a mile of my house in East London. The Outcast Motorcycle Gang, which has 67 chapters across the country, is an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang or a "One-Percenter" Motorcycle Gang. Multiple agencies were included the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Bryan County Sheriff's Office, Bulloch County Sheriff's Office, Glynn County Police Department, Hinesville Police Department, Savannah Police Department, Georgia Department of Public Safety, Georgia Ports Authority Police Department and several others. The arrests and indictments were a result of a multi-agency operation named Operation Patronus. Sixteen alleged members of the Southeast Georgia Chapter of the Outcast Motorcycle Gang have been arrested and indicted and approximately $180,000 in cash and 71 guns have been seized, according to a press release. Investigators discovered a conspiracy to violent assault members of a rival gang and forcibly rob them of their motorcycle vests.
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